Dwell 5/1/2016

A dream home is an architectural self-portrait. Many people work ceaselessly on their ideal house, whether it is conjured in fantasy or realized in brick and mortar. This kind of person loves refining details, and enjoys the feeling that, though they are always editing, they are never quite finished. If you are reading this, there’s a good chance that you are one of the dreamers, or one of the doers, or both. We couldn’t ask for a better pair of visionaries to consider than Ray and Charles Eames, captured in an exultant pose atop the skeleton of their yet-to-befinished Case Study House in California (page 168). In the context of the modern American landscape, the legacy of that home can not be overstated, nor can the sheer mountain of works…

LETTERS Loved the Australian prefab that took only two months to design and six weeks to install (“Speed Machine,” December/January 2016). But what a roadblock local government was— five months to secure permits? Government is either too intrusive or too slow to act—or both. The authorities have to get out of the way if prefabs have the chance to solve our housing shortages around the world. George Meyer Long Beach, California I have always been a great fan of Dwell. One concern I have, however, is that while care is taken to exhibit environmentally friendly, low-impact structures, I don’t see attention to environmentally appropriate lighting. Light pollution is a serious problem— affecting human and animal health, safety, and, of course, energy use. I think that Dwell should directly address lighting…

Hadani Ditmars Writing about architecture, culture, and politics, Hadani Ditmars’s work has been published in Vogue, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Architectural Review, and the New York Times. Ditmars penned a story on a conversion of two historic houses in Vancouver into a multiunit complex (p. 42). When visiting the site, she enjoyed “a moment on top of the roof deck of one of the town homes with a view that took in the greenery, the heritage facades, and the modernist lines— and they all seemed to coexist seamlessly.” What notable house would you love to live in? “Juan Luis Borges’s ‘The House of Asterion’—because it is the perfect mythic place for a writer.” Arlene Hirst Deputy director of design at Metropolitan Home magazine until it closed in 2009, Arlene Hirst…

Artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) is remembered for many things, such as paving the way for French Pop art and patenting his own shade of blue. Less well-known is his turn as a furniture designer, and his 1961 opus, Table Bleue. Topped with a plexiglass display filled with bright, textured pigment, the piece cleverly draws focus inward from its edges. Now, after more than 50 years in the production, the coffee table’s influence is reaching the mainstream in clear and colorful ways.…

PROJECT Union Street ECOheritage ARCHITECT Shape Architecture LOCATION Vancouver, British Columbia For locals, Vancouver’s picture-postcard reputation and its public-planning triumphs do little to salve the fact that it has one of the highest costs of housing per capita in the world. It also has a serious issue with social alienation; a recent Vancouver Foundation report named lack of connection and engagement as citizens’ number-one complaint about the city. And as heritage homes are routinely destroyed for lot value, Vancouver is starting to embrace its history while carving out a new identity for itself. A creative answer to all these issues is found on Union Street in historic Strathcona. The neighborhood— perched between the railway station and Chinatown— was only narrowly saved from bulldozing for a new freeway in the late…

PROJECT Casa Olabuenaga ARCHITECT Sottsass Associati LOCATION Maui, Hawaii “We had worked with Ettore and all of the Memphis designers since the conception of our company,” says Lesley Bailey, who founded the jewelry and accessories brand ACME Studio with her husband, Adrian Olabuenaga, in 1985. She’s referring, of course, to Ettore Sottsass, the Italian architect and designer who, after more than 30 years of practice, went on to helm the radical but short-lived collective known for its brash, offbeat furnishings steeped in visual irony and colorful, discordant juxtapositions. “At the time, no one else had claim to that but us,” she says, of the Memphis keepsakes still produced by ACME today. Life and business have long intertwined for Lesley and Adrian, who first met at a trade show in Los…