Florida Bauhaus / Court Houses

Architect: John Bennett & Terence Riley (designers)

Year(s) built: 2006

So, you’ve designed a house in Miami that takes advantage of the near-tropical climate by forgoing any enclosure between the living spaces and the bedrooms. Instead, a spare courtyard bisects the house, cut along its length by a lap pool. A narrow concrete bridge takes you from one side of the pool to the other. It’s gorgeous, stone simple. But what do you do when it rains?

“You get wet,” said John Bennett, an architect who designed just such a house with Terence Riley, the former chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art and, since March, the director of the Miami Art Museum. They now share the house.

You do get wet. But showing a visitor around the house last week during an evening downpour — as the city prepared to be inundated by hipsters attending the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, which starts today — Mr. Bennett and Mr. Riley didn’t seem to mind the rain.

It’s Miami, after all; the rain was warm. And the chance of a random drenching just adds another level of fun to a house that seems to toggle from academic severity to party-pad louche. “It was meant for bathing suits,” Mr. Riley said of the house, “not business suits.”

The New York firm K/R, which he founded in the 1980s with John Keenen, acted as project architects, producing the drawings and helping to refine the details. The landscape — dense, enclosed gardens front and rear — was executed by a Miami designer Mr. Riley refers to as “the improbably named” Raymond Jungles.

The result is a house that is at once a love letter to the spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and an earnest proposition about how one might live in a city like Miami, which has been experiencing a residential building boom.

In addition to his iconic skyscrapers, the Barcelona chair and the phrase “less is more,” Mies van der Rohe is known for his residential work, not just the famous Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill., but also a series of studies for houses that were in many ways Farnsworth’s opposite. Where that house, in a rural setting, is an experiment in transparency — all walls are glass and dainty steel — these other houses, known as the court houses, were urban introverts.

None of them were ever built; many were developed only as a design problem for Mies’s students at the Illinois Institute of Technology. But several illustrations of the concept exist: drawings that show what life might be like in an impeccably proportioned, well-detailed house that sits within its own concrete walls, looking out only to its own serene closed court.

It was that vision that entranced the two architects as they were working on the 2001 “Mies in Berlin” show at the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Bennett developing computer-rendered reconstructions with his business partner, the architect Gustavo Bonevardi, and Mr. Riley curating.

“We wanted to live in those drawings, basically,” Mr. Bennett said.

And now they do. They modeled the concept — four walls on the perimeter spanned by two planar roofs, a court in between — after those unrealized houses, and they weren’t averse to an even more palpable nod to Mies. In several studies, Mies pasted in excerpts of paintings by Georges Braque, floor to ceiling, as a suggested wall treatment. Mr. Bennett and Mr. Riley did the same; just inside the door of the house, one wall is covered with an overscaled Braque detail printed on laminate.

Continuing in toward the central court, one finds a small living room furnished as if in a raid on the shops of the Miami Design District three blocks away. Floors and ceilings are concrete (the floors unfinished), with only a very few slender steel-pipe columns to suggest that the roof does not float on the white-painted side-walls of its own accord.

It’s luxury of a sort, modeled, Mr. Bennett said, after the feel of a Chelsea art gallery.

Mr. Riley, meanwhile, says it’s something more. “It’s pragmatism, like William James’s pragmatism,” he said, pointing out how resistance to hurricane-force winds helped shape the long wall of sliding glass panels that looks out on the pool.

On the other side of the Braque-decorated wall is a photo mural by Richard Misrach of a lone bather in a vast expanse of ocean. Nearby, a sleek Bulthaup kitchen is hidden in one long, low island, every component but the sink sliding beneath the mirror-like stainless steel countertop.

“We wanted it to be a Donald Judd kitchen,” Mr. Bennett said.

Mr. Riley added: “No one really cooks here anyway. It’s more of an elaborate bar.”

As for parties, the house has seen its share. “It’s great to have people over to a house like this,” Mr. Riley said. “It’s immediately fun.”

And afterward, taking advantage of the brutal concrete floors, Mr. Bennett said, “we just hose it down.”

But the house also has a loftier function, at least in its designers’ minds, as a model for local development.

The house has a mirror-image neighbor, built at the same time, for the Design District developer Craig Robins, who sold it after completion.

The two stand on a street typical of the area and much of Miami. Lined with small bungalows ranging in style from gingerbread to Spanish mission, it is big on charm but small on cohesion and privacy.

“What’s left of Mies’s vision of thriftiness and thoughtful use of materials?” Mr. Riley said. “To get this much privacy in another kind of house you’d have to go way out into the suburbs and find a much larger lot.”

“The next step would be to do a street,” Mr. Bennett added, “to do both sides.”

To illustrate how such a street might look, Mr. Bennett cued up one of the videos from the 2001 Mies show at MoMA. A projector on the living room side of the courtyard sent an image over the pool and onto a wall on the bedroom wing: Mies’s courtyard houses, in many details very much like this one, are slowly extruded from a plan before multiplying to fill an entire large block.

It’s not a bad vision. No one passing Mr. Bennett and Mr. Riley’s concrete-fronted house would call it off-putting, despite the near total lack of transparency. And, with each house using nearly all its lot, it does seem like a sensible way to achieve both dignity and privacy in a dense city with a suitable climate.

“It’s also interesting because it’s an anti-real-estate typology,” Mr. Riley said, warming to the topic. “Real estate is ‘location, location, location,’ but this house can be built anywhere.” (Anywhere you’d be willing to walk outside to get to the living room, at least.)

That was enough pedagogy for Mr. Riley. “I don’t want you to think we sit around watching Mies videos all the time,” he said.

Other images, Beck and Bjork music videos, were soon being projected across the court and the house reverted to its more relaxed, bathing-suit incarnation.

“We’ve been encouraging artists to think of it as a venue,” Mr. Riley said of his unique single-screen theater. Indeed, for the festivities surrounding this week’s Art Basel Miami Beach art shows and associated Design Miami events, the two have commissioned a piece from the artist Matthew Weinstein that will flicker exclusively for the entertainment of friends and other visitors to the house. Rain or shine.

Sources: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/garden/07miami.html?ref=ludwigmiesvanderrohe

http://www.world-architects.com/en/krnyc/projects_en.html