Stanley dot com

Flipping through Surface Magazine's 2005 Design Issue, I discovered a couple unbuilt, single-family house designs by Stanley Saitowitz, featured in an article on dot-com dreams gone awry in and around San Francisco, the epicenter of tech money in the 90s. The Zakin and Davis Houses both feature long, linear bars that bend and overlap each other, ending in dramatic cantilevers that strain towards the ideal vista.


Zakin Residence


Davis Residence

These large houses seem to fall into a series of designs - also including the Kahn and Omega 3 projects - that use linear bars to define outdoor spaces, frame vistas, and instill each house with a unique sequence of movement and spatial relationships, especially when compared to typical residential design. In relation to Saitowitz's previous, built houses, these are extravagant, their expense (both land and building) and failure a product of the dot-com bubble and bust. While this means similar designs, in terms of scale and size, aren't appropriate now, their value in expanding the architect's talents and ways of approaching the single-family house may mean great things are on the horizon.