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House of the Issue: Taalman Koch

House of the Issue: Taalman Koch

It’s hot, dry, brown, and dusty—and for some, a personal paradise. Welcome to the California high desert, where a pair of Los Angeles-based architects, Linda Taalman and Alan Koch, have finished construction on their own 1,100-square-foot getaway.

An experiment in hands-on minimalism, the house sits on a remote five-acre site in Pioneertown—just beyond the northwestern boundary of Joshua Tree National Park—and two hours east of Los Angeles. A husband and wife team, Taalman and Koch bought the land in 2006, and with the help of friends and family, built much of the house themselves.

It’s a project they had been contemplating since moving their design firm, Taalman Koch Architecture, to Los Angeles from New York five years ago. The couple, who met at Cornell and founded OpenOffice arts + architecture, relocated shortly after completing the design and renovation of the Dia:Beacon museum in Beacon, New York, in 2003. Their move west was precipitated by a desire to experiment with new building materials and construction techniques, and to have a more direct role in seeing buildings they had designed come to life.

THE OPEN LIVING ROOM FEATURES A HANGING FIREPLACE AND STEEL ROOF (above). Beneath the solar panels, THE HOUSE offers LARGE OVERHANGS FOR SHADING (below).

 

The Off-grid iT house is the result of the couple’s latest experiment in mixing prefabricated and on-site construction techniques. The aluminum framing, steel roof, cabinets, and 3-form bathroom walls arrived ready to install, while the concrete foundation and electrical and plumbing systems were fabricated to meet site-specific needs.

Since the house is two miles away from the nearest electric tower, Taalman and Koch engineered an off-the-grid power system that includes eight solar panels, four of which are on the roof and provide electricity, while two additional panels serve as the house’s solar water heater.

A sizable overhang shades rectilinear floor-to-ceiling windows, some of which are patterned with a vinyl decal grid that functions both as a shading device and a privacy screen. The strategy for enclosing the living quarters is equally low-tech: the bedroom area is nestled between a small hill and a cluster of acacia trees. A pair of outdoor courtyards completes the rectangular floor plan, creating the same sense of easy indoor/outdoor living popularized by modernist architects working in California during the 1950s and ‘60s.

The house was designed as a kit around a modular floor plan, with open sections that can be shifted or mirrored to meet the client’s space and privacy needs. Taalman is unsentimental about the notion of site specificity, believing, as many modernists did, that architecture can become more accessible by way of being more generic and, in turn, more easily reproduced. The iT house may seem one-of-a-kind, but the firm has built three others just like it in Villa Park, Paso Robles, and Three Rivers, near Sequoia National Park.

“The idea of the house is that ‘iT’ can be whatever one wants it to be, it’s up to you to fill in the blanks,” explained Taalman.

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