Adrian Luchini, associate professor in the School of Architecture, designed the headmaster's home, the 6,400 square foot "Isabel House," at The Principia in St. Louis.
By Liam Otten
August 24, 2001
Adrian Luchini, associate professor in the School of Architecture, designed the headmaster's home, the 6,400 square foot "Isabel House," at The Principia in St. Louis. |
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For the architect, private residences often occupy a professional space akin to a painter's drawings or a novelist's short stories, offering the benefits of smaller scale, greater immediacy and a chance to focus on exquisite detail rather than breathtaking scope.
That said, Adrian Luchini's 6,400-square-foot "Isabel House" is no ordinary residence. (The house is named for the foundation that funded it.) Luchini, associate professor in the School of Architecture, developed the project with the St. Louis firm Metropolitan Design & Building.
Nestled into a low hillside on the 360-acre St. Louis campus of The Principia, 13201 Clayton Road, the building, which was completed earlier this year, pulls double duty as both the headmaster's home and as a host facility for small receptions, welcome ceremonies and other semi-public events.
"There is a definite entertainment aspect to the house," Luchini said. "Principia is a boarding school with students coming from all over the United States. The headmaster and his wife become like surrogate parents in a way, hosting all kinds of activities for the kids, from concerts and dinners to just watching television."
"It's a very unusual amalgam of public and private space," concurred Principia Headmaster Robert Clark, who now lives in the house with his wife and family. "Adrian has done a wonderful job of creating a building that allows us to feel that we have private family areas, yet that also opens up very naturally to accommodate larger groups."
Luchini noted that a certain negotiation between public and private was inherent to the building site: The southern border runs along a well-trafficked pedestrian walkway connecting the boys' and girls' dormitories, while the northern border faces a rolling field and is screened by an cluster of mature trees. Luchini's mission, then, was to weave the diverse threads of program and location into coherent architectural cloth while also honoring the modernist vocabulary of the school's 1950s-era campus.
"The campus is relatively new and has a number of very nice buildings done in the International Style" Luchini said. "At the same time, both the client and I were interested in creating a contemporary structure that would have a presence and shape of its own."
Luchini's solution was to conceive Isabel House as a subtle, boomerang-like arc, with front and back approaches developed as distinctly different tableaus. The convex side, which points toward campus, reiterates the strong lines and flat planes of neighboring structures with an undulating (and load-bearing) wall faced in red brick. In contrast, the light, almost levitating walls of the concave side --done in white stucco --form a de facto courtyard that provides the family with a measure of privacy. Unifying the two views is an elegantly tilted copper roof, the profile of which almost subliminally suggests a bird ready to take flight.
"A traditional two-story home really wouldn't have fit the campus," Clark said. "And while Adrian's design definitely looks newer and more modern than the existing buildings, what I really like is that the concept behind it is so expansive. It challenges your ideas about 'home,' with interesting results.
"That's what education is all about --expanding one's horizons."
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