Westside Pavilion
05/01/2008
Silicon Valley’s well-earned reputation as a beehive of innovation has rarely extended to its residential architecture, which more often invokes the dim past rather than a bright future. But when wireless tech guru Eli Pasternak and his cellular biologist wife, Carmela, decided to build a house in Palo Alto, they knew that a mock-Tuscan villa or Tudor mansion would not suit their style. The couple had lived for years in a nearby Eichler, one of the now-iconic midcentury modernist homes named for builder-developer Joseph Eichler, who introduced glass walls and open floor plans to thousands of Californians in the 1950s and ’60s. "We especially liked all the glass, the openness, the indoor-outdoor feel," says Eli Pasternak. "That was the starting point for our new house."It did not take them long to find a sympathetic spirit, someone who had modernist roots but could design a home with its head and heart clearly in the 21st century. "Eli and Carmela have a wonderful sensibility for contemporary architecture, but they also brought their backgrounds in science and technology to the design process," says Palo Alto architect Stan Field, who studied with influential midcentury architect Louis Kahn. "I designed the environment, while they were more into technological aspects, like the webcam that allows them to see how much mail is piling up while they’re out of town." With the need to provide family living space, offices for both the husband and wife and guest quarters, the residence, says Field, "became much more than your normal home, and designing it offered an opportunity to rethink the contemporary house."
An animated composition of angles, curves and intersecting planes rendered in glass, brushed stainless steel, pearly white plaster and softly glowing limestone floors, the 8,000-square-foot residence is essentially two buildings joined at the top by a skylight that runs through the entire house. Passing through the front door, you immediately enter a luminous, soaring space between a pavilion-like building on the right, where living room, family room, dining room and kitchen flow into one another with few separating walls, and a two-story structure on the left that houses offices, upstairs bedrooms, a second-floor gallery overlooking the living areas and a tubular, black glass elevator. Occupying the basement level are a home theater, gym and guest suite with its own entrance and a security code that can be programmed from the Internet.
The slope of the wing-shaped, cantilevered roof over the public rooms creates a variety of moods inside. The dining area, for example, where the roof swoops down to its lowest point, has an intimate, contained feel even though the space is open to the family room and the living room beyond. In contrast, the living room ceiling’s upward slope—to a height of nearly two stories—lends the space an ethereal, expansive quality, which is accentuated by a wall of windows and glass doors overlooking the rear garden. The living room is furnished with clean-lined Italian furniture and a few small decorative objects so as not to compete with the architecture. "We don’t have to be sitting in the living room to enjoy the space," says Carmela Pasternak. "That happens every time we see it from another part of the house."
"Louis Kahn taught me that light is the creator of space," says Field, who has produced intensively site-specific designs for everything from a community center in his native South Africa to California homes, an Argentinean winery and synagogues in Jerusalem, where he was chief municipal architect. "Architecturally, this house has so many quiet things going on. But more than anything else, I think it’s about light. Pure, beautiful, natural light."
Field Architecture, 650.462.9554, www.fieldarchitecture.com