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This story is online with more photos at http://www.wearedesignbureau.com/2010/10/robert-stone-design/

When you look at his body of work and his refreshing, original design ethos, Robert Stone is more of an artist than an architect. While many other architects might have you believe the same about them, Stone’s work — bold, raw, engaging, and unapologetic — steers far clear of convention and hip architectural trends that muddy the marketplace with tired tropes. Rosa Muerta was not built for a client, nor did it have any real budget. It was built because Stone had an idea and wanted to share it with the world.

“I want to establish to possibility of an underground architecture that is meaningful in it’s own time and place,” Stone says. “Architecture that matters, if even just to a few people. I want to make work that is every bit as beautiful, sunny, depraved, dark, exotic, familiar, trippy and fucked-up as Southern California is.”

Elements like the fake flowers, mirrored ceilings, and tinted glass are a reaction to the Cholo culture of SoCal, bringing the supposed low-class aspirations of local residents to high design, reinterpreting them into architecture. It’s an acknowledgment, validation, and warm embrace of all that surrounds the house. And because no one lives in the house full-time, Stone has been able to rent it out to hundreds of people — yet another step in the organic process of living, creating, and sharing.

Stone designed and built the house entirely on his own, without help from any other construction workers or contractors. It speaks to Stone’s close emotional relationship to the house, the land, and the culture he grew up in. Rosa Muerta brims with personal touches and humanistic flourishes, like the concrete hearts that adorn the home. Says Stone, ”The heart initially reads as perhaps a pop gesture, but it’s own connotations of love and sincerity bring the next question: ‘does he actually mean it?’ Yes, I mean it.”

Robert Stone’s Golden Acido Dorado in Joshua Tree California by Danny Hudson

On 5-acres of high desert in Southeastern California, the golden yellows of the landscape are continued and reflected in ‘Acido Dorado’, a vacation home designed by Los Angeles-based architect Robert Stone:

“My work looks different because I think differently about architecture. It is designed for a different “function” – to engage the cultural context on a conceptual level. For the last century up to and including the present avant-garde, architecture has strived toward abstraction – focusing on shape and form while suppressing the cultural meaning that we attach to things. It has followed an old idea of what sculpture is and how it functions, while other artistic disciplines (including sculpture) moved beyond this long ago consider conceptualism, performance, representation and figuration, engaging “meaning” by any means necessary.  I am simply pushing forward architecture in that direction, in the way i know how. i hope there are others.”

Taking a unique approach to the design process, the one story structure is almost a mirror of its surroundings, interpreted in it’s own way. reflections present throughout the project both literally and metaphorically offer a new experience and meaning to the home in the arid climate. from glass-like reflecting pools to opposing parallel mirrors, mirrored ceilings, and the peculiar use of materials and colors, the project not only serves as a backdrop in which the user can perform daily activities but also responds to the user and seems to engage in a deeper dialogue with a sense of time and place- with a distinct message.

“So this means that rather than a collection of boxes and planes, I use a wider palette and combine ideas and materials into a poetic whole that gets its meaning not from the architect but from the world around it. it doesn’t pretend to be a big “timeless” abstract sculpture. It is designed to engage current fashion, art, its time and cultural context, to modify it and question it- then reflect it back charged with different meaning. this isn’t the old argument about symbolism or ornament – it’s deeper than that. it is about considering things in their full conceptual circumstances and finding the meaning there.”

The design reinterprets the classical elements of wall, roof, and floor, manifested through different materials. the vertical envelopes are made of hollowed concrete block creating a perfectly permeable yet room-bounding partition, embedded with the archetypal heart and rose. sections of opaque blocks provide the necessary privacy in the bedrooms from the external world. the floor plane sinks into and out of the ground, forming a sort of internal stepped courtyard with a pool and built-in planters, while the canopy floats gracefully above the entire construction moderating the amount of light let into the spaces beneath.

“The house sits in the middle of a natural environment but it confidently projects the opposite of nature- a “cultured” meaning. some of the strongest elements here are things that are so loaded with cultural connotations that they are impossible to figure into architecture as we have defined it for so many years.  Gold is impossible to separate from its connotations and consider abstractly- same with flowers and the heart. I came up through the same architectural education and practice as everyone else, so I am well aware that my aesthetic vocabulary is “different” – but with it I can do things that I could not do with abstract sculptural minimalism.”

“Acido Dorado is designed with a series of meshed ideas that constantly modify each other- so it never really settles into a static statement. The dead flowers are representational of a living thing, but that kind of romantic and lush flora is relentlessly contrasted with the real (but dead) desert surrounding. the mirrors reflect the emptiness of the desert with their own infinite space, and their glass is the same material and chemistry as the glittering silica sand that they reflect. Gold is a color, a material, and an idea. all of these elements fold in on each other conceptually which makes for a certain “unreality” to the place as these associations modify each other continuously. I am pursuing ideas about time, death, reality and hallucination  and I develop these unusual aesthetics to get us there. .  to get to “meaning” by any means necessary.”

BG is a gorgeous large format fashion and design magazine from Spain.  Photos by Brad Lansill.

Robert Stone – The Dead Rose of the Desert

(Translated from Spanish text by Adriana Argudo)

Under the hot and relentless desert sun in Southern California we find a black silhouette that contrasts and complements its flat brown landscape.

Covered with a mirrored ceiling and surrounded by a screen with black fake flowers composed in strict geometric patterns, it blends with the warmth of the sand and gives life to the dead Southern California desert. Like a lost vernacular that developed over the generations after Manson killed the 60’s, the desert became over-run with dirt bikes, and the California dream rotted in the sun, Robert Stone designed a project beyond words with significant architecture that brings feelings from all who know this desert rose. The simple concept and complexity of the spaces result in a consistent and clear style.

Rosa Muerta is buried four feet into the ground with interior ceilings that are ten feet tall while the exterior appears to be too low to be a habitable structure. It’s walls are open to the surrounding natural elements, but it’s design carefully uses solar shading, thermal mass and breeze catching to regulate the temperature in a place that is an endless summer most of the year. For it’s creator, Robert Stone, Rosa Muerta is a perfect aesthetic for it’s time and place, a natural expression of the living culture of Southern California.

“Conceptually, I have a really different idea from most architects about where meaning resides in the subject-object relationship. Rather than thinking the meaning resides in the architectural object, or it’s abstract form, I consider that it is negotiated anew between the subject, the object and the context.”

Building elements of tile, glass and metal are monochromatic black to contrast to the beige view that dominates the area. The most striking and decorative element is the black rose metal work that that contrasts both visually and conceptually with the arid landscape.

Robert Stone is an architect who looks for meaning in the context, not simply in the trends but in the deeper expressions of the surrounding cultural context

“I am interested in the way that a monochrome space makes the building all about texture and sheen. I use flat, gloss, and satin blacks very carefully to create a rich palette of textures. I use monochrome color schemes to make people more self-conscious of their role The buildings are simply backgrounds or frameworks for the meaning and action that people bring to them and act out in them.”

As we look at this amazing project, we cannot stop thinking about how Gothic fashion may have found it’s way into this great signature work. And, how this project so effortlessly moves this into a more contemporary context.

Stone has presented his work in very different ways from that of more conventional architects. Fashion has been a crucial part of this presentation.

“I don’t really identify personally with goth, but I admit that I really respond to the high level of craft in fashion that has a gothic edge to it- Olivier Theyskens, 2003 Gucci, Hedi Slimane. It isn’t surprising that the fashion world was the first to respond to my work either. They are used to looking at things that are all-black but are also carefully detailed. They are also used to looking at things that are new, and deciding for themselves if they are interesting. Architects strangely were slow to see the architecture in my work- the roof structure held together with stainless pins, the gravity defying structural tricks,  or the concrete detailing, the spatial composition- the things that we architects get off on. They couldn’t get past the black color for a long time.”

“I think gothic as a style that favors the dark, irrational, and  sensual over the rational and modern is a really different thing in different places. In my work I am finding expression for the “real” culture of Southern California- not the adobe fantasy, or mid-century modern fantasy, but the real culture that is both natural and fake, sunshine and noir, religious and godless. But, the gothic style in the Southern California desert is probably something different than it is in Spain or London.”

This format allows you to walk through the house and see it from viewpoints marked on the plan.

Go here to walk through http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/interactive-floorplan-rosa-muerta-house/3443

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Few modern houses can claim to be the result of a truly personal manifesto. Even fewer can be attributed solely to a single person, from detail drawing through to concrete pouring, brick laying and plumbing. But the Rosa Muerta House, located on the fringes of Joshua Tree in Eastern California, is all of these things. Robert Stone is a singular architect, a man concerned not with following the architectural herd, but with infusing his work with a sense of theatricality, atmosphere and craftsmanship.

Rosa Muerta is a one bedroom house, a low pavilion that makes visual references to everything from Mies van der Rohe to Robert Smithson. ‘My aesthetic basically started from nothing. Just an honest search for a way to make architecture that is more subtle and meaningful to me,’ Stone says. As interested in sub-cultural design expressions like low-riding, ceiling-mounted mirrors and fancy ironwork as he is in minimal art, the house is a collision of craft and culture, entirely hand built by Stone himself.

As a result, the Los Angeles-based architect prefers to exist at the periphery of the modern art world. Stone embraces the complexities and contradictions of contemporary architectural design, creating forms and concepts that occasionally jar or conflict. For Stone, the more juxtapositions the better. ‘Ultimately, my work is very much for others to experience and create meaning with,’ he says, ‘but it begins with personal references simply because that is the only way I know how to work with real subtlety and understanding.’

The plan exploits the arid desert location, focused around an outdoor living room with spa and fire pit, partly open to the sky and surrounded only by the combination of intricate metalwork mesh and black-stained concrete blocks. Above, the canopy roof initially appears to be a direct quote of the Case Study aesthetic, yet is actually carefully mirrored on the underside, reflecting the desert soil and scrub that runs right up to the building line. To be inside is to be outside.

By contrast, the solitary bedroom is a dark, mysterious cave with the bed flanked by planters and a small kitchen, utility area and bathroom located alongside them. There are no definitive reference points, no concessions to fashion and no desire to promote a hollow futurism. Stone seems genuinely aghast at the world of ‘high class luxury aesthetics’, and Rosa Muerta derives its sense of drama and place through a self-conscious theatricality and spatial games. The low culture references are reverential without being patronizing, the ‘trash’ aesthetic of hearts, flowers and mirrors quoted and reappropriated without irony. A truly personal space, embedded in its landscape and set apart from the rat race of modern design.

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What was the construction process of Acido Dorado?

If you are going to dig the ditches the work has to be new, it has to be meaningful, and it has to be your own. I did 100 percent of the building all by myself. Really, I am kind of self-conscious about this. I am coming out in the open with an aesthetic and conceptual approach that I have been developing for 20 years. I don’t want that to be overshadowed by the novelty of the master degree wielding solo-builder story. Philip Johnson inherited his daddy’s fortune and got his work built, I inherited a garage full of tools and got mine built. What is the difference to the architecture? I do think there’s an aesthetic consequence to this though. . .I can’t imagine this process would be worth it if you were doing derivative work, or just some new shape or nice finishes.

Where does this house sit in the context of Californian case study houses and the desert works of Will Bruder and Rick Joy?

I have a personal connection with the case study houses. They represent part of the marketing and lifestyle campaign that built my home town of Palm Springs, and their derivatives still make up much of what is now the vernacular of Southern Californian architecture. Modernism to me wasn’t some special idea that I saw for the first time in an architecture history class at university. It was the vernacular that I grew up with, now part of a vast field of broken utopian ideals turned into marketing campaigns, occupied and detourned into the framework of everyday life. . . and somehow better for it. I played punk shows in the living room of a William Cody house, drained and skated the pool of a William Krisel. People actually live in these houses and change their meaning- they are much more interesting as artifacts when you consider them full of high teenagers 30 years later. That may sound crass, but l’m giving them more credit than those who hold them up as empty objects with no cultural consequences. Bruder and Joy require a different response. I think my ‘desert’ is really different from theirs. I don’t think there is such a thing as nature separate from culture. I am quite sure their parcels had as many spent shotgun shells and bleached out beer cans on them as mine did when they found them . . . but my work somehow acknowledges that . . . and theirs pretends otherwise.

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Architect Robert Stone and I are planning my visit to Rosa Muerta, a textured and reflective black mirage, which materializes just east of Joshua Tree in Southern California. In our initial correspondence, Stone tries to illustrate what I’m in for: “The house sits out in the middle of the open desert, overgrown with weeds and grasses like an exquisite burned-out Barcelona Pavilion from another, much sexier universe.”

Several days later, my car thermometer climbs 17 degrees in under three hours, ultimately perching at 40 degrees celsius. Congested Los Angeles freeways give way to dirt roads, steep grades and stretches of dry, uninhabited land. The setting is extraterrestrial, to be sure. And when I finally the integrated threshold from scorched sand to smooth black concrete, indeed I feel I’ve stepped through the looking glass in Barcelona and into Stone’s iridescent, heat-bent and handcrafted galaxy (where I experience and instant drop in temperature under the dramatic overhang).

Reflections of Mies van der Rohe bounce, distorted, from the structure’s chrome columns. They replicate again in the (outdoor) living room’s low, mirrored canopy, which reflects back at the reflecting pool (also a spa) and makes the desert floor a ceiling. But with a nod to the columns, Stone urges me to consider the chrome details of a Mongoose BMX bike as well. Later, the architect alludes to legwarmers (yes, the ‘80’s fashion staple) as he explains how the black rope around each column visually disconnects the straight line of the supporting structure, “to make it float a little more”.

“Clearly, I understand what it means to take a chrome column, and it’s the Barcelona Pavilion- but it’s coming out of the dirt,” Stone says. “It’s not sitting on a plinth; it’s in the desert. I know what the high references are for these things, but there are also ones that are just close to my heart.”

In this way, Rosa Muerta is welded of dichotomous orientation points. It simultaneously quotes from the architecture of textbooks and references the twisted wrought iron of Southern California’s barrios. It borrows heavily from the architect’s personal experiences growing up in Palm Springs. The sunken living room, for instance, is reminiscent of a pool’s shallow end, where Stone says he spent much of his young life “gabbing with friends while everybody was skating”. Stone remarks on the unique view of the world achieved while sitting with his head just above ground level, one arm up, level with the landscape.

“Think of it like language,” Stone says of his aesthetic approach. I can go to Japan and learn how to ask where the train station is, but here I can speak with a kind of poetry and understanding that is much more subtle. That’s what I am after – a way to make architecture that can work culturally in subtle and intricate ways.”

Throughout the long conversation, our voices are punctuated by birdsong, the skittering of a lizard on concrete, and the distant growl of an engine. “I hope you get the dirt bike in the background,” Stone says with a laugh. “That really is the context.” Later, the architect, who writes prolifically of his work, quotes from his notebook: “The desert is awe inspiring and serene in its emptiness. But, just as important is the detritus of modern culture, a bleached out Coors can, or a shotgun shell on the ground, that reminds you that nature and culture cannot be separated.”

I arrived at Rosa Muerta on the heels of a fashion shoot, the only evidence of which remained in thousands of footsteps still littering the desert sand. Rosa Muerta is a public space, but the fingerprints of visitors readily wash off the metal appliances and custom-cast concrete blocks. Physically, the structure does not allow for someone else’s baggage (save for some ashes in the fire pit). “There’s no parking, no garage, no storage.” The nearest neighbour is over 180m away.

And so, Rosa Muerta has seen celebrations that resonated from Joshua Tree all the way to YouTube, but it has also hosted a visitor who spent five days meditating and been the site of a marriage proposal. “There will probably be all these babies named Rosa,” the architect laughs.

Stone says the space was designed for “parties”, but he uses the word as shorthand for the disconnect a visitor might feel in a structure that offers no narrative cues. “The aesthetic being completely original to this place, you come out here and have to reinvent yourself,” Stone says. “Who am I in this little black house?”

Then, after a moment’s thought, he adds: “In America, every community that’s worth a damn has an abandoned house that all the kids know about. And that’s where they go and party. In some ways, I am building that,” he says. “An open space with no adult supervision.”

Gold Standard

Shimmering like a mirage, the surprising spectacle of this metallic house couldn’t contrast more sharply with the surrounding wilderness of the Southern California desert

by Jo Froude

A golden house would be impossible to ignore in any setting. But rising up from the wilderness of the Joshua Tree national park, Acido Dorado can’t fail to inspire a reaction. ‘Gold has so many cultural associations’ says its owner and architect Robert Stone, who insists that the initial shock of the bling factor is short lived. ‘After the first ten minutes, you get used to it. It isn’t really that flashy at all.’ Robert also designed the neighboring Rosa Muerta, a similarly configured but alI-black house which featured in ELLE Decoration last September. ‘It’s an architecture which fits the place,’ he says. ‘The design is inspired by some of the abandoned buildings from the 1920s that you see around here. Not some phony image of the American south-west.’

Honesty is central to the philosophy behind Robert’s striking architecture, which has its roots in conceptual art. ‘I don’t want to create bad copies of someone else’s work,’ he says. ‘If you’re going to make the effort to do something, it has to matter.’ So rather than working for a client and having to compromise on the design, he borrowed the money and now rents out the finished building as a vacation house to cover the costs. I don’t really think of it as my house,’ says Robert. ‘More like the world’s smallest hotel.’

With its mirrored ceilings and gilded interior, Acido Dorado oozes glamour but also has a remarkably close connection to the wilderness of its desert setting. ‘Inside there are many reflective surfaces, but you don’t actually see yourself. The reflections expand the space outwards – it’s not about narcissism.’ Whatever brings guests to this corner of the desert, from untamed nature to dazzling design, the chances are they won’t find exactly what they were expecting – and that’s the way Robert likes it. ‘I love it when the experience of things goes against preconceived ideas.’