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Phoenix
blank studio
Wrapping Xeros residence in a veil of rusted steel, Blank Studio borrows hues from the desert landscape
By Suzanne Stephens
I wanted to wrap one material around the entire house—as sort of an architectural lingerie,” explains Matthew Trzebiatowski, AIA, about the rusted wire mesh and corrugated steel swathing the exterior of his Xeros Residence in Phoenix, Arizona. In designing —under the name Blank Studio—the one-bedroom, 2,200-square-foot home for his wife, Lisa, and himself, Trzebiatowski, an architect in the office of Wendell Burnette (page 92), seized on a lacy, if gritty, mesh to enclose open sitting areas and screen the glazed walls. Elsewhere along the exterior, sturdy corrugated-steel panels, oxidized to a ruddy hue, gird the structure. “The impulse was primarily aesthetic,” Trzebiatowski says, noting, however, that the wire mesh both cuts the sun’s glare and affords privacy, while the corrugated steel—with insulation—affords warmth when temperatures drop. Trzebiatowski also used steel for the structural frame. He considers a totally steel house a “kind of holistic notion that works well with the parched and rocky landscape. Most of my decisions are about being in this place,” he says. Because of the desert climate, he named the house Xeros, the Greek word for dry. (Fortunately, the lack of moisture here has kept the rusting process from going too far.)
The neighborhood where the Trzebiatowskis found a rectangular, 1⁄8-acre corner lot (recently expanded to 1⁄4 acre) lies on Phoenix’s outskirts, where the city’s flat, gridded streets come to a screeching halt at the foothills of the North Phoenix Mountain Preserve. The existing, unprepossessing, shoe-box-shaped house had to go: Like many in this catchment of undistinguished, one-story ranches and bungalows, it dated to the 1950s and needed extensive renovation. With musicians, architects, and artists moving into this precinct, it is not surprising that these newer, more bohemian neighbors didn’t complain to the local design review board that the 30-foot-high, rusty-steel house would, without exceeding the zoning height limit, loom up over this enclave’s stuccoed walls and tiled roofs.
From various angles, the Xeros Residence looks like a treehouse or a huge periscope—or both, combined. Within a narrow site, measuring only 50 by 250 feet, Trzebiatowski could not spread out horizontally, nor did he and his wife relish looking directly into the next-door neighbors’ houses or yards. So on the upper level, he oriented the 30-by-16-foot living/dining/kitchen area to the south, toward the valley where the rest of Phoenix sprawls, and the bedroom to the north, facing the unpopulated mountains. The 24-foot-long bedroom wing cantilevers 12 feet to the east from the house’s 12-foot-wide base to include a home media center. The base, containing a library and studio, is partially enclosed by sloping concrete foundation walls, and depressed slightly below grade along the hill’s 5-degree incline. To the south, the studio opens onto an enclosed outdoor patio and, beyond that, a 14-inch-deep pool.
Want the full story? Read the entire article in our April 2006 issue.
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