Like Aphrodite rising from the sea or Peter Parker getting bitten by a radioactive spider, the design for this house, by Athens-based Angelidakis Studio, has an origin story. From Andreas Angelidakis' blog: "On a thunderous February night, a mudslide is imagined and part of the basin fills with earth, forming an impromptu beach...Above the reservoir, fiction suddenly takes over and the concrete hand of a giant girl angrily punches through the little mountain of Wetona Drive...Now the gigantic hand has calmed down, and appears to be coming out of the water, elegantly holding a serving tray, as if the statue of Liberty became a waitress and her hand holds up a building, perched over the cliff like a billboard."
According to the blog, the house "attempts to sum up a portrait of Los Angeles as a city of infrastructural crisis, impending disaster and celebrity paranoia."
The glass box "represents the moment when the celebrity exposes herself to the paparazzi," and the blog's points on ambition and stars who "run from the paparazzi, but go home to expose themselves on Twitter and reality television" are fair enough. The declaration that "Los Angeles is a metropolis planned by infrastructure and guided by celebrity" seems at the very least a big exaggeration. Still, the house has its own beach, bedrooms excavated out of rock, and a view of the Hollywood Sign.
The design of the Hand House appeared last fall in PINUp magazine.
· Hand House [Andreas Angelidakis]
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