Engineering Topic #6: The Chemosphere

I was just sent this, and found it quite interesting:

The Chemosphere



There's nothing like this flying saucer, in the neighborhood, in the rest of John Lautner's career, or the world. It stands as a bundle of contradictions, a spectacularly odd landmark, a unique effort, a kind of high-water mark, a signpost to a future that never developed.

By about 1960 the city of Los Angeles and its real estate prices had increased to the point where developers bulldozed residential lots higher and higher into the Santa Monicas. Those years saw the creation of dozens and dozens of customized luxurious perches in these hills, perches in Trousdale Estates and Mount Olympus and along Mulholland Drive, perches that overlooked and trumped the expensive homes in Beverly Hills and Hollywood and West Hollywood. The owners of these houses tended towards late 50's fantasy properties, and the houses on these sites came with unique bonuses: nighttime views as powerfully romantic as Sinatra, air somewhat less laden with carbon monoxide, and a nice illusion of supremecy over everyone living below them.

The high life, in more ways than one.

And by 1960 John Lautner had had his own architectural office in Southern California for 20 years and had produced a long series of houses that combine innovative engineering, superb handling of materials, respect for his clients' needs, and an experimental vision that remains perpetually fresh. The living room of his Carling Residence, for instance, was built to rotate on a turntable and become an outdoor patio. The Reiner Residence called Silvertop in Silver Lake, contains entire glass walls that silently disappear with the touch of a button. His design solutions may appear to be grandstanding at first, but they derive from logic, originality, and technical daring.

His first residence (1940), for himself, was built on a hillside. By choice or by accident, Lautner developed a reputation for making the most of challenging locations. The Malin Residence (the Chemosphere, 1960), is the extreme example. The client was a young engineer with limited resources who had been given a priceless view of the San Fernando Valley, on a lot of ugly, arid rubble on an incline so steep that a human being couldn't stand up on it.

Initially Lautner didn't like the site, had impulsively given Malin a dollar figure which was too low, put off the design work, then quickly produced the design almost in exasperation. Lautner's radical solution was to propose an octagonal, saucer-shaped structure entirely supported by a central stem five feet in diameter. Malin bought into it. Working with the Malin's own design participation and sweat equity, and materials donated from companies eager to be associated with the project, Lautner took an otherwise-unbuildable slope and created a house with incredibly sweeping views.

The Chemosphere is eye-catching, sure, and audacious. The flying-saucer design is irresistable eye-candy, an attractive nuisance, a dramatic Space Age fantasy with an apparent lineage to the late work of the Raymond Loewy studio, the old incarnation of Tomorrowland and Expo '67. It takes the sexy and gratuitously aerodynamic architectural shaping of the era - 'gratutious' because houses and restaurant signs don't ordinarily travel very far - to the logical extreme, to the shape of a flying saucer. The Chemosphere might actually be airworthy.

If launched hard enough.

Then you realize the other thing about the Chemosphere, its second sort of audaciousness. The Chemosphere isn't meant to be merely sexy. It's not a joke or an attention-getting device. By the time Lautner came to this phase in his career, he'd been thinking about difficult sites a lot, and he'd built several other perches, and knew as much as anybody how to build a good, responsible design on a steep slope.

Responsible house design on steep hillsides is tricky, requiring that you spend money with a daring architect. No solution is available out of the box. One of the cheaper developer's solutions of the time, incredibly, was to construct a regular old wood-frame ranch house on stilts, one edge built along the road, the other edge and its balconies suspended in space, the flat underside of the house exposed, the whole structure held up by ten or twelve steel-into-concrete contact points. In the 1962 Hollywood satire "The Loved One", the suicidal heroine Aimée Thanatogenos rips another 'condemned' sign off the place and swings over the edge of an unrailed balcony, over a rocky 500-foot drop. If you've never seen a hillside house on stilts, they're about as beautiful and practical as you'd imagine. And in an earthquake zone, unneighborly.

More reasonable alternative designs tended towards digging living space into the hillsides, or only partially suspending them in the air, or building systems of retaining walls. (Besides being prone to failure, retaining walls are to houses as narration is to a movie: a signal that you don't quite know, or don't quite care, what you're doing.) Build a house on spot that's other-than-flat, and you force most architects out of their comfort zone, and into admitting some uncomfortable ignorance about engineering and structure. Most architects are comfortable with rectangular, post-lintel-and-beam construction, and compressive forces travelling straight down, and the strengths of materials in compression, and gravity. The moment you start talking about anything else is the moment they want to bring their favorite consulting engineer into the project.

Lautner had actively sought an elegant, beautiful, practical solution to the problem, grappling both with the structural questions - how to keep it from falling down - and the aesthetic questions - how to reconcile the traditional architectural horizontal and vertical vocabularies to the slope. His previous hillside houses almost visibly struggle with the problem, with spider-leg struts, spaces carefully tailored into their topographies, and, well, the odd retaining wall here and there.


Think through the design process as an engineering problem. If you want a structure on a slope without digging in, you have to support it from down-slope to keep it from sliding down the hill. Make the conceptual leap from an edge of support on the lower side (like a retaining wall), to a single point of support, and you might end up with a single V-shaped anchor-point downhill, against which all the concentrated weight of the house would press. But that approach isn't going to work. That anchor-point isn't going to be able to resist all those shear forces pressing downwards parallel to the slope of the hill. You could artificially reinforce that single V-point, but Lautner found the better answer. Lautner made the audacious conceptual leap and balanced all the weight of the house into midair, so that the compressive forces are concentrated straight down onto that single anchor-point. The design works because it's easier to deal with the weight of the house pointed straight down.

Given all that, Lautner's other decisions follow on naturally. Right-angled corners would be ludicrous on a suspended house, so some kind of circular floorplan seems right. A completely curved surface is expensive to build, so the floorplan is based on an octagonal compromise; it's not an essay on the circle in the same way as Frank Lloyd Wright's Lykes House. Of course you have to put windows all around. Brendan Gill once called it "a pumpkin pie with windows." Assume a reasonable number for square footage on the single floor (1300 square feet, with four bedrooms), and you can back into the diameter of the structure (60 feet) and the diameter of the central concrete pedestal (5 feet). It may look like a flying saucer, but it's not a superficial fun-and-games design solution. It has real, inventive, remarkable and admirable design integrity.

The Chemosphere delivers on its promise. It is good design. In this light, this house begins to seem less like a some kind of grandstanding, showboat star-architect move, more like the most conservative response to the site, and actually sort of inevitable.

But the house is also a bundle of contradictions.

It's not the engineering marvel it could be. For all its advanced looks, the Chemosphere is still a creature of weight which relies on compressive force and weight and gravity to keep it standing up.

It needn't be a house. Nothing about the Chemosphere House signals it as a recognizable house: it could just as easily be a factory showroom or a restaurant or a National Park Service observation deck.

And the Chemosphere needn't be here. It's such an advanced design that it pops out the other side of the residential-architecture equation. It takes a problematic site and makes the characteristics of the site irrelevant. Take the footing and plant it on the top of the mountain, and it would work just as well. Take it to Palm Springs and plant it in the shadow of Mt. San Jacinto, or any other unbuildable hillside, with no topographical analysis at all, and it would work just as well. It's no longer a tailored design solution, it's a generic design solution. There are few evident secrets about its construction method.

Yet nobody has. It's as if Lautner raised the stakes to the point where nobody else has bid, and he himself backed out of that slow-motion 3-D checkers game of real estate valuation on the slopes, strategies of the best views and lines of supply, all constrained by maximum building slopes. Building expensive homes on hillsides is a cross-climax of property values, geology, structural engineering, architectural psychology, urban planning and naked ego. On one side of an invisible line, property is worthless, and on the other side, it's priceless.

In 2000 the Chemosphere was bought by the German publisher Benedikt Taschen for $1 million, and it now serves as his Los Angeles home and satellite office.

http://www.waltlockley.com/chemosphere/chemosphere.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosphere