The Razor: Artfully Cutting Through The Property Market

March 27, 2011 § Leave a comment

“Open up a structure to the undulating space of sky, landscape and view, and the building becomes an ever-evolving organism” – Wallace E. Cunningham, architect.

What do you get when you cross a Wrightian-schooled member of the AD 100, a client whose brief is akin to a Warhol-style fluctuating artwork, a plot of land widely considered unsuitable for building, and a $32,000,000 price tag? Answer: the Cunningham-designed home of philosophical merging extraordinaire, The Razor, is on the market.

“Nature is not static, nor should be the efforts of man.” Cunningham has, no doubt, brought forth an appreciable continuum of the Wrightian ‘Organic’ ethic, and a remarkable response to working harmoniously with both the environment and the clients’ own wishes. The resultant reactive structure, deeply embedded within the steep and difficult plot, is in perpetual response to its environment and therefore more living sculpture than inert structure. The clients in question, a couple for whom the La Jolla, California, situation afforded them good opportunity to flow internal to external, requested a residence that would be active and reactive; a building which, rather than dominate or compete with the incredible view, would not only compliment it, but act as a sort of passive viewpoint to the landscape itself.

With the advantageous position, lightness of materials, and an approach to design that is “more intuitive than intellectual,” Cunningham took the clients’ brief and returned a property that is of the sharpest adherence to all necessary components, carrying it to a transcendence of its own materials and into a true work of art.

But if you find yourself salivating at the sight of this highly glorified concrete and glass lookout and with a readily-spendable £32,000,000 (or the seemingly more digestible figure of approximately 20,000,000 if you make your acquisitions in Great British Pounds), then The Razor could be the residence of your reality.