Sea Ranch, Condominio I : strategies for constructing the everyday life

In 1963, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull and Richard Whitaker began, under the direction of Lawrence Halprin, the design and construction of Condominium I. A decision that contributes, probably unconsciously, to a more precise focus on modern and heterogeneous American domesticity. Conditioned by the vast geographical extension of the territory, the interest in shaping everyday life has spread exponentially across the continent since the end of the Second World War. Difficult to categorize in an stylistic sense, this day-to-day architecture is recognized, despite its diversity, through actions mostly associated with specific groups or movements that complement other isolated ones such as the Sea Ranch adventure. Understood as a commitment to residential exploration responsible for its relationship with the environment, the proposal was able to achieve notable diffusion and attention of the architectural establishment that began to dilute over the years and the progressive advance of post-modernist rhetoric. The inclusion of Charles Moore, head of the operation, in the festive postmodern scenography generated from the critics a reductive association of his profile with the phenomenological grammar, relegating the residential research carried out during the 60s to the category of second level research. Starting from this conviction, extended in the popular but limited in the critic, the present text tries to alter the stigmatized vision of Condominium I to offer a new image of the operation that allows to recognize the building as a real manifesto of an investigation around the residential space. In this sense, the essay is build as a successive, almost concentric approximation to the different levels of domesticity that take shape in the building, from a reflexive location in the surroundings to the proposed interior occupation of the dwelling. Seven layers that evaluate different strategies in the creation of a dialogue between architecture and inhabitant, swinging between those that reinforce a close relationship with their context and those linked to the particular human condition. Associated with the outer layers of the dwelling, the first project strategies stand out for their nascent geographical awareness, the unbiased choice of recognizable materiality and the conscious (and as contemporary as Californian) definition of limits. Focused on strict intimacy, the second ones reveal the conviction of its authors in an architecture capable of creating unique spaces through common mechanisms, showing their intimate association with the individual and highlighting the importance of Charles Moore in the process. In which it can only be understood as a declaration of change in the face of the foregoing, sensitivity to the environment is intermingled with less evident approaches that reinterpret the architectural tradition of the Bay Area, incorporating invariant Asian architecture, meanings imported from the classical culture and provocative alterations of the perceptive that this text intends to interpret in a domestic key. Because the extensive dissemination of the work (of which little information has reached our days), which during the years following its construction concentrated on geography in order to rapidly initiate a connection with postmodernism, lacks a critical thought on the residential carried out by its authors during the decade of the 50’s that these lines intend to recover. The profound processes of transformation operated on the site today and its impact on a building with a discourse with vocation, at times, pedagogical (or redemptive) make desirable a final coda focused on its later influence and flexibility of adaptation to a society that has matured more than half a century. The last chapter thus offers an objective vision of that influence and a more personal one of the result of the temporal acclimatization that shows the validity of a discourse that has survived its failure as a tendency. The earthly and the dreaming, the classical elitism and the vernacular anonymity, the contemporary and the atavistic give shape to a cog in which the importance of each piece is directly proportional to its relationship with a whole that never loses sight of the inhabitant as the ultimate and first objective of these lines. The text thus gives form to an atlas of mechanisms for the construction of everyday life, hardly cataloguable in its entirety but deeply related to other approaches to the domestic that build a unique residential universe, as Californian as authentic.