“The computer is a tool; I can’t do without it,” says Förster. “But the nice thing about making models is that in the process of doing, I’m more open to mistakes—maybe I put the tape in a way that I don’t intend, but it shows a new possibility. In a computer everything is perfect. When I make models, it’s intuitive and rough: I take a flat piece of paper, I cut it, I tape it. It’s very quick. I find it very refreshing.”

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Thomas Phifer is one of the most subdued architects you’ll ever meet. Sitting in his all-white New York office in a navy suit, reclining diagonally in a straight-backed chair, he speaks in a low and measured tone. When he’s being pensive—–which is most of the time—–he closes his eyes as he talks and bobs his hand gently in front of him like a conductor, as if coaxing out words. To hear him better, I lean in, block out the blaring car horns outside. In this way, he is like his architecture: exquisitely quiet, subtle, and absorbing.

Phifer has been practicing architecture for 34 years, as a partner at Richard Meier’s office from 1986 to 1996, and as founding principal of his firm, Thomas Phifer and Partners, since 1996. He designs beautiful buildings—–minimalist steel-and-glass houses, a daylit museum—–but his architecture is about much more than eye candy. “We work a lot with nature, trying to bring people more in touch with their environment in a subliminal way,” he says, in a subtle South Carolina twang (he grew up in Columbia and went to architecture school at Clemson University). “Our buildings want to be helping hands, bringing people closer to understanding the sun, and light, and the change of seasons. For far too long, buildings have been fortresses, cutting people off from nature.”

His masterwork to date—though he’s far too humble and cool-headed to call it that—may well be the Fishers Island House, a second home he designed recently for Tom Armstrong, the director emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and his wife, Bunty. Set on an island off the coast of Connecticut and surrounded by gardens, the house embodies Phifer’s design sensibility. The pavilionlike building sits lightly in the landscape, both aesthetically (with its wraparound glass facade and minimal interior walls, the place is literally see-through) and ecologically, thanks to geothermal heating and natural ventilation. An aluminum-and-steel-rod trellis encircles the house at roof height, modulating natural light that washes in through the 12-foot-high glass walls.

During the design process, Armstrong stopped by the office weekly to check on the house and discuss the latest drawings. That could be an architect’s nightmare, but Phifer embraced the opportunity to relate so closely with a client. “The closer the collaboration, the better,” he says. “To hear the voice of the person who will inhabit a place and see it come alive in the built work is for me what architecture is all about.” While the house was still on paper, Phifer’s office made Armstrong miniature, to-scale models of both the interior walls and the couple’s collection of 20th-century abstract American paintings, so he could figure out the best way to display his art. “He gave me this incredible toy,” recalls Armstrong. “With most architects, it’s ‘Give me the program and I’ll give you the design.’ But Tom really worked with me. He’s not a screamer or a monster ego. But when he’s on the right track, he proceeds with great strength and brings you along.”

Phifer traces his evolution as an architect back to 1976, when at age 22 he took his first trip to Europe (and first flight anywhere). He stepped off the plane and his mind was promptly blown. “Oh my god, this is outrageous, this is incredible,” he recalls thinking. “I was kind of skipping along in life, and then I went to Europe and my world opened up. Seeing the work of James Stirling in London, Aalto in Finland, Gaudí in Spain, the ruins in Rome—it was just an outrageous experience.” Later, while managing projects in Paris, Basel, and Barcelona for Meier’s office, Phifer observed and internalized the priorities that shaped European design—–such as access to natural ventilation and daylighting—–but that were largely neglected in American architecture at the time. “In countries like the Netherlands it’s literally against the law to put people away from a window,” he recalls now. “It’s a human right to have contact with nature. In America that wasn’t really a concern. It’s just a completely different idea about how to make a building.”

In 1995, Phifer won the prestigious Rome Prize and took a leave of absence from Meier’s office to spend eight months in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Dedicating himself to “studying daylight,” he visited the Pantheon almost every day, rain or shine. “It’s really a metaphysical experience to go in and understand what that building does and how that building represents eternal light,” he raves. “It’s the magic of the oculus, like everyone says. It was built for the ages. You can’t talk about that kind of permanence very easily in the archi-tecture that we make today.” When Phifer returned from Rome he decided to start his own firm, working, at first, out of his living room. His firm is now in west SoHo, with a staff of 25 working collaboratively around a hundred-foot-long table.

His first major commission was the Taghkanic House in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley, a collaboration with his mentor, the legendary modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley, then age 87. “I’d never designed a house in the landscape before,” Phifer says. “We talked about how to embed architecture in the land, how to choreograph the arrival, how to allow buildings to deal with daylight and the land”—–guiding principles that continue to shape Phifer’s designs. The resulting house is a white-painted steel-and-glass box that rests on a hill; the rest of the structure is sunk into the earth, with a shaded glass face open to light and views. Since then, he’s designed airy and luminous houses and office buildings across the country, a United States courthouse in Salt Lake City, a student center for Rice University, and, most recently, the new North Carolina Museum of Art, an open-plan 120,000-square-foot museum where, as in the Fishers Island House, controlled daylighting illuminates the art and transparent walls reveal gardens and reflecting pools just outside. His firm also won an international competition to design a new streetlight for New York City, a taskhe found more difficult than conceiving a building. “It was so technically challenging,” he says of their design, which employs an energy-efficient LED bulb. “To my knowledge, it was one of the first designs for an LED streetlight, so we really had to push the technology.”

By all measures, Phifer’s firm is flourishing. But Phifer shrugs off any applause. “You have to practice for so, so, so many years before you even get a glimpse of the right way to do a building,” he demurs. “The more you see—–the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Museum that Lou Kahn did—–and the older you get, the more humble you get, because you begin to understand how those buildings are true masterpieces. Architecture is extremely difficult to make at that level.”

When I point out that not all architects get humbler with age, he raises his eyebrows and leans forward insistently. “Just one trip to the Kimbell and you feel like you’ll never do a building that’s even close to that. The building is completely timeless. The natural light is just breathless. It’s incredibly simple and powerful. When you’re a young architect, you look at it and you say, yeah, that’s beautiful. But when you get older you really begin to appreciate what a masterpiece is.

“More and more I’m thinking about life span,” he continues. “A lot of work we’re trying to make more permanent, making simpler and simpler forms. We’re into very quiet architecture.” Prodding him to think big, I ask him to name his dream project. “Another museum,” he says evenly. “Another house.”

Sticotti had designed about a dozen houses for friends and clients over the past two decades—he studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires before establishing his own line of furniture, NET—so building his own wasn’t much of a stretch. “To him, it was like creating a grand meuble,” says Hernaez—a big piece of furniture. He custom-designed every detail and had 14 employees in his furniture workshop and architecture studio fabricate them, from the gigantic, Mondrianesque installations of double-paned windows and doors (made of locally forged iron and rare peteriby wood from northern Argentina) to the modular lapacho-and-pine shelving units used throughout the house to hold books and CDs.  Design Within Reach was so impressed that they picked up the shelves for distribution in the United States.

The house held symbolic value for the couple: It was a physical rebuilding of their lives after a series of turbulent events. First there was the emotional turmoil of their relationship—when they met back in 1995, they were both married to other people, each with two children of their own. And then there was the devastating economic crisis of 2001, during which Argentines’ bank accounts were frozen and devalued, making investing in anything, including a home, extremely challenging. Previously abundant construction materials from abroad were suddenly scarce and extremely expensive, forcing designers to look inward for inspiration and recycled materials—a new concept for the country, though not for Sticotti, who has always liked working with old wood. Because of this necessary resourcefulness (and a foreign market suddenly interested in Argentina’s newly affordable goods), the early 2000s were a particularly vibrant and creative moment for Argentinean design, says Sticotti.

Reflecting that economic and architectural climate, as well as Sticotti’s own aesthetic leanings, the finished house is very much “of Argentina,” as he says. “People always say that Buenos Aires is like a European city [because of the baroque architecture and Italian heritage], but at the same time, we have our own culture, our own materials. This house is all B.A. In a way, I was trying to find something that represents us—and what we’ve got here is leather and wood and concrete.”

Those three materials make many appearances, in several incarnations, throughout the house. The exterior is clad with strips of Latin American lapacho hardwood, affixed an inch from the building to provide good insulation and air circulation; like teak, it will weather and gray over time. The second and third stories—dedicated to the children’s bedrooms and the master bedroom, respectively—have floors of recycled pine, recovered from a local demolition site. (The couple’s children live with them part-time and range in age between 11 and 18.) The walls are paneled in full sheets of plywood, to minimize scrap and keep costs down. Slats salvaged from an old house in La Boca—a Buenos Aires neighborhood known both for its rainbow-colored  wooden houses and as the birthplace of tango—lend visual interest to walls in the living room and mas-ter bedroom and are affixed backwards to hide their brightly painted faces.

In a nod to traditional Argentinean construction techniques, the ceilings and central structural wall are poured-in-place concrete, with seams and cracks showing “for honesty,” says Sticotti. “I try to use simple, honest materials. I don’t like paint or plaster; I prefer to leave things as they come, and show how things are made.” Furniture from Sticotti’s own line provides most of the house’s decorative flourishes. Mixed in with a scattering of design icons—wire Bertoia chairs and a pair of cowhide-covered butterfly chairs, invented in 1939 by three Buenos Aires designers—are a plethora of NET products: router-cut cedar light shades; wooden stools topped with woven rawhide; tray-topped side tables (used as nightstands in the bedrooms and as a coffee table in front of the couch); and those modular shelving units, lined with books along a narrow catwalk hovering above the double-height living room.

“A house floating in the garden” is how Sticotti describes the finished building. Every room overlooks the surrounding landscape, with treetop and park views from the upstairs bedrooms and a tangle of flowering plants, cacti, and jacaranda trees visible from the ground-floor living area. Floor-to-ceiling glass doors slide open onto large patios, physically extending the interior living space into the garden, and a stacked stone fireplace literally penetrates the glass wall in the living room—a bit of visual trickery that blurs the line between the end of the house and the beginning of the yard. Upstairs, a giant deck off the master bedroom overflows with terra-cotta pots whose contents tell the story of the couple’s past and present lives: plants and cacti from their previous apartments and gardens; other people’s discarded plants, snagged off downtown sidewalks; and blooming souvenirs from their travels.

These days, the house buzzes with activity, alive with the sound of teenagers playing musical instruments, a tinny radio in the kitchen, and two dogs lumbering underfoot. Seated contentedly on the deep, nestlike sofa (a Sticotti original, of course), Hernaez sighs happily. She’s a recent convert to modern design and she’s not looking back. “This is more fresh, more light, not much in the background. It’s like a paradise!” she says.

It’s also a brave new direction for Buenos Aires, a city best known for its ornate European-style baroque buildings. Sticotti’s house, born out of trying economic and personal times, and set amidst a sea of terra-cotta roofs and faux English cottages, signals a very 21st-century approach to Argentine architecture, one that melds local and recycled materials with a global modernist language and celebrates native architects and designers who thrive by that old gardener’s motto: Bloom where you’re planted.

A modern eccentric with an architectural sensibility drawn from ancient Japanese traditions, Terunobu Fujimori designs projects that are exercises in playful experimentation and sophisticated craft.

One of the first things you notice about the Japanese architect and architectural historian Terunobu Fujimori is his voracious appetite. His particular brand of hunger extends not only to food—which he devours swiftly and animatedly, crumbs flying Cookie Monster–style—but also to an ardent intellectual curiosity about the world, especially as it relates to architecture, his all-consuming passion for more than 30 years. A longtime professor at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo, Fujimori came to designing late—he got his first commission at age 44, 19 years ago—but he has since conceived some of Japan’s most startlingly original buildings, on average one per year.

Leading the way to his office at the university (he calls it his “laboratory”), he walks swiftly and steadily, as if propelled on a Segway, his salt-and-pepper hair waving behind him. We sit at a table sipping green tea, and Fujimori thumbs through his sketchbook, discussing the atypical genesis of his career while gobbling tea cookies and sketching almost continuously with a blue pencil. Fujimori grew up in a tiny, rural village two hours south of Nagano, where he helped care for the surrounding forests, as the local villagers have done for more than 400 years. He studied architectural design in college but quickly became disillusioned by the lack of hands-on technical training—he was more interested in building than in design, he realizes now—and moved to Tokyo to pursue a PhD, spending the next 20 years as a scholar and professor of modern Japanese architectural history.

Fujimori basically fell into designing buildings after his native village commissioned him to design a small history museum for a local family with ancient ties to the area. As he pondered what form the building should take, he felt the weight of all of architectural history bearing down on him. “Since I was a famous architectural historian,” he says, “I thought my architecture should be totally unique, dissimilar to any architecture that came before. I figured that if I did something traditionally European or Japanese, everyone would say ‘Oh, it’s because he’s a historian.’ I didn’t want that criticism.” But at the same time, he wanted to stay away from anything too contemporary. “Some of my closest friends, like Tadao Ando and Toyo Ito, were architects who were starting to get famous, and I didn’t want them to laugh at me and say, ‘Oh, you mimic my work.’”

His peers found the building intriguing. “Terunobu Fujimori has thrown a punch of a kind no one has ever seen before at ‘modernism,’” wrote the architect Kengo Kuma. Encouraged, Fujimori decided to continue designing. With no other clients in sight, he built a house for his family in a Tokyo suburb. Inspired by the plant-covered thatched roofs prevalent in Normandy, the Tanpopo (Dandelion) House has strips of volcanic rock affixed to the facade, with flowers and grass blooming in the grooves between them. The thick walls mean that the house is extremely well insulated and energy-efficient, a by-product of the design rather than a direct goal. While Fujimori admits that his buildings tend to be ecologically sensitive and extremely energy-efficient, he is wary of the contemporary conception of green design. “As an architect, I deal with the visual effects. Energy conservation is an engineer’s work. My intention is to visibly and harmoniously connect two worlds—the built world that mankind creates with the nature God created.”

Earlier that day we’d met in Kiyosumi, a town 60 miles north of Tokyo, to visit his most recent project: a 1,080-square-foot concept house he designed for the Tokyo Gas Company Ltd., Japan’s largest natural gas provider. Coal House, as Fujimori calls it, uses exclusively gas-powered appliances and is full of quirky details: Squat, hobbit-scaled doors conceal a bathroom and side entrance (you literally need to duck to enter); the children’s room is accessible only by a steep ladder (“It’s okay,” Fujimori reassures me when I inquire about late-night bathroom runs, “children are like monkeys”); and a tiny tearoom hangs off the second story like a jutting upper lip, echoing the silhouette of his earlier Charred Cedar House from 2007. Both projects are extraordinarily striking, thanks in large part to their exterior siding, charred cedar boards with a crackled, crocodile-like texture—an ancient Japanese technique that seals the wood against rain and rot but is seldom used by contemporary architects. This is in part because it’s labor-intensive—it takes seven minutes to char three boards—and also because the method is considered primitive. “No educated architect would use this material,” says Fujimori with pride, grinning broadly. The effect certainly makes an impression; as we chat in front of the Coal House, a neighbor walks by slowly, swiveling her head, her mouth visibly agape.

Little about the way Fujimori works is conventional. He doesn’t have a firm per se but rather recruits promising graduate students to help him flesh out the details of each project after he’s done all the drawing. He makes his architectural models by hacking tree stumps into abstract, sculptural shapes using a chainsaw. Galleries abroad have offered to buy them, but he refuses. And when he’s completed the final drawings for a project, he invites his clients to his weekend house in Nagano for a little ceremony he’s devised. Sitting in his private Too-High Tea House, perched 20 feet in the air and wavering on two forked tree trunks, he hands them a hand-rendered version of the final plans. “If they don’t like my design, I shake the building!” he says, laughing heartily.

Fujimori hires professionals to do all the structural and electrical work on his buildings but handles many of the interior finish details himself, with a motley group of volunteers that he calls the Jomon Company—so named for the Neolithic period of Japanese history and for the primitive tools they use to give Fujimori’s interiors a warm, roughed-up feel. When the structure is nearly complete, this loose collective of close friends—a painter, a novelist, a book publisher, a sake brewer, a priest—gather to do whatever unusual task Fujimori has set aside for them: planting hundreds of leeks in individual pots atop a gabled roof; weaving a bamboo screen for a copper-plated pottery studio; or cutting irregular chunks of wood with stone-carving tools and embedding them in a tea house’s vaulted ceiling. “Instead of playing golf that weekend, they work,” says Fujimori, hastening to add, “I never pay them. If you pay, it’s labor!”

Fujimori clearly relishes his iconoclast role, even as he receives increasing recognition and respect as a designer: At the 2006 Venice Biennale he exhibited his unconventional architectural models, and in 2007 the Japanese publishing company Toto released a monograph of his work. But increasing fame and more prestigious commissions don’t mean he’ll change his unconventional working methods anytime soon. He’s spent the past several years roaming the globe for new ideas, applying his historian’s mind to collect inspiration from ancient models: mud architecture in Mali, adobe buildings in the American West, and the famous Caves of Lascaux in southwest France. These spare, stripped-down structures remind us that we all share primal instincts that can be aroused and satisfied through design: for shelter, warmth, and community. Fujimori may dismiss sustainability as a side note in his buildings, but his modern interpretation of the Neolithic captures a truth too often lost in our scramble for eco-credibility: Working with nature is sometimes the most radically green approach an architect can take.

Dunlop’s parents, who lived in Brisbane, took up the case and found the couple some land atop a wooded ridge above Noosa, a stylish beach town on Australia’s northeastern coast. “It was obviously a cracking site,” Dunlop says now, gesturing off his deck to a rolling sea of bright green eucalyptus, sloping for miles down to an ocean dotted with yachts and freighters. Despite the giant leap of faith required, it was something of a risk-free investment: Dunlop’s parents were so enamored of the property that they vowed to buy it if the couple balked.

A few months later, when Dunlop was in Sydney for an exhibition of his paintings, he hopped a plane to Noosa to check out their purchase. He was thrilled. When he wandered next door to introduce himself to his future neighbors, he was pleased to discover two of the eight-person firm Bark Design Architects. When the principals Lindy Atkin and Stephen Guthrie learned who he was, they were keen to design his future house. Atkin’s and Guthrie’s enthusiasm was somewhat self-serving—“We were terrified of having to look out on a big-block mansion or a Tuscan bunker,” Guthrie admits—but also big-hearted. Unlike many of their neighbors, who’d erected tall fences at the edges of their property, the architects were determined to preserve the scenic views from the road, a popular route for cyclists and drivers. “We wanted our architecture to ‘give back’ to the street,” as Guthrie puts it. Dunlop liked them immediately, and a collaboration was born.

The architects’ brief was to create a warm and airy three-bedroom house for a growing family and to preserve some of the elements the couple loved about warehouse living, including an open plan and soaring 16-foot ceilings. Dunlop also wanted a painting studio with natural lighting, raw plywood walls, and an extra-tall roof to accommodate his larger works. To help steer the design, the couple put together a scrapbook of images that inspired them and sent it to the architects: tear sheets from design magazines of houses they loved, Polaroids of mid-century-modern furniture, fixtures they’d purchased at London flea markets (along with measurements, so the architects could design the rooms to fit), and photographs of Dunlop’s paintings, “to show that the artwork came first, and furnishings second, and that the paintings weren’t necessarily going to match the couch,” says Webb. “When all that ’50s and ’60s California-style stuff came over, we were like, ‘Yes!’” Atkins recalls, clapping her hands in delight. “We love that aesthetic, too. That’s when we knew this was going to work out beautifully.”

After an intensive eight-month design process, however, the project hit a snag: Construction costs had skyrocketed in the intervening months, and the bids coming back from the builders were beyond the couple’s budget. Rather than ask the architects to downscale and redraw the plans, Webb and Dunlop got creative with their approach. “Once you’ve been shown the best, it’s hard to scale your expectations back,” he explains. “At that point, we’d bend over backward to make it happen.” What they did do—become their own lead contractor—was no less gymnastic. Webb, eight months pregnant, sat through the required owner-builder exams and handled all the subcontracting. Meanwhile Dunlop, along with his father, chipped in with labor, prepping the foundation and laying slate tiles by day and then, pressed by a deadline for an upcoming exhibition, painting in a ramshackle milking shed on a nearby dairy farm late into the night.

It caught the attention of design magazines well beyond the remote islands, such as Architectural Record, which in 1950 devoted two issues to Hawaii’s brave new style. “Their point was that modern architecture is everywhere these days, even in as far away a place as Honolulu,” says Dean Sakamoto, an architect and the director of exhibitions at Yale’s School of Architecture, who grew up in Honolulu. He recently curated the Honolulu Academy of Arts’ exhibition on the Russian-born Ossipoff, who worked in Honolulu for 67 years and designed many of the city’s most revered buildings.

Approaching downtown Wellington, New Zealand, from the airport, you curve around the city’s glittering bay and land in Courtenay Precinct, a stylish neighborhood chockablock with boutiques, bars, and sidewalk cafés. It’s hard to believe that just a decade ago this was one of the city’s least appealing areas, its prime landmarks a sketchy bus depot, a belching incinerator where the city burned its trash, and a commercial port where cargo ships docked to unload their wares. Warehouse-lined streets erupted at daybreak as produce markets took over the neighborhood, leaving squashed tomatoes and cabbage leaves in their wake. “It was really quite scungy,” reflects Jan Bieringa, who with her husband, Luit, bought one of the area’s rundown mercantile buildings in 1996. The Edwardian warehouse on the corner of Blair and Wakefield streets is a few blocks from the water. “At the time, this was a very neglected part of Wellington. Not many people were moving into the inner city. But we thought it was fantastic.”

Dedicating themselves to their new neighborhood and determined to take an active role in its transformation, Jan and Luit sold their suburban house and took over the building’s raw, 3,000-square-foot third-floor space (“Hard to heat, but great for playing soccer with the dog,” Luit says). They lived and worked in this open-plan space for four years as they gradually strengthened and renovated the building, renting out the other floors to creative, like-minded professionals and shop owners. (Luit is a freelance curator and the former director of the National Art Gallery of New Zealand; Jan works in film and new media.) “The idea was to develop a creative community within the building, and to avoid transient tenants like nightclub or restaurant owners,” explains Luit. “We wanted to get people on the streets during the day, to help make it a vibrant neighborhood.”

After four years, Luit began itching for a new project, not to mention a more permanent-feeling residence. He hired his architect friend James Fenton, director of the local firm Architecture Workshop, to design a rooftop home. It took just a glance around the neighborhood, where neighbors had begun expanding their own buildings skyward, for the pair to come up with some definite conclusions about what they didn’t want. “People around us were generally just extruding what was below, creating a fourth floor by repeating the base,” says Fenton. “But that destroys a building’s proportions, turning it into something stretched out and unfortunate-looking.” The better approach, Fenton believed, was to juxtapose what was already there with something entirely new, yet respectful of the original structure. So after a few napkin-sketch starts, the pair came up with a design that contrasts the muscular bulk of the existing building while at the same time echoing its structural lines: a trio of glass-walled, three-story apartments. As Fenton explains, “We decided to play with mass—to crown the heavyweight base with a lightweight top. The building was a strong frame with unusually large windows. So we took the size of the windows to an extreme, and made the apartments almost all glass.” Taking a minimalist approach suited Luit just fine: “Jan and I are dreadful gatherers of art and books—the last thing we needed was a space cluttered with details and materials.”

In order to secure a construction loan from their bank, the Bieringas had to pre-sell one of the apartments off the plans. They approached their longtime friends Tony Hiles and Judith Fyfe and found willing and eager partners—on the condition of a few design tweaks: namely, the nixing of a Jean Nouvel–inspired barrel vault that was to arch over the three units (“It would have blocked the view,” Hiles explains. “I live visually—I didn’t want a wooden hairnet in my way”) and the ability to design their own kitchen. Both parties anticipated the risk inherent in working so closely with good friends. Hiles confesses: “Right away, our concern was: We love them now, but how will we feel about them every bloody day—how will that work?” But to their delight, they’ve found themselves very compatible neighbors. It helps that they’re all self-employed and independent people, Hiles explains. “We respect each others’ need for time and space. We get together for dinner once a week, but we don’t live in each others’ pockets. I thoroughly enjoy living next to someone I can bump into, and then the very next minute we’re having tea.”

The design of the apartments inherently promotes this sense of community (ditto the fact that both the Bieringas work one flight down, in open-plan offices carved out of their former loft apartment and shared, as envisioned, with other creative industries). The three apartments’ sunflower-yellow front doors open onto an outdoor corridor that parallels the sidewalk 40 feet below, encouraging casual encounters between the residents (the third apartment was purchased, postconstruction, by Catherine and Murray Heyrick). One of Hiles and Fyfe’s three decks hangs over this entranceway, allowing them to pop their heads over the railing to say hello if they’re feeling social, or to duck away if they’re seeking solitude.

Inside the individual apartments, this public-private interface continues, with privacy decreasing up a vertical gradient. The top floors are the most transparent, reading as a series of intercutting glass boxes that overlay and lock into each other, offering eye-popping views of the surrounding hills and cityscape as well as unexpected glimpses back into the apartments. Tying it all together is an open central stair, which allows sounds and light to travel throughout the three floors.

Yet even the most compatible partners and neighbors need some alone time—a challenge in a space with so few walls and so many windows. “Glass is a material you have to be careful using,” Fenton says, acknowledging that a sense of comfort is just as important as architectural gestures when it comes to designing people’s houses. “You can’t mess with people’s comfort zones too much when you’re dealing with the place where they spend all their time, because the last thing you want them to feel is on edge. You have to stimulate without wearing them out.” To that end, he devoted the more cellular lower level to the three small bedrooms, tucking them behind the original building’s parapets to give the residents a feeling of security. On the top floor of each apartment is a lofted, nestlike room that Hiles calls the “blob-out room,” which he says his grandkids love for the same reasons adults do: “You can hide out up there, but you’re not totally separate from what’s going on in the rest of the apartment.”

Still, there’s not much hiding to be done in an apartment their neighbors refer to as “the fishbowl.” When they’re asked the inevitable question—how do they feel about being on display to whoever passes on the street below—all six residents declare themselves unfazed. “All they get if they look up—and they rarely ever think to—is one goldfish, maybe two,” says Luit. “But when we look down, we see hundreds—the whole of humanity in all its grotesqueness and delightfulness.”

In fact, these days when they look down, there’s a lot more to see than passersby. The burgeoning neighborhood is rife with new investment and promise. Teenagers swarm a skateboard park on the revitalized waterfront, and cranes hover over a luxury high-rise under construction on an adjacent lot. Locals stroll down a harborfront boardwalk, past a grassy lawn speckled with picnickers. It’s a thrilling bird’s-eye view—and even more so for those tenacious residents who have witnessed its evolution.

OCCUPATION Artists

HOME BASE New York City

SHOWSTOPPER Oldenburg and van Bruggen, who have lived, worked, and traveled together for the last 29 years, have been shuttling back and forth to L.A. in order to create their 65-foot-high, unfurling aluminum and stainless-steel Collar and Bow for the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (151 S. Grand Ave.; 323/850-2000), which will be revealed early next year. “[The sculpture] represents the point in a performance when things are ready to become wayward, yet remain contained,” van Bruggen says.

WORKING VACATION For artists, the boundary between work and pleasure can be blurry. “We use travel as a new experience, one that we can build into new work,” says Oldenburg. Going to L.A. has an added appeal: “There’s more space, and artists can develop in a healthier way,” van Bruggen observes.

ONE SMALL STEP “It may be the wrong thing to do, but we love to walk here,” Oldenburg says with a laugh. Among their favorite destinations to explore on foot are the paths of Roxbury Park (471 S. Roxbury Dr.) in Beverly Hills.

UP NEXT In 2006, the duo will visit Denver and Seoul, in order to erect two site-specific installations. ]]> http://jaimegillin.com/2005/12/01/just-back-from-los-angeles-claes-oldenburg-and-coosje-van-bruggen/feed/ 0