Issue 1 ·
A Ferrari Went Through This Wall In 1986
It took twenty years and two generations to finish this house.
The glass pavilion at the Ben Rose House wasn't in the original drawings.
James Speyer designed the house in 1953 — steel frame, floor-to-ceiling glass, cantilevered over a wooded ravine in Highland Park, Illinois. Precise, considered, very much of its moment. Speyer had trained under Mies van der Rohe. The pavilion came twenty years later, added by David Haid — Speyer's student (Mies's architectural grandchild) to house Ben Rose's collection of sports cars. So the element that everyone knows, the structure that a Ferrari went through in 1986 and made the whole building famous, was an afterthought. A twenty-year afterthought built by the next generation, on top of the last one's idea.
I watched that scene as a kid and didn't really get it. A car going through a glass wall. My main thought was that someone's dad was going to be furious.
Thorp House is in its rainy season, which in Bali is less a weather event and more a structural audit. Water finds every decision you made and files a report. I finished the project over a year ago, and the photographs still arrive on my phone in Taiwan. I read them the way I read drawings for a live job — because in every way that matters, it still is one. The brief described one life. The house is now being asked to hold a different one — more people, more noise, more of everything — and the brief never mentioned any of it.
That's not a failure of the brief. That's just what happens when a building meets time.
The Ben Rose House spent decades doing the same thing; quietly absorbing the elements, renovations, new owners, near-demolition, a 2017 restoration that buried a garage under the footprint and kept the glass above it almost entirely intact. And Hollywood sent a Ferrari through its wall in 1986. The wall is still there. The building has outlasted the car, the film, two architects, and thirty years of people assuming it wouldn't survive. Seventy years of Illinois winters and it's still standing — which is either a vindication of the design, or the site, or just dumb luck. Probably all three.
What's the building you saw as a kid that you still think about?
See you next week,
Danny