Block House
Residential construction
Los Angeles, CA
(In Construction, est. Completion 2025)
Project Team Matthew Au, Mira Henry, Jixun Wen, Nihan Caydamli
Designed for an artist, Block House treats the building as a site for study of material craft. Working with a custom fabricator in Jingdezhen, the historic ceramic town in China, we developed an original block unit to clad the exterior. Ceramic cast elements create the effect of a woven patchwork across the façade, and modulate light and shadow through the use of deep grooves and “v” cuts. We think of the pattern both through the language of textiles and typography recalling Anni Alber’s early textile Typewriter Drawings that she pioneered after her travels to Mexico. The house is a stack of three floors, with the lowest level grounded by an extensive set of “brick rugs” that move out into the landscape. The upper levels pivot around a double height volume with interior windows creating a play of views from floor to floor.