Larry Totah died few years ago. All his close friends, including me, have seen him wither away, but he managed to keep an encompassing fog around his demise as if his architecture was going to survive in it, and it did.
Only then but not now. It remained there not frozen but still, not void nor empty and not sad.
It was three or four years ago when Larry passed away and I don't remember exactly when and it is not important anymore because now the years will just keep adding. As far as I am concerned, there is a moment his last project will remain unchanged, contained and always still, except the blur which will be moving slowly. I will keep wishing the house would remain always empty, dirt not covered and maybe someday walls are further tangled like Larry's words did at the final days in a Hollywood hospital. Death, like the House, cold on the surface and not inside.
I was the first one to see him transformed and transported elsewhere in the dark intensive care room and spent the next fifteen minutes alone empty and not frozen, like the House.
Avocados grew around the Malibu Hills where the pictures were taken, a winding road around the brown soil and there it was, a catacomb worthy of my friend circled in perpetual and final expression and not thin.
The House continuously frames and de-frames itself in three or four sets of axis minded passages. In the front, overlooking Pacific Ocean rather edgewise and build like a long drawing depicting a horizontally composed architecture. The fog, roof and the walls are more of Chumash hiring Hopi to build on their mountains for few exquisite basket full of shellfish to adorn the wedding dresses in Hopi villages like the ones a Don Juan dreamed of, a fair exchange.
Then beyond that wall starting from small, and from the left side if one is facing the ocean and slowly moving sideways like a tracking shot capturing images from one space to another. First a large bathroom and a bedroom, then another room to watch TV, and then, the scale conscious living room combined with an open kitchen. From there, outside framed through the carefully placed windows capturing wide spreads of the landscape around the House. If the fog ever clears, a mountain, the ocean and the dirt carpet on which the structure resides would appear. I saw it like that too but forgot.
Second axis is the street created by parallel and across arrangement of disparate buildings dissected by sometimes interior perpendicular cuts. This axis, not the ocean, and not thin, is the lungs of the house. A horizontal chimney, a breezy passage. Bobcats, rattle snakes and giant owl would roam here and take refuge. This is the passage at fog, illuminated by a blurry light all around and wiggles of walls running wild like the eaves.
Another axis runs along the other edge of the flattened ridge. An eastern view with hills covered with native yuccas, verbenas, sages and other variety of native brush and obscured after few feet down disappearing into the skirt of the hill covered by the weather.
I guess it could be any building but it was construction of Larry's. As he was battling with cancer knowing he was going to die, this house was his lifeline and kept him alive and he saw it finished. He attended client and contractor meetings for which I would drive him there and walk around taking photos. Larry liked the images and I liked them too. Not much later though. When I was there few months after Larry died, house was transformed beyond my relationship to it. A wealthy and driven lawyer lived in it and all the work was done inside. Outside was quiet and the fog was back.
(from an architectural remembrance.)