A Union of Opposites

(Part 4 of 4)

By Eve Kushner

High in the Berkeley hills, in a magnificent house by Berkeley architect Dan Liebermann, a two-story space contains so many features that it's hard to get a handle on them all. One first notices a stone fireplace, a black steel staircase railing and faceted windows placed in fractal patterns, alternately convex and concave. The panes rise two stories and extend the length of the croissant-shaped living room, giving off the air of importance, like full-height windows in a performing arts center. Rich wood divides the panes vertically. And those lines draw the eye up to a vaulted ceiling, warm and comforting with honey-colored, rough planks.

When I toured the place, I couldn't immediately grasp how all these elements fit together. Then I heard Liebermann describe the house as synthesizing "spatial grandeur and a barn-like, honest, working simplicity." Aha! When he mentioned this synthesis of opposites, he nailed a key issue. As he sees it, good architecture weaves together contrasts: "small and big, dark and light, narrow and fat, heavy and light, rough and smooth." He finds support for this approach in Asian ideas about contrasting elements (e.g., shibui and yin and yang).

His houses typically unite contrasting elements, resulting in environments that feel both spacious and human-scale. They're also dynamic, because joining opposites creates tremendous visual excitement.

You feel this, for instance, in an 850-square-foot Mill Valley house that Liebermann designed. When you enter the front door, a curving wall prevents you from seeing all the way to the back. And this slight barrier provides a "come-along visual suggestibility," says Liebermann, as if you were hiking a trail and wondering, "Oh, what's around the bend?"

Going beyond that, you find yourself in one of his trademark elliptical rooms, where a central column supports an umbrella ceiling. Near the perimeter, the ceiling hovers at about 8 feet, but it rises as you walk toward the center of the space. That's true in any of Liebermann's rounded spaces, but the effect is amplified in the Mill Valley house, because the central area also steps down like an amphitheater. All these changes cause you to experience "a succession of events," he says.

When you reach the column at the center, "Everything maximizes itself in one explosion," says Liebermann. That is, the column looks largest from that perspective, as does the ceiling height, the room itself, the fireplace across the room and the view of the outdoors. Then, as you continue walking across the space, everything "successively gets smaller again. So that's how you get a contrast. The big foils the little, the little foils the big."

He also contrasts materials. In some of his houses, the central column is "a light, evanescent, tubular structure," with pieces of steel woven like an Asian wicker stool. This plays off the nearby fireplace, a "solid, grounding, anchoring mass." His materials tend to be severe, including concrete in floors and steel in columns, with window glass adding more hardness. He chooses these materials to complement the rustic wooden planks that he otherwise uses, particularly in his ceilings. He then softens the appearance of harsh materials, for instance by sandblasting steel, which yields a "granular look." A coat of linseed oil subsequently makes the steel "greenish-yellow-amber, like bronze." Furthermore,he uses radiant heat under concrete floors because, as he explains, "There's a crossover between the felt warmth and the visual warmth."

If his architecture sounds "busy" (and people have told him as much), his clients see it differently. The owner of the Berkeley hills house told me, "Waking up in our house is like waking up in a kaleidoscope or a snowflake or a seed pod." She added, "If you're standing in our living room and looking at the spiderweb ceiling, all the ins and outs, it's just amazing. It's so complex that only a certain kind of mind would conceive of it."

In Liebermann's view, the "mind" that conceived of the house belongs largely to Mother Nature. He says, "I try to humanize the building by giving it the complexity of nature."

In creating a space that's simultaneously grand and comforting to humans, what better source of inspiration?

To see the projects mentioned, go to evekushner.com and choose "on building."

May 2007 Builder Architect Edition Issue

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