Recursive House

Where can a line lead you? The Surrealists believed automatically drawing one continuous line could take you into your subconscious. Many artists also use one unbroken line to create two-dimensional portraits or to limn recognizable forms. For Axis Mundi, one uninterrupted line leads to home. Or, more intriguingly, to the rhythmic underlying structure of this concept house for a successful digital entrepreneur in the Palm Springs desert. An homage to Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler’s 1950 “Endless House,” the basic footprint and floor plan derives from a single ribbon looped repeatedly in a single continuous line. The home is enclosed with rammed-earth exterior walls built up along the undulating contours formed by the ribbon, while interior walls are erected around selected voids defined by some of the loops. A faceted tent-like Cor-Ten steel roof—out of which the shape of the floor plan is cut out and replaced with glass—tops the structure. It is both a line of intellectual questioning posed by the designers and a line of continuity that brings fluidity to a living plan for the client in question.