The machine for living needed an update. Gone are the days of celebrating the sterile box. The five points of architecture brought a new dignity and many promises, but also with them came a state of anxiety. By drinking this attractive Kool-aid, contemporary living had become to a large degree depressed by sterilization, a symptom of its own iconographic erasure of historical tropes. Thus, how could one update this machine today? Perhaps by bringing it together with the aspect it was too cold to confront: coziness and character.

To create something serious yet ludic, we turned to one of the most intellectually stimulating moments in architectural history for answers: mannerism. Conditions in which disorder of the order within the order become the rule, radical departures wrapped within conventions. In the spirit of what Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, and Andrea Palladio were doing to the 16th century Palazzi, we decided to embrace the modern slab apartment building and transform it through a similar synthesis. Elements which seem aligned but upon a second view start to oscillate and misalign. Concrete prefabricated structural elements, familiar in their infrastructural vernacular, are stacked, but for the purpose of achieving a monolith of amicable character rather than a foreign monotonous extrusion. The building is solid, yet soft, strong, yet delicate, monumental, but not intimidating.

The contemporary American city is characterized by a conglomeration of glass vertical high-rise extrusions, always in strong opposition to the single family residential vernacular fabric. Two conditions that modern life can simply not escape, but the elements of transition between these two scales are rare. How can one solve this problem? The building attempts to do it, seeming colossal in scale from afar, only to come close and realize it is merely a few stories tall. Everything that we see is not what it is. The stacked elements alternate in each of the building faces, reversing proportions, so that windows are narrow slots. Every floor takes on the illusion of three stories from afar, but only a close reading of the building can reveal they are in fact not what they seem. The slabs are actually not precisely slabs, but instead a trabeated, structural shell. We are in front of many possible buildings, one vertical in expression, one much more horizontal in aspect, or perhaps simply a structural hollow frame. It is perhaps a rare case in which the memory of the ancient, the omnivorous logic of Modernity, and an interest in perception had a brief flirtation.