Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/603573
296 CULTURED rchitect Chad Oppenheim is not keen on buildings that peddle in "arbitrary geometry." To draw the first line on a blank sheet of paper, the Miami-based phenom would rather eschew artistic license for channeling a building's site into form. "How do you take a piece of land and craft the most dynamic, comfortable and jaw-dropping way to experience that specific place?" he says of this more deferential approach. Oppenheim has responded to the reign of flat, rectangular lots in his adopted hometown, for example, with an ever-expanding collection of houses and towers whose crisp geometries and delicate details appear almost extracted from the city grid. Film director Michael Bay has watched that oeuvre take shape. The Hollywood powerhouse behind blockbusters like the Transformers movies and of next month's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi became acquainted with the architect nine years ago, when he signed for the penthouse of an Oppenheimer-designed Miami condo and again, shortly after, when he instead purchased a single-family residence. Oppenheim just happened to have designed that home, too. The bond, Oppenheim remembers, was immediate. "I remember getting a call from Michael (it was the same night I proposed to my wife) and he said, 'I just want to tell you I'm a big fan and I want to do a house with you one day,'" he says, laughing that "I then kept on waiting for that next phone call!" It rang fairly quickly thereafter, as the two began planning to outfit the Miami house more to both the client's and architect's liking. It was during the refurbishment that Oppenheim learned of Bay's purchase of a small house perched on eight acres in the hills of Los Angeles. Yet the director, whom Oppenheim says has "an incredible mind that understands space and procession really fast," had not initially pegged his friend for the project. His reasoning: If a great building communes with its site, then shouldn't he use a Los Angeles architect who knows the terrain intimately? To prove that his professional raison d'être was not limited by geography, Oppenheim asked Bay to walk the site and sketch some rejoinders to it. "I was completely blown away," the architect recalls of the visit. "It was quintessential Los Angeles, overlooking the city on one side and untouched canyon on the other. In a way, that combination of urban and serene, idyllic views reflects Michael—his public persona and his true personality." The results changed Bay's mind with equal force. "Chad nailed it, and you're talking about a director where no one nails anything," he says. Since last summer he has been using the house as a refuge and entertaining space when he's in L.A. Replacing the original structure, it comprises 30,000 square feet in a pinwheel-like arrangement of wedge and blade shapes that both nestle into the earth and emerge from it, almost geologically. Noting how the property belts 300 degrees of a hillside that has multiple promontories, Bay explains, "Chad's design really encompassed submerging the house and letting it pop out in these different areas." "There were a couple of things we were trying to accomplish," Oppenheim says of this complex plan. "One was to maximize the incredible views and another was to dance around the existing pines, which we wanted to keep so badly. Then there was this idea of creating a great sense of arrival and of following the geometry of the road and figuring out how to heighten the experience of getting to the property. Once we took all those things together, there really was no other way. This project was about me feeling the forces acting on the site, like uncovering the truth of what it wanted to be." Los Angeles architecture firm Rios Clementi Hale Studios helped shepherd the four-year construction project to completion, and Lorraine Letendre and Lynda Murray were responsible for interiors. Like the site itself, the final product offers insight into Bay. While the multiple cantilevering volumes, as well as an entry sequence that begins humbly and ultimately wends into a showstopping vista, seem naturally suited to the billion-dollar director, Bay himself points to other aspects of the project that reflect identity. "The house is very much about light and shadow, and light plays a big part of how I see the world," he says. He also meditates over the tenuous privacy that comes with living in a largely glass house protected by expansive nature: "You've got to be a little bit less embarrassed if a gardener sees you naked," he says, a comment that may also allude to projecting one's imagination onto the world's screens. Bay also contributed to the project's success quite directly, by adding proprietary gaming technology to its visualization and deploying his on-set experts to help figure out the mechanism that lifts and lowers the giant glass wall of the lower lounge. For all of his avoidance of arbitrary expression, Oppenheim says the project conveys a bit of his own spirit, too. Besides allowing him to uncover the truth of a new kind of landscape, it fulfilled a desire to build someone's dream home that goes back to age seven. "Michael is making incredible movies with thousands of people and huge stress, and he deserved a place that would nurture him." "The house is very much about light and shadow, and light plays a big part of how I see the world." —Michael Bay A