Keenen + Riley

Architecture_miami

Bauhaus heads south TERENCE RILEY’S HOUSE IN SOUTH FLORIDA IS INSPIRED BY MIES VAN DER ROHE’S MODERNIST VISION In Terence Riley’s new Miami home, you sometimes have to ask yourself whether you are outside, inside or somewhere in between.

Longtime chief of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Riley was recently tapped to head the Miami Art Museum. In compensation for leaving Manhattan, he and his partner John Bennett had the opportunity to design a home from the ground up – and open it to the mild Florida elements.

A diehard proponent of High Modernism even during its darkest days in the ‘80s, Riley is given much credit for its current global revival. Find yourself unaccountably attracted to low-slung furniture and bare surfaces? Riley’s your man.

©Paul Clemence

No surprise, then, that he turned to the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe when it was time to build a house of his own. In particular, he was inspired by Mies’ unbuilt “court houses.” Designed together with his students at Berlin’s Bauhaus school in the early ‘30s, the houses were to be

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modest, single-family dwellings. Riley believes they were Mies’ answer to critics who said he designed only for the elite.

Still, the court houses did include one seeming luxury: a walled interior courtyard reminiscent of classical Greek and Roman home design. By borrowing this ancient technology, Riley has smuggled Miami’s richest attribute – its beguiling climate – into the heart of his new home.

Less and more Mies’ work is, of course, defined above all by its rigorous lack of ornament, and Riley’s design lives up to the master’s dictum that “less is more.” Every angle is a right angle, and planes of glass, plaster and concrete meet seamlessly, yet without any attempt at adornment. In the Modernist campaign against clutter, Riley’s kitchen is literally contained in a box. Stove, refrigerator and storage are all hidden within a single, waist-high unit, letting the walls remain unbroken expanses – the way Mies liked his walls.

“When you live in a house like this,” says Riley, “you can’t collect stuff and make piles. But that suits me. As a curator I’m constantly having to deal with objects – collecting them,

storing them, displaying them. I didn’t want to come home to the Terence Riley Museum.”

Still, tropical exuberance infiltrates High Modernist purity.

Frogs, lizards and foot-long dragonflies scale the monolithic courtyard walls. Flanking gardens envelop the house in a tangle of greens. A mango tree towers over the sleeping wing and from time to time drops its fruit with an unceremonious thud on a perfectly planar roof.

“You don’t own a house in Miami,” jokes Riley. “You share it with the flora and fauna.”

Perhaps inspired by the promiscuity of his new surroundings, Riley has deliberately foregone certain aspects of Miesian orthodoxy. He has, for instance, allowed himself to hang art on the walls. And his living room is dominated by a Campana Brothers chair, an outrageous confection of stuffed animals that not only violates Mies’ principles but exceeds the bounds of Kitsch itself. Responding to his environment?

Thumbing the nose at the master? Letting the Florida heat go to his head? A little of all three, probably.

I also think it may be Riley’s comment on the process of working in Mies’ shadow. Since Mies’ aesthetic is defined by its unrelenting rigor, to stray slightly from the master is to forsake him altogether. Indeed architectural historians have pointed out that Mies’ students showed remarkably little innovation, at least when they were under his direct tutelage. Riley’s crazy chair reminds us that the project of marrying Miesian rigor and tropical exuberance is, in fact, doomed from the outset, so you might as well have fun while you’re at it.

Inside out A series of clever – and classically Miesian – decisions make the transition from house to courtyard a seamless one. Most obvious are walls of floor-to-ceiling glass – a technique Mies helped pioneer. But there are also subtler, almost invisible details that make it hard for the mind’s eye to clearly distinguish outside from in.

The roof of the living quarters, for example, extends a few meters into the courtyard, creating a transitional zone that is, literally and also visually, a continuation of the indoor space.

The garden’s flanking walls are, likewise, merely extensions of

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interior walls; indeed there is nowhere you could say that one ends and the other begins. The ground, too, is a single entity – the same material (polished cement) and elevation inside and out. Only the transparency of glass defines the boundary between house and garden.

Heady stuff, but Riley has fun with the idea, too. A snaking line of lime-green ottomans starts in the living room, then continues past the glass wall into the courtyard, linking the two spaces with a single joke. And a digital projection system turns one wall of the courtyard into an outdoor movie screen, which you can watch from an outdoor lounge chair – or the comfort of the living room couch.

Despite all these continuities, the courtyard – and for that matter the house itself – is cleaved in two by a narrow rectangular swimming pool that reaches from one exterior wall to the other. While Mies’ plans didn’t call for pools, the meeting of water and whitewashed walls in Riley’s house is quintessential Mies, turning stark simplicity into something willed and beautiful.

©Paul Clemence

To progress from living to sleeping quarters, you must go cross a little bridge – a winning detail, but I was surprised Riley had not provided a roof, too. In hurricane-prone Miami rains can be fierce. It seemed an oversight, but when I asked Riley about it, he responded with an impish shrug. If you want a house that’s open to the elements, he implied, you have to take that idea seriously – and be willing to get a little wet. It was, it seemed, like decoration in Mies’ aesthetics of

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subtraction: an inessential detail that could be eliminated.

Certainly, leaving off the extra stretch of roofing allows that much more subtropical sunlight to flood the court. The white walls in turn amplify that light, then diffuse it through both interior and exterior spaces. However, the blue shimmer of the pool is the coup de grâce, turning the tropical sun into something mobile, even tangible – the bright outdoors dancing in the dark corners of the house.

More Hockney than Mies A critic has said Riley’s home is more David Hockney than Mies van der Rohe, and it’s an apt comparison. As you walk into Riley’s living room, you feel you’re stepping into the aqueous clarity of a Hockney painting.

And like a painting in a gallery, Riley’s work starts with nature, but its real delight lies in the ways he has captured and circumscribed it. Ironically, his open courtyard has allowed him to create a home that, while full of air and light, is also exceedingly inward looking. There are no lateral windows, for example, and those at either end are guarded by walled gardens of elegant narrowness. Indeed, from inside the house it is impossible to see either the street or neighboring homes.

A Manhattanite eschewing the vagaries of suburban Miami?

Sure. But also a curator of design and architecture honoring a master and demonstrating his validity in an unfamiliar context.

In doing so, he creates a space that is, like the ideal museum, both luminous and sheltering, open and perfectly contained.

Robert Landon