Design’s driven by the client—and shaped by the budget. But acknowledged masterpieces can offer a little inspiration. When John Guenther was asked to design a spirituality center for Vision of Peace Hermitages, on the bluffs in Pevely, Missouri, he thought of The Sea Ranch, a planned community on the Sonoma coast: “simple, shed roof, wood-shingled buildings, beautifully situated on this dramatic site, influenced by the shape of the land.” So he oriented the chapel, library, and office to the dramatic view; used a shed roof to open the building to the view to the east; and clad it in wood shingles that would weather to blend with the surrounding forest.
At Cite Works Architects, partner David Williams was asked to landscape a new house, Santa Barbara Spanish, in Brentmoor Park. The front yard sloped down to the street, but the owners wanted a level area where their family could play and relax. So Williams borrowed the playbook from Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Piazza San Pietro in Rome. “It’s in a Baroque oval, framed by a heavy colonnade,” he explains. “Granted, this isn’t St. Peter’s, but the way he framed the space and transitioned from one elevation to another seemed to fit.” Williams’ colonnade is formed by cherry trees lining a curved driveway, and a stone retaining wall rises to define the change in elevation. Stone stairs make a transition, and a paved oval at the top connects the two arcs of the semicircular driveway.
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Susan Bower at Mitchell Wall Architecture and Design turned the green pitched-roof Monopoly house, “what we call an ur-building,” into a Central West End garage of corrugated gray metal. “That toughened it up a bit!” she notes. More dramatically, she took Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs—“an open plan with lots of glass and overhanging roofs that create porches and outdoor spaces”—and rethought it for the Midwest. The St. Louis house has the same flow, but darker colors let it recede into the shadows.
Mike Killeen, founder and principal of Killeen Studio Architects, is wary of historical allusions: “Once, I brought up the Golden Rectangle, and it lost me the job!” He fared better, though, with Frank Lloyd Wright. “We had some folks who wanted a Modern home, and they wanted a skylight. I’m not a big fan of skylights; they leak. I said, ‘Take a look at the clerestory window in the Robie House,’ and sketched it.” Light now slants into the clients’ great room from a long ribbon of glass set near the ceiling, inspired by the man the American Institute of Architects dubbed “the greatest American architect of all time.”
