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Anneli Xie
Prof. Alice Friedman
ARTH 321: Gender, Sexuality, and the Design of Houses
2019/04/21

Michael Maltzan’s Pittman Dowell House: Reconfiguring Queer Domesticity

According to Alice Friedman’s essay “Public Face and Private Face in the Design of Contemporary Houses,” the conventional structures of the “machine à habiter,” that was supposed to provide machine-like responses through standardization – both sociopolitical and formal – is slowly starting to disappear. This shift in approach to domestic architecture, Friedman claims is due to “shifting demographics of the family […], the feminist and queer liberation movements […], and the revolution in digital technology and communication […].” Our increasing presence within the public gives us an increased need for the private, and with the notions of family and domestic relationships changing in more visible ways, traditional conventions slowly cease to make sense.

            Much like Luis Barragán’s manipulations of the walls in his home, the changing nature of the wall – “as boundary, as scrim, as a screen for projection” –  is one of those structures in flux due to our changing times. Rather than the outward nature of the classic mid-century modern homes that we have studied, with sliding glass walls and horizontally stacked planes that left interiors in open view, walls are now starting to once again turn inward – something that is exemplified in Michael Maltzan’s design for the artists and educators Lari Pittman and Roy Dowell in the Pittman-Dowell residence. Maltzan’s design is in many ways a response to the Dorothy Serulnik House, a Richard Neutra glass house in typical mid-century design that is located on the same compound. In exterior, it turns inward instead of outward, having opaque (rather than the Serulnik glass) walls; but in interior, it turns outward instead of inward, having glass (rather than opaque) walls. Similarly, Maltzan responds to the modern issue of social transparency as our private lives become more and more blurred with our public persona; and for Neutra, and many other mid-century architects, transparency was a moral imperative. In that way, we can view the Pittman-Dowell house as almost a complete alter ego to its neighbor.

            The houses, too, draw parallels to Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Guest House, that also stand in conversation with each other. Similarly to how we can read the Glass/Guest House complex as an “architectural essay about the conflicts between Modernist theory […] and the particularities of social/cultural values,” the Pittman-Dowell creates a dialogue about the public and private interplay in the 21st century. Today, without ever leaving home, we exist in multiple places all the time and are constantly connected to something else. The Pittman-Dowell residence and its interplay between the public and the private, as well as its conversation about the hierarchy of spaces makes us think about exactly that.

References



Pearson, Clifford. “Breaking Conventions: Pittman Dowell.” Architectural Record. April 2010, 72-75

Friedman, Alice. “Public Face and Private Space.”