Modernism is much talked about in dwelling magazines and design studios these days, but seldom practised. With every fresh colour spread or presentation of new house plans, comes a lot of talk about the wonders of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Arne Jacobsen, but the houses designed in the name of modernism seldom have a meaningful relationship to the works of these innovators.
This is because to be truly modern is to think things anew, to question the conventional, to design from first principles rather than received styles. The pastiching of design elements from the 1920s, '30s, '40s or '50s is not evidence of modernism in action, but rather the standard postmodern operations of quotation and irony — though here, the slicing and dicing is of steel-and-glass boxes, instead of Victorian cottages or becolumned Regency villas.
When an architect or editor tells me a new house is modernist, it is usually a guarantee that the design is derivative and semi-livable; in the main, I find this stuff boring.
Thoroughly un-boring, however, is the best modernist house on B.C. shores I have seen this year: a Tony Robins-designed home west of Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast.
At the most banal level, this is a box on the rocks, a seemingly simple pavilion of glass and concrete panel-board perched on a headland pointing toward Nanaimo. What makes the house truly modernist in creative spirit, rather than neo-modernist in style, is its space-making and details.
A lesser talent would have jacked up this house above the granite ridge where it sits. But Mr. Robins's design pushes down into the ridge, with a sawback of stone running through the deck and then through the wall, right into the house's foyer. The custom steel stair inside and wood decking outside are painstakingly cut around the shore stone; every grey-speckled bump and swell is respected with on-site tailoring to accommodate the natural reality.
A similar design device was central to architects John and Patricia Patkau's 1986 Pyrch residence, a Victoria home ranged around a moss-draped rock outcropping worthy of a René Magritte hallucination. True to the spirit of the Belgian painter, the Patkaus's handling of the rock outcropping was somewhat surreal, while Mr. Robins's aesthetic tends more toward magic realism, given his design's amplification of the stunning views on each side of the "house on the rocks."
This house on the rocks is best thought of as a kind of telescope, even "periscope," in the words of the female half of the 50ish couple who now spend their weekends here (and, eventually, their retirement). The word is apt because the layout, walls and windows focus, direct and deflect views and light.
The male half of the couple, South African-born and ensconced for a decade in Vancouver in a career as a genetics researcher and biomedical entrepreneur, had collected a variety of salvaged architectural elements from India: turquoise-coloured 19th-century cabinets; a richly ornamented, dark wood Mogul door with lintel; red sandstone wall carvings. "When the design was half done, he insisted I find a way to integrate these Indian elements," Mr. Robins recalled over lunch near his Point Grey home and office, "and of course, I resisted at first."
The cabinets, bearing the hallmarks of use that come only with age, are now set beside an open steel stair running up along a small-windowed (for privacy reasons) wall. Inside each cabinet are nested other quirky collections: vintage toy cars in one, exquisitely tiny Salish woven baskets in another. The sandstone wall carvings found homes in the bathrooms, while the Mogul door opens into the middle of three bedrooms upstairs.
