The Willow House attempts to revive the Palazzo as a possible housing type. We believe the actual type to be composed but negotiable, monumental but not colossal, civic but knows its place. It suggests an urban architecture, yet maintains a domestic scale. It might be the perfect soulmate to tackle the insipid proliferation of gaudy Neoclassical single-family houses in the United States. The Palazzo is the proof to all rules: three is the ideal number of compositional parts to create a monumental nature; the applique of window types, course banding, and symmetry proves to be the best partner in crime to create this monumentality; the search to create a gravitational presence simply always succumbs to any over-scaled cornice.

But how to update the Palazzo today? Perhaps with an earnest effort to put it face to face with the opponent it always tried to evade: frugality. Perhaps the answer lies in a monumentality afforded by everyday materials. Perhaps by turning bas reliefs into steel decks, poche into ducts, decorative banding into slab edges, we can create something both banal and vivid. We adopt this 600 year old motif but give it a new form. In its context, we contrast the blatant copies of Renaissance elements, stucco Bel Air mansions with their arcades, column orders, cornices, and entablatures, packed with sculpture niches and a terracotta roof on top. These absurd stucco boxes attempt to recompose the grandeur and sophistication of Renaissance palazzi through a collage of their parts. Instead, we suggest a counter. A Modernist LA home, clothed in Renaissance atavism, its figure clear in the contemporary abstraction of its parts. Inevitably, it retains the essential tropes in order to force the connoisseur to recollect the source, while it amuses and delights over the departures. Through this unconventional organization of conventional parts, the familiar nature of this contemporary Palazzo lends itself to memory, its freedom lies in the montage.