Photos by
Bruce
Damonte
When Metropolis called the architect Craig Steely
to talk about Xiao-Yen’s House, a home he designed for
a San Francisco couple (one of whom is named Xiao-Yen),
it took the Bay Area architect 20 minutes to start talking
about the house. There were so many other fascinating
topics up for discussion, from a book called Arthropod to
Superstudio’s Continuous Monument of 1969 to the fear-
lessness of speaking at universities without the smoke-
screen of apparatus-laden scholarship. Steely talked about
Hawaii and California—the architect works a lot in both
states and finds that he can do better work for the place
he isn’t in—and the differences between building on
hardened lava and a fog-saturated California city. He also
talked about the disservice of jargon to the academy, and
of the dinosaurs of poststructuralism as they continue
to roam through the halls of higher education. He even
talked about the architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay—this
guy who did a building on Russian Hill full of Darth Vader
triangles and concrete sticking out everywhere, a compe-
tition he won by doing an eighth-scale drawing. Steely
loves him because “he was just so personal and so crazy
and just so for real.”
What does all this have to do with a four-story duplex
that Steely remodeled for an artist and a filmmaker in
the Corona Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, the
same neighborhood that he himself lives in? As it turns
out, everything. Steely is one of those architects obsessed
with form-making, with the social particularities of life
that can be changed, moved, or swayed through the intro-
duction of a particular plane or volume, material or
exoskeletal stairway.
