Desert Landing

Steven Holl designed 900 sf "TURBULENCE HOUSE" house for Mei Mei Berssenbrugge / Richard Tuttle build atop a windy desert mesa ( 2001-2005). Looks like the perfect place to listen to Brian Eno's "On Land."

Original budget: $300,000. Final cost: Over $600,000

Holl: "You come up this road, the drive turns, you can barely see on the left these brown vernacular adobe buildings, which are the main house and Mei-mei's and Richard's studios, and there's this weird metal thing straight ahead that doesn't look like a house and that you see right through, like it's a gate, or some inhabited piece of sculpture." Holl likes Kiki Smith's remark that it's "a brooch pinned to the mesa." He describes being the first one to sleep in it, a year ago: "The sun rises on the mesa from underneath you and the place glows with a gentle orange light that softly wakes you up."

Tuttle: "The place is uninhabitable half the time. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. With lasers, they devised a footprint, a slab, on site, then when the panels arrived they didn't fit — they had to pull them together with straps, like a corset. Not very bright. Any damn fool knows you don't do these two things separately. I respect Steven. He's an artist. It's not his fault if the whole architecture profession is ego gone wild." He adds: "It turns out that the greatest invention, the one that made civilization possible, is caulking."

Berssenbrugge: "We wanted prefab, and instead we got a creative architect's iteration of prefab. It's not Green. It's not solar. It was twice over budget and construction was a nightmare and it's still not finished. But it is real architecture, and that's rare, with beauties only an artist can give you. I tell people, was Dr. Farnsworth happy with the house Mies van der Rohe gave her? She didn't have a closet, but she got a work of art."