Houses in the Sun: Light Movement Embrace

For 26 years House + House Architects have created intimate, personal architecture. This new monograph documents the firm's recent residential work in California, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and examines their design process through exploratory sketches and exquisite photography. Cathi and Steven House's extensive travels throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, with focused studies in the Mediterranean and Mexico, have molded them into architects with poetic insight into the use of light and shadow, movement and pause, place and embrace. In their humane and handcrafted modernism, Cathi and Steven House carry forward the modernist questioning of the fundamental premises of architecture by embracing what the Mediterranean vernacular had to teach them about sensuous enjoyment and human dignity achieved in a life lived both privately and in conjunction with others, in the infinitude and wonder of shifting light, in the hand wrought detail and in the clarity and interconnection of built forms. What more could one ask of home than that it combine security with wonder, all the while fortifying what is most personal and most communal in our lives. [MORE] Cathi and Steven House think with infused spatial color, inclusive boundaries, and sculpted natural light. Their ability to grasp qualities that seemingly different things share yields habitable, continuous environments, where the passage is as important as the arrival. Hallways are village streets fore casting anticipated functions. Vivid color fills one's memory of the garden. And building elements-walls, doors, stairs, windows, balconies, and columns-are figures sharing the space with human occupants, creating gentle family gatherings in an architecture of closeness at many scales. Their work is poetic, insightful, and intelligent. It is influenced not by trends or fashion, but rather by light. culture, views, climate, and certainly by the desire to inspire. The work of House + House Architects can offer motivation to a profession that needs to find ways to create places of unique beauty, inspiration, and influence. Ultimately, their projects call to mind a quote by Mexico's great writer, poet, and diplomat, Octavio Paz, who celebrated architectural space "solid without heaviness and tied to the earth but with a desire for flight."