The master bedroom is situated
along an extended corridor that steps
up the site to create a distinct space.
“In the middle of the night, we wake
each other up,” Press says. “We’re
like, ‘Wake up! Look at how the moon
is shining through the window.’”
“Instead of the program being
a continual linear world,” Bell says,
“what I’m hoping will happen is that
the building is proportioned in a way
that you’ll sort of pop out of a bubble of
space and be nowhere, and then you’ll
leave that and enter another bubble, and
the bubbles don’t correspond so much to
the building as to what you’re doing. I was
trying to find a way in which the visual field
would expand, the background would push forward, the middle ground would stay stable, and
space would turn inside out. You enter the house,
find yourself in a complexity of space, and in the
end feel more as if you’re outside.”
Bell has a reputation as an uncommonly enthusiastic and generous professor and studio critic, but
his excitement at finally seeing his drawings and
theories materialized at full scale was especially
understandable given the amount of time and
intellectual energy he had devoted to the project:
months and months hashing out ideas with the
clients—Philip Gefter, former page-one picture
editor of the New York Times, and screenwriter
and filmmaker Richard Press—during which time
Bell produced at least four distinct designs and
hundreds of pages of drawings, and managed to
invest the project with elements of his more than
20 years of theoretical speculation on the perception and experience of space. He had hoped
to combine those investigations with experiments
sketched out through a decade of research on
social housing and designs for affordable homes
wherein he aspired to reconcile domestic architecture with the unsettling psychological effects of
the contemporary world.
“It’s a very interesting moment when someone as
thoughtful and intense as Michael starts doing
private commissions like this house,” says Mark
Wigley, dean at Columbia’s graduate architecture
school. “He simultaneously thinks through the
question of housing in political, social, and economic terms—how housing operates in our society
and how it’s changed over the last twenty years.
On the other hand, he’s obsessed with questions of
optics and the precise way in which one experiences houses. Somehow he has found a way to
take lessons from social housing into the private
Offices at the end of each wing
allow the clients to work in separate
areas with unimpeded views of the
surrounding wilderness. “I always
imagined they would be e-mailing
each other from across the house,”
Bell says. “I’m ashamed to admit
we do,” Gefter says.
A floor plan shows the simple
but elegant layout of the interior. The kitchen is stationed
on an island opposite the living
room, and a fireplace is suspended next to the courtyard
above the basement stairs.
