Two White Wonders: The Douglas House and Smith House by Richard Meier

The Douglas House

I was through with architecture when I met the Douglas House.  It was the end of a dream.  I realized I didn't have it in me to be an architect.  It had nothing to do with the forms.  The play of spaces--light, air, volume--moved me, but I didn't like the people, the competition, the corporate mindset of the school of architecture.

My decision came the day one of my professors gave us the assignment to design a Utopian city based on medieval military fortresses.  The fortresses were beautiful if you only thought about shape, such as the example below:

But I couldn't get my head around Utopia being enclosed--even if only metaphorically.  When I asked, "How can you design Utopia based upon a structure of war?" my professor thought I was a smart A, which is fine, because I thought he was a dumb A.  

Meanwhile, I'd been skipping classes half the time, writing depressing poems in my gloomy dorm instead of designing closed utopias for a school that proudly announced the first day of class that "50 percent of you will drop out before the end of year; our job is to weed out all but the best."

I felt more at home in the English department, among those who questioned the morality of everything, even the family dynamics around the Thanksgiving dinner table.  I quickly immersed myself in classes such as Psychopathology in Literature, Bible as Literature, Women in Literature and American Fiction as History. Everything was about connections, context, history and cultural dynamics.  Nothing floated disconnected to the past.  Nothing was beyond questioning.

So, I never expected to have my breath taken away by a building again.  As far as architecture goes, I was an apostate.  I'd left the fold bitterly and had no intention of looking back.

But, then it happened.  I wish I remembered how, but I don't.  What remains is myth.  That is all there is. I believe I was looking through a magazine while sitting in a cold, dreary concrete block waiting room while getting the oil changed in my Plymouth Reliant.

Maybe the magazine was Architectural Digest, but it could have been any magazine.  I don't remember an article, so it was probably only an add.  Yet, it must have included Meier's name.  I knew of his work, but hadn't seen this house before.

I was stunned.  It seemed to cascade down the forested hillside like a waterfall of light and air, both tumbling down and soaring towards the heaven at the same time.

The home is entered from the top level via a flying bridge from a street that runs along the hillside.  You enter through the closed, walled private spaces that face the road.  The house then opens and drops in a series of spaces thrown open to the wilds through the huge glass planes.

The home perfects lessons learned from Meier's earlier design of the Smith House.  (See video below)

When I look out a window, any window 

in the world, from Brooklyn to Rome 

to Fatehpur Sikri, India, I see a concert 

of light and color working together 

in ways that cannot be contrived. 

In my work as an architect I cannot 

imagine a situation in which I would 

try to compete with or imitate 

the environment that surrounds 

my buildings. My job is to acknowledge 

nature, to create relationships 

between the interiors 

and exteriors, and to bring order 

in a way that substantiates 

the spaces we live in 

and move through.

--Richard Meier