Greg Lynn Form is at the center of debate and discussion of design culture. From Time Magazine's list of "100 innovators for the next Century" to the New York Times and CNN, projects that range from retail interiors to cultural institutions, from public housing to coffee sets, have been awarded, praised, contested, and never overlooked. The modern house pictured above is driven by desires for dematerialization and extension. Today, we prefer dense luminescence to lightness and rich encumbrances to endless emptiness. The Venice House folds inside and outside rooms into a singular porous environment that occupies the entire triangular site. A one story high occupiable structural truss defines the mass of the house, composed of only two continuous extruded and radially bent steel tubes, braided and looped through one another that function simultaneously as horizontal and vertical members; beams and piloti.
The integrated structure allows a one hundred foot long ground floor interior living area to be partially enclosed and yet blended with outdoor spaces and light courts that perforate the upper level and connect the landscape with the sky. These glowing wells both separate the upper floor's bedrooms, study and children's area from each yet link them with the lower zone as well as the roof as the fold upward along the curved structural radii. Each element of the house does more than one thing at a time: material and surface continuities make volumes both voids and solids, inside and outside, continuous filets and radial tangents enable the curvilinear basket structure to both support and create hollow courts. This flowing continuity of upper and lower levels, of roof and ground and of voided hollow structural baskets and mass engenders a new kind of porous domestic space that folds together: indoor and outdoor spaces, structural frame, void light wells, solid figures, translucent bounding envelope and an undulating ground plane into a suspended mixture.
