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"View Slideshow\n\nJapanese by affinity, South African by birth and affiliation, the couple who called on San Diego\u2013based Wallace E. Cunningham to design their retirement home in Southern California are connoisseurs of landscapes. What convinced the husband and wife to buy the three-acre property was the near 360-degree panorama fanning across miles of a lush valley, with ranches and citrus groves rolling to the foothills of mountains in the distance.\n\nWhen Cunningham met the couple, he was spellbound by their tales of the spacious vistas in South Africa and of bonsai gardening in Japan: The husband and wife had lived and traveled around the world during their careers as an executive and a scientist, respectively. Rare is the architect who works as a portraitist, but Cunningham, who thinks no small thoughts, decided to portray the couple and their travels in a house that would evoke an environmental biography of other times and familiar places, as well as form a lens to their chosen view.\n\nWith its small forest of staggered piers and revolving views, the house invites exploration. \"Each space is singular.\"\n\nOnce a student in Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, Cunningham has always grown his buildings out of the site. But in a subtle reversal, he developed the new house with sight lines dictated by the views. \"I positioned and scaled the house to optimize visual corridors,\" says Cunningham. He also sculpted the earth into a plinth to elevate the house into the view, as though it were an acropolis.\n\nAs he was designing the house, the five-foot, eight-inch Cunningham walked the site with a six-inch-high wood box on which he stood to simulate the height of the husband, who tops out at six-two. Standing on the box, Cunningham started to edit the views, using string guidelines so that the house would work like Stonehenge: He aligned walls, ceilings and overhangs to fully frame, rather than crop, the distant peaks and spurs. \"I was scaling the windows against the mountains,\" he explains.\n\nHe also discovered that the house, as an optical machine, could censor the houses in the foreground. A retaining wall, built in a circle around the residence, forms a swimming pool whose infinity edge not only melts into the horizon but also eliminates the sight of nearby houses. \"We masked the visual noise in the landscape and focused on its serene aspects,\" he notes.\n\nAfter circling up to the back of the site, visitors park and walk to the house along a ramp that passes the tops of 12 purple-leafed plum trees. In spring visitors see eye-to-blossom with the billowing pink masses. The large onyx-glazed entrance gate, backlit by lights at night and the sun during the day, doesn't open into the house but into an outdoor space\u2014an expansive, minimally landscaped courtyard centered on a large, shallow pool lined in polished black granite. There are few trees, but visitors see them twice: The pool crisply reflects the canopies of a redbud and red and green Japanese maples. From the projecting roofline hovering over the front door, a wide sheet of water cascades into the pool. \"My clients talked about the waterfalls in South Africa and the long eaves of their traditional house in Japan,\" says Cunningham. \"The house is a story line of their lives.\"\n\n\"The projections that frame the landscape also shape the outdoor rooms,\" Cunningham says. \"They actually define as much exterior space as interior space.\"\n\nAs a structure, the 10,000-square-foot house is not made of walls and ceilings but of piers and beams, staggered in plan and stacked atop each other in the roof. Glass fills the gaps between the segments, defining the membrane between inside and out. \"My clients wanted to feel as though they were living outside, so I devised a simple three-dimensional construction system, like the tower of cards children build, to play with the idea of what's enclosed and what's not,\" says Cunningham. As in Japanese houses, he brings overhangs well beyond the perimeter of the interior spaces, to form sheltered outdoor areas. \"The architectural projections that frame the landscape also shape outdoor rooms,\" he says. \"They actually define as much exterior as interior space.\"\n\nThe same patterns of light and shadows outside march through the glass to striate the floor. Inside, the views work much as advertised. The corridor from the front door to the living room frames Paint Mountain to the east, and the tall, expansive living room offers a southern panorama centered on Black Mountain. Cunningham, who collaborated on the project with interior designer Pamela Smith, lowers the trellis of beams in the dining room to accommodate seated guests. Throughout, he composes the views like a landscape artist. In the mornings, creeping mists transform the valley into an unfolding Japanese screen.\n\n\"In Japan my clients lived in a traditional wood-and-paper house, and one weekend they decided to fill the dry streambed and pond around the house with water,\" remembers Cunningham. \"When the husband mentioned at work that the basin would not hold water, his Japanese associates laughed and explained that the basin was not for real water but for the water in your mind.' \" On the west side of the house the architect wrapped the master bedroom wing, with its large bath and gym, around a long black-gravel interior courtyard. \"It's for the water in your mind. We rake the gravel into liquid patterns.\"\n\nThere are other outdoor areas, wet and dry, among the structural outriggers and the stones that step through the ground cover. The long patio facing the pool and view, where the husband smokes his nightly cigar, is equipped with a fireplace, telephone jacks and data ports. Other beams cover a dining area like an arbor.\n\nRather than designing volumes, he created a structural web.\n\nWith its small forest of staggered piers and revolving views, the four-bedroom house invites exploration. \"Even though it's a simple, simple construction idea, you can't easily understand it,\" says Cunningham. \"Each space is singular. You have to see every room before you can put together the whole.\"\n\nWright, Cunningham's spiritual mentor, rooted houses in the site thematically and physically, but Cunningham erases any sense of the earth. Basking in reflections of the sky, the house doesn't seem to touch the ground but appears instead to float. The architect not only abstracts the feeling of vastness that the view inspires but also distills lighter, more ephemeral aspects of the environment. \"The pools mirror the sky, and, depending on the wind, the ripples bounce dancing light patterns on the ceilings,\" he says.\n\nRather than designing volumes, Cunningham created a structural web that filters the California sun through the interwoven members. \"The house is not the solid, the shadows are; and otherwise the house dissolves in the luminosity. Just how the grid plays itself out is not predictable, but separating and layering the parts allowed me to produce an intangible and ethereal space that always defers to the view.\"\n\nAfter all was said, built and remembered, the clients did not name the house after a distant place. They call it Harmony. \"They say that it's harmonious with the view and the environment, that the house is at rest,\" says Cunningham. \"But it also goes back to my portrait of them. They're ordered, and they have a sureness about them. I built the house to reflect their calm.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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