Defying Perspective
Part 2 of 4
By Eve Kushner
From the Egyptian pyramids to Taipei 101, humans can't seem to abandon their "bigger is better" mentality. How refreshing, then, when an architect calls an 850-square-foot house his best building. In 1958, Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann started building that structure in Mill Valley for his family. A half-century later, it still serves as the prototype for his solution to wasteful building practices.
Long before environmentalist ideas became mainstream, Liebermann developed strong beliefs about responsibly restrained living. In particular, this former shipbuilder insists on minimizing personal space. Inspired by Native American structures and cathedrals, he designs elliptical houses with soaring central columns that support parasol-shaped roofs. The bedrooms and bathrooms, tucked under the low-roofed fringes, tend to be meager. The owner of the Mill Valley house laughed while showing me her so-called airline bathroom. By contrast, gathering areas are centrally located and should be expansive, Liebermann reasons, because humans are social creatures.
Liebermann builds most houses on steep hillsides. Working with a hill's contours, he makes an elliptical cut, "a bite out of an apple," then creates a concave, curving retaining wall, like a bowl halved top to bottom. (Curved structures are stronger, he argues, so they predominate in nature, as in craniums, eggs and seashells.) His retaining wall doubles as the main interior wall of the house. And according to Liebermann, this concave wall creates spaciousness in a third dimension. Although you can't walk on the extra space, it fulfills the eye "enough to make a little house seem quite commodious."
Because such a wall could look forbidding, he softens it with a fireplace, sometimes a massive one with stacks of limestone that stretch the length of the room. This feature beckons aesthetically and emotionally, and it also alters perceptions of space. Liebermann discovered this when he lived in the pea-sized Mill Valley home and brought in a grand piano, expecting the instrument to overwhelm the house. Instead, the huge fireplace made the piano seem insignificant. He understood then that juxtaposition and relativity, not actual measurements, determine how large an object looks.
In an elliptical space, he maintains, length in just one dimension is enough to create a sense of spaciousness. For instance, in one Berkeley house by Liebermann, the great central room is shaped like a croissant, dwindling to a point at either end. The farthest reaches create a counterpoint to the main area, making it seem larger. As he explains, "When you have only one dimension that's big, the suggestibly smaller dimensions all around it make it appear bigger." He says that in a rectilinear room, the width and length are constant at all points, so this type of "basic play on natural human perception" can't occur.
He wields a bevy of other techniques to augment rooms visually. In the floor of a dining room, for example, a circular brick pattern continues beyond the exterior glass walls to the patio outdoors. The dining area therefore seems to expand past the confines of the house. Similarly, in a trick borrowed from Frank Lloyd Wright (under whom Liebermann apprenticed), brick arches in one house extend beyond glass walls. The eye discounts the walls and follows the archways, or looks past them, to the woodsy surroundings.
Abundant skylights bring one's eye up to the treetops, so one imagines the ceiling to be 50 feet up, not 10. And in Liebermann's soaring ceilings, wooden beams radiate out from the central columns. He notes that in rectilinear spaces, parallel lines appear to converge in the distance. But when beams in a wagon-wheel formation spread out from a central point, it "defies perspective."
According to Liebermann, a tiny house saves money all along the way, from construction to heating and maintenance. His clients don't think they've sacrificed anything by living in smaller spaces. Far from it, they feel quite fortunate. The woman with the circular brick floor in her glassed-in dining room says she continually gravitates toward that space, as it feels healing. "Even hard tasks like tedious paperwork feel better in that room," she says. "It's about being surrounded by good vibes." Two other houses by Liebermann make the homeowners feel as if they're simultaneously inside and outside. And as for Liebermann's Mill Valley masterpiece, the owner told me, "You don't need much. This is a very casual house. You sit on the floor."
Liebermann says his structures appear double their size. Perceptions, he asserts, are the most effective tool in creating sustainable architecture.
To see some of the projects mentioned, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building
March 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue