Stark Beauty

When you’ve got great bones designed by Park + Associates, the structure should be the architecture

- Judith Torres

Not many architects consider structure as a form-giver. Many regard it instead as a form-follower. As one architect told me, he designs the form, and the structural engineer finds the way to hold the architecture up. For a senior layperson like me, that’s a startlingly fragmented way of thinking, considering only three generations ago, our master-builders or maestros served all three roles of architect, engineer, and builder. On the other hand, I grew up in a time when structural walls, bracing, columns, and beams were always concealed by plaster cladding and ceilings— people didn’t care to see a building’s guts and bones—so this may have contributed to the perception that structure has little to do with enhancing and experiencing architecture.

It’s fascinating to see where changes in taste will take people’s perception of structure. Take the Stark House, conceived by Park + Associates in response to the clients’ brief to give them architecture that was honest, of limited color palette, and would stand out.

The designers decided they would give the client a house so honest one would not only experience the raw materials of which it is made but would also enjoy the very bones of the architecture. “We wanted the structure to be the architecture,” says senior designer Adrian Abano, a Filipino working in the Singapore-based architecture firm. “Fortunately, the client immediately agreed. They also agreed to use raw concrete and glass, unadorned. Hence, the name Stark House.”

Context