Arch Tour Fest 2:15PM: 4/Way House

Photo Credit: Taiyo Watanabe

Arch Tour Fest: 4/Way House | 2:15 PM

This is an in-person tour. Attendees will be required to show proof of vaccination. Please read and check the agreement and safety boxes in the registration. Additional information regarding the tour and check-in process will be emailed directed to registrants 24 hours before the event. Tickets are non-transferable.

View the list of all Arch Tour Fest LA tours

Arch Tour Fest is presented by LG | Business Solutions

CES Learning Units: 1 LU

In 1992, all of Skyhawk Lane burned, along with 39,000 acres of neighboring Topanga and Malibu, reducing all foliage to soot, and property values to half of their pre-burn high in the late ‘80s. Fire allowed the clients’ purchase of the land, but remains a constant concern. Skyhawk Lane runs along the Pacific edge of Topanga Canyon, a microecology that urban historian Mike Davis once termed “a revolutionary, not a reformist landscape… Walden Pond on LSD.”

Odds are, the land will burn again. Fear of fire, flood, slides and erosion dictate stringent setback, cladding and planting guidelines enforced by the state-wide Coastal Commission and myriad county and city agencies. During design development, we assessed first what would be left to rebuild if 4/WAY did burn, and how the site might shield other homes and safely serve firefighters. The 2,250sf retreat mediates between competing topography and sight-lines, and between the allure and danger of life in Topanga.

To take advantage of a distant but commanding view of Santa Monica Bay, the house folds across the grain of a steeply sloping ridge, ducking upslope neighbors and cutting into the hillside to cool the lower floor. A fire-proof retaining infrastructure supports a web of trusses clad in standing-seam RhineZinc. Two standard truss profiles, in two orientations, form a faceted cascade over studio space and kitchen below and living space above. Surrounding terraces act as both fire buffer and a complement of outdoor rooms. A carport tilts up to become a projection screen for the upslope living room.

Architect: Deegan Day Design and Architecture
Design Team: Joe Day, Taiyo Watanabe, Yo Oshima, Bonnie Solmssen, Felicia Martin, Mark Lyons, Noel Williams, Sonali Patel and Tanya Werner
General Contractor: Kent Snyder Construction
Structural Engineering: Gordon Polon
Metal Fabricator: Banks Welding
Landscape Design: Dry Design
Custom Furniture: Chris Sheppard and Michele Liu

Tour Led By:

Joe Day, Assoc. AIA, Design Principal, DDD&A

Joe Day is an architect and critic in Los Angeles, where he leads Deegan-Day Design & Architecture and serves on the design and history/theory faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). In both his design and writing, Day examines the intersections of contemporary art, urbanism and architecture as visual disciplines. He contributed an additional foreword to the 2009 edition of Reyner Banham’s seminal study, Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (University of California Press, 2009), and in the spring of 2012 taught at Yale School of Architecture as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Chair. Day’s Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013) explores new polarities in contemporary architecture and urbanism. He serves on the Board of Trustees at SCI-Arc, and as a Director at the W.M. Keck Foundation.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Participant will learn how the architect built on a hillside.
2. Participants will learn how to frame a coastal view.
3. Participants will learn how to factor in sustainable technologies.
4. Participants will learn how the architect designed a novel home in a city with many of them.