Isozaki in California
Isozaki in California
Between Heaven and Earth
RIBA Gold Medal (1986) and Pritzker Architecture Prize (2019) winning architect Arata Isozaki is probably best known in LA for MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art, across the street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Broad Museum on Grand Avenue. In the spring of 2011, I was invited to visit three concrete sculptural sleeping pavilions that Isozaki designed in the high desert.
This is a short essay I wrote about those concrete structures for the design journal Domus after I stayed on the property overnight, sleeping in one of the pavilions. I have revised it and included some additional photographs and further notes about Isozaki's other projects in Southern California.
Between Heaven and Earth
“…the ceiling is the sky, the surrounding mountain range and rocks are the walls and partitions, and… the floor is the desert. It only consists of expanding the notion of the house towards nature itself, the surrounding environment.” Arata Isozaki
Forty years ago, Arata Isozaki designed a house and artist's studio on a narrow alley lot less than 500 meters (1/3 of a mile) from the Pacific Ocean in Venice Beach, California. The slender dwelling was made for friends of the architect, both LA art collectors. It was later sold to musician Eric Clapton. To this day, Isozaki's elegant house still manages to capture some of Southern California's idiosyncratic qualities, particularly the fluid relationship between human-made and natural spaces. The client and architect stayed friends, exchanging correspondence over two decades and visiting each other intermittently in Japan or California. Years passed, and the client acquired a large property in the High Mojave Desert about two and a half hours southeast of Los Angeles. Surrounded by the benthic beauty of an ancient but now dry seafloor, dramatic rock formations, cactuses, reddish soil, Joshua trees, and sagebrush, the property sits 1,500 meters (4921 feet) above sea level. It is about 15 kilometers (930 miles) from the Joshua Tree National Park and 50 kilometers (30 miles) northeast of Palm Springs, typically 5 to 7 degrees Celsius (40-45°F) hotter on any given day than the high desert. During the day, the temperatures in the Mojave can soar to 38 degrees Celsius (100°F) but drop at night to 1 or 2 degrees Celsius (33-35°F).
Developed initially as a ranch in the 1920s, the property includes a small cabin once owned by LA artist Ed Ruscha who painted on its interior walls. The cabin and land are totally off the grid. Water is sourced from a well. Sewage, electricity, and phone service are non-existent. Solar and gas power. lighting and cooking. The nearest urban area is Pioneertown, built by Gene Autry and Roy Rogers as a Western movie set.
The primary sensation of being on the property is an overwhelming sense of its remoteness, isolation, wildness, and sublimity. Living in the desert, I suspect, would promote deep hermeticism. Spending time wandering among the site’s large rock formations, across washed-out creek beds, and over the area’s mineralogical plains brings one quickly to an understanding of Southern Califonia's fragility. Given the desert’s relative proximity to civilization, you get a very immediate sense that our urban settings and cultural identities rest on the most tenuous of hypotheses supported by the most brittle of infrastructures.
On a trip to California in the 1990s, Isozaki visited the area with his friend and slept one night outdoors. As he has noted, Isozaki discovered that the desert's “architecture” has the sky for a ceiling and the ground as its floor. On another visit to the property, the client asked the architect to design a semi-enclosed outdoor bedroom near the main cabin so that his family could have a place where they could sleep under the stars and the moon, away from snakes and other wildlife; a place to appreciate seasonal changes and stay cool on a hot summer's night. The architect suggested nature itself as a room and instead proposed to the client that they make three outdoor bedrooms, not one. After some sketching and long-distance discussions, the architect and the client agreed to build three different bedrooms for four distinct seasons on three different areas of the property.
The first "bedroom" one encounters walking away from the main cabin is the winter bedroom— it is an almost cubic box. The winter bedroom is the most complete architectural exercise of the three, being a fully enclosed concrete and glass box measuring nine by nine feet square with a six-foot-square glass panel inset on the top plane as part of the ceiling. Here the architect had intended to include a bed and storage unit designed by Man Ray. Instead, the client decided to forego any interior furniture preferring to sleep directly on the structure's concrete floor, which, incidentally, stays surprisingly warm on the coldest nights, radiating the sun's heat trapped during the daytime. On one interior wall, the British artist Jeremy Dickinson has painted an image of a rusted toy found on the property, a small fire truck abandoned no doubt years ago by a child and preserved by the desert. Sleeping in the unit, detached from civilization but partially disconnected from directly experiencing nature, I felt something like a sense of kinship with the little bedroom's architecture, as if my body and the structure were fused. In the desert’s cold night, this reminded me of the significance of shelter, and the idea that culture perhaps started with a distinct but straightforward separation and distancing of our bodies from nature, the so-called primitive hut.
The next “bedroom” is the summer bedroom, a nine-by-nine-foot concrete deck cantilevered off on a single, thick low, stepped vertical concrete wall. Like the other bedrooms, it is made out of three-inch board-formed concrete. Its mass and details, such as the stair risers, are sculpturally defined by an exacting formation— parallel architectural lines embedded in formwork, a lucid translation of two into three dimensions. This bedroom is totemic, almost a sculpture; almost a pure art act, both ancient and futuristic. And yet, beyond its sculptural qualities, it is architectural, precise in its re-imagining how to inhabit the space between the heavens and the earth. It is merely a simple concrete platform, and yet, it is everything architecture could or should aspire to achieve. That is to say, it arrives at a perfect marriage of formal/symbolic intent and functional performance— nothing gained, nothing lost, both more than architecture and less than architecture simultaneously.
The last “bedroom” one reaches, situated at the lowest point formed by the triangle between the three structures, is the fall and spring pavilion. This structure hovers, literally, between an architecture of total enclosure and screening, the winter bedroom, and an architecture of total openness and minimal form, the summer bedroom. The fall and spring bedroom, like its siblings, is also built of board-formed concrete. However, its architectural structure is the most designed, the most mannered. It is a floor folded into a vertical wall, then gently rolled into a barrel vault resting on another wall, perpendicular to the first wall. Between the two walls, three concrete prisms, two small steps, and a larger rectangular concrete oblong box define a place to sleep or observe the vast desert valley beyond the property. On the rear of the structure, the artist Lawrence Weiner has carefully applied a text painting to the backside of the exterior wall. It reads "OBSCURED HORIZON" in yellow upper-case stenciled letters, outlined in red-orange and framed by a rectangular red-yellow box. The artist has added two identical cursive loops on either side of the box, like lower-case "e"s or two waves curling over and back onto themselves. As a visual summation or a diagram of the structure, they could be no more precise: perfectly capturing how the architect rolled the desert floor onto itself, over the sky, and then back to the earth, while in the process partially obscuring the earth's horizon.
Isozaki has stated that a traditional Japanese tea house creates nature artificially. Therefore it is not nature itself. The opposite theory, he has suggested, is to consider nature as an artificial form. In the Mojave Desert, the architect's subtle yet stable interventions in a primordial landscape propose that we bear witness to the delicacy of our relationship with our planet and the resoluteness required of any structure to survive in nature and indeed bind itself to such a landscape.
By creating a state of being neither totally primitive nor overreaching in any false attempt to seek a new paradise, Isozaki found a perfect balance between artifice and nature. His idiosyncratic structures, designed for a friend and an exceptional client, propose the tightest of dances between the dissolution of culture into nature and the conscription of nature itself as part of an architectural cosmos. This seems like a very astute portrait of Southern California itself, a region precariously balanced on a fault line that runs between the ocean and the desert.
The collection of three dispersed elemental outdoor bedrooms is one of the most potent acts of pure architecture I have ever encountered, a testament to essentialism as well as to an ambition to imagine that architecture could claim the sky and the horizon as its domain, a space to dwell somewhere between heaven and earth.
Postscript: Arata Isozaki in LA
While MOCA was underway, Isozaki also designed a house on Speedway Avenue in Venice Beach and a little-known art gallery in West Hollywood near the Pacific Design Center for music industry executive and gallerist Earl McGrath. The house is still there and has been well maintained. The gallery was recently converted beyond recognition into a hair-salon. I have struggled to find photographs or drawings of the gallery. But, I did find these compelling images of MOCA under construction by New Topographics photographer Joe Deal and a very romantic image of the home at dusk. The similarity between the yet-to-be red Indian sandstone and dark green enamel-clad concrete barrel vault at MOCA and the spring/autumn pavilion in Joshua Tree is quite striking. The neat inversion of MOCA’s translucent light delivering pyramid into the house’s chamfered roof corners/light monitors is another fascinating parallel conversation between Isozaki’s three remaining Californian projects.
After completing MOCA, Isozaki built another seven projects in North America, the last significant public building of his design being the Ohio Center of Science & Industry (1994-1999) in Columbus. No other houses were commissioned in the US; the Venice house is his only domestic project in North America.
In 2017, British artist Rachel Whiteread contributed two painstakingly fabricated cast concrete “negative casts” of midcentury camping cabins to the Joshua Tree property. I find the dialogue between these airless, sealed “ghost cabins” and Isozaki’s airy pavilions particularly poignant. I will conclude by offering that they are in a looping, trans-Pacific, cross-cultural and intergenerational conversation with Isozaki’s cast-concrete Kaijima House in Kichijoji, Musashino City, Tokyo (1977, below), which is a parent to both MOCA’s barrel-vaulted entry pavilion and the arcuated fall and spring pavilion on his friend’s high desert ranch.
