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Studio Works

Raise-up House

West LA

Raise-Up is a proposition to take a simple typical Los Angeles "bungalow" and transform it through a simple move. In the case of Raise-Up, is to sever the house from its foundation, a one-story 1,200 square foot affair, and raise up the entire house, except for the garage, about 16 feet in the air.

The space created below is a kind of "found" space between the house and the earth. This new space which accomodates the living spaces of the house, is treated as simply as possible. It is seen as a kind of "loft". The private parts of the house are located in the old house on the third floor. The sizes of the former living rooms and dining rooms are suitable for the modern needs of bedrooms. The kitchen is easily converted into a second bathroom. The house has no second floor.

Raise-Up proposes to build economically. The proposition is a way to enlarge these bungalow houses in an economical way. The foundations can be saved, the roof remains intact, and all the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, can remain mostly unchanged.

The central "loft" space has a bare concrete floor stained green, and contains the living, dining and kitchen functions. The simple central space attempts to "root" the activity of the family. It becomes the "courtyard for a farm" for another culture, a "home room" around which all of the family activities of modern life revolve.

Raise-Up invents a finish for the interior wall surfaces- the "Giotto finish"-that employs standard drywall spackle with raw colored pigment to produce a colored surface smooth to the touch. It is a poor person's "stucco Lucido". The wall finish is almost nothing more than the preparation of the drywall for painting it never receives.

Raise-Up considers color to be a material. The color of the loft spaces on the ground level is a luminous warm light that seems to change with the passage of the day. Different parts of the room-all the same warm white Giotto finish-seem to have different coloration. The interaction of the color of the walls, the green color of the floor, the red color of the stairs, the natural light, the artificial lights, and the time of day (the night) produces a dynamic condition of surface coloration.

Raise-Up clads the walls with shapes and surfaces of white plastic; there are very few windows. Translucent acrylic panels sanded velvet smooth form the surfaces for skylights and clearstories. Certain areas of the walls framed normally as 2x4's, are covered in this same translucent material (inside out) to establish diffusing lights in the daytime for the interior spaces. At night, these rectangular shapes project light (fluorescent lights trapped inside) both to the interior spaces and to the exterior of the house.

Raise-Up proposes an inside/outside existence. The green polished concrete floor of all the ground floor spaces moves outside as green concrete extensions and as a lawn. The four large doors of the main loftspace open out to back lawn and trellis runway. Their horizontal light baffles link the inside and outside spaces. The two rotating doors of the painter's studio and the childrens studio are like walls that extend both outside and inside, again linking spaces.

Raise-Up cannot cope with reinventing the "front" of the house. Substituted is a vertical trellis Z-shaped wall that forms the entry side of the house. Eventually this wall will be covered with a growth-a kind of synthetic "nature". This Z-wall is very much like the lawn of a two story house set within a neighborhood of modest one story affairs is avoided in favor of a vertical park-a rose garden for the neighborhood.

The family is composed of a movie person, a painter, and West Side children - a contemporary family "on the move". The house for them seems to be a place to stop, and also a stage for the complexities of modern living.