by John J. Sullivan

In 1997, Manhattan architects Alan Koch and Linda Taalman started an experimental architectural-design firm called OpenOffice, intending it to serve, in the language of its mission statement, as “a vehicle for art and architecture projects . . . that merge the disciplines.” That mission is currently being fulfilled through an innovative and unusual project called Houses X Artists (“X” signifies “by”).

The project was born when Koch and Taalman (both in their early thirties) began brainstorming about ways to subvert what Taalman calls “the idea of the architect as a solitary author of ideas.” The next step, creating a formal design collaboration between architects and nonarchitects, was a small one. An invitation was mailed to more than a dozen distinguished visual artists—some well known, others not, and none necessarily possessed of any architectural know-how—asking each to parti-cipate in an experiment that would “give way to the realization of a house as a work of art.” The artists were challenged to “bring to the surface the ideas within a house while probing the limits of its formal potential.” In plainer terms, they were being asked to use their amateur status to their advantage, to envision houses that wouldn’t occur to professional architects (who, having internalized the limitations of academic training, tend to know too much). The architects at OpenOffice would act as design midwives, putting their more practical expertise at the disposal of the artists.

It was an attractive invitation: to play architect for a fantasy client; to imagine the house you might build if cost were not an issue, if no stuffy future occupant were going to dismiss your plans as too far out, and if someone were always on hand to help you overcome pesky real-world obstacles. “We presented this project in a lecture at Art in General,” Taalman remembers, referring to a nonprofit .. York arts organization that supports work outside the usual range of mainstream galleries. “Afterward, people were raising their hands and saying, ‘What about this idea of artists working in a commercial environment?’ I thought, Wait a minute, I hadn’t thought of this as a commercial environment. But for them, that’s really fascinating—‘Hey, this bathroom has to work?’”

A solid grounding in the commercial concerns of construction is probably not something many architects would ascribe to OpenOffice. In talking about Houses X Artists, Koch and Taalman, along with .. partners Lyn Rice and Galia Solomonoff, are unapologetically theoretical and playful. Koch speaks about working “to retain that virtual edge, that floating quality,” when turning the artists’ respective visions into workable plans. And Taalman says that the project, which will be in progress for at least another year, “will sort of never be finished,” meaning that it will give rise to other collaborative possibilities, other projects, rather than terminate in a single built home or group of homes. In fact, as Solomonoff points out, some of the proposals “would lose certain strengths if they were built.” Not that these dream houses are intended to remain computer animations or models forever. The project’s ultimate goal, as articulated in the invitation, is to present “ready-to-build houses made tangible through graphical and textual representation.” And the architects want to see them built, going so far as to seek out partnerships with industry and manufacturers, which they hope will lead to the development of .. construction materials in cases where existing materials fall short of the artists’ ideas.

The ideas themselves are inspired; they are dream houses in the truest sense. They include Kevin Appel’s “glass garden house” (which looks in mock-up like the intersection of a greenhouse and the hall of mirrors at Versailles), Charles Ray’s high-tech tepee, and Chris Burden’s miniature skyscraper, which he claims can be constructed “quasi-legally” in Los Angeles County without a building permit. (“Each floor measures 100 square feet,” Burden says, “and its maximum [overall] height is 35 feet,” specifications that meet the county building code’s definition of a “small outbuilding.”) David Reed’s house revolves around a bedroom gallery—an invention born, say the architects, of the artist’s having felt for some time that his own art would best be displayed in such a room (or presented, as they phrase it in the proj-ect prospectus, “as a domestic performance that blurs public and private boundaries”). The artist’s conception of the house, as can be seen in computer-generated images, involves a high degree of transparency as well as shifting planes and perspectives that, according to the prospectus, “dematerializ[e] into layers of skin and structure.”

Fascinating, but hardly the sort of thing that wins design commissions. And for the architects at OpenOffice, that’s partly the point. “This is one of the great things about the speculative field,” says Koch, who compares the elaborate 3-D visual representations he and his partners are creating to the old pattern books that Jefferson used in designing sections of Monticello. “This is part of that tradition. You make work without a user, and then the user finds it. You can’t build a $20 million building and then say, ‘Hey, you want this?’”

Which raises the question: Will anyone want these houses? Taalman says that one of 10 questions put to the artists was, “Would one be allowed to hang out in this house?” And the artists, including David Reed, have resisted the urge to turn their houses into sculptures or museum pieces, nice places to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. Still, these spaces are about interpreting space; they ask questions about the relation between a building and an occupant more than they represent formalized answers to those questions. Some of the designs are engineered to make things interestingly problematic for the dweller. Jessica Stockholder’s “typical small house” takes a traditional house, similar to a lodge or cabin, and distorts it into “an entirely unfamiliar and abstract landscape” (the 3-D projections resemble a Rubik’s Cube that’s still a few turns from being solved). Stan Douglas’s site-specific house “circulates around a central void, into which images of the site at the present and at its inception/construction are simultaneously projected” via camera obscura and mirrors engraved with photographs of the original site. Douglas’s plan demands that you consider how the property looked before the house was built.

Finding funding for Houses X Artists—a requirement if the houses are to evolve beyond the purely speculative stage—has at times been difficult. “We’re really seeking visionaries,” says Koch. “Not everyone understands what ‘cross-disciplinary’ means.” But enough people do understand that the project has gained irreversible momentum. Rodney Hill, of the Gorney Bravin & Lee Gallery in .. York, has joined OpenOffice as a curatorial consultant with the aim of turning the project into a traveling exhibition. And engineers Matt King and Nigel Tonks from Ove Arup and Partners, along with Museum of Modern Art design curator Paola Antonelli, have recently agreed to assist with prob-lems of material or design.

For the OpenOffice architects, there is no doubt that the teasingly vague invitations they sent around last year have provoked some brilliant responses. “We’re letting the artist become the architect,” says Taalman, “swapping the position of authority to where it isn’t really clear where the ideas are coming from. And when you do that, you get something fresh.”

John J. Sullivan is a .. York–based writer.