New York City
Joel Sanders

Blurring boundaries between hidden and revealed, work and play, Joel Sanders fashions the highly flexible Lee Residence

By Raul A. Barreneche

New York architect Joel Sanders denounces many of the accepted norms of domesticity. He is right to try to shake off now- outdated notions of the home?modern life is increasingly fluid, flexible, and full of contradictions and blurry distinctions between work and play, entertainment and recreation. In 1999, the Museum of Modern Art made that case in the successful and provocative exhibition, The Un-Private House. The show posited that changes in domestic life and technology are liberating architects and their clients from outdated, centuries-old typologies of rigidly programmed cellular rooms and inherently private dwellings. One of the 26 house designs featured in the exhibition was Sanders's transformation of a hermetic 1950s suburban ranch into an open, voyeuristic bachelor pad centered on a sunken gym instead of a Lucy-and-Ethel?era kitchen. That bachelor pad was never built, but Sanders's design for a recently completed Manhattan pied ? terre puts many of his hypotheses about the modern home into practice. See the September, 2002 issue of Architectural Record for the full story.

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All photography ? Peter Aaron/Esto