Dante|Telescope House

DA N T E .| .T E L E S C O P E _H O U S E

"Precisely because it is the famialr way it isn't the artistic way." —Victor Shklovsky, Art as Device (1917)

TOWARD A MOVE|MEANING ARCHITECTURE > AN ARCHITECTURE OF IDEAS > AN ARCHITECTURE THAT PROBES THE THEME OF FORM AND CONTENT IN ART—WHERE CONTENT RISES FROM A DEEPER WELL THAN THE SIMPLE CONCEPT OF FORM AS CONTENT

A built-essay on the relationship between architecture and painting, this project spanned five years.
It began in 1991 when I was teaching at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and was completed in 1996 when I was teaching at the University of Virginia.
The project's title—an important expression of the underlying mental structure of the work—underwent subtle transformation during the five-year process, though without relinquishing reference to the essential thematic duality involving architecture's relationship to literature and astronomy.

I started out with the straightforward title Dante|Telescope House and a variation, Dante|Telescope House^zlowe (which superscripts the owner's last name).
But at crunch time, I got nervous about the look of the "D" on the Monolith Mural.
So on a ladder in the rain the night before the project was photographed by Yukio Futagawa for the international journal GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE HOUSES 51 (Spring 1997), I bravely (rightly or wrongly!) erased the "D" and retitled the project, (D)Ante|TELESCOPE House.
I now tend to refer to the project as simply Dante|Telescope House.

Dante | Telescope House won the 1995 "Blue Ribbon Award for Excellence in Architecture" from the New Jersey State Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

Were it not for the courage, intellectual camaraderie, and commitment to high purpose and excellence by my unique client, David Zlowe, I would not have had the opportunity, which too few architects ever get, to discover and express my own untrammeled artistic voice—
to begin to find in architecture the freedom and purity of expression that I have found in painting.
Thank you, David.

39 00 29.81 North Latitude —.77 01 39.22 West Longitude | Silver Spring, Maryland

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