Mutuo was approached to remodel one of the townhouses that conform ‘The Tribal Compound’ designed and built by David Ming-Li Lowe in the Hollywood Hills in the late 1970’s.
When our client acquired the property, the townhouse had been added to and intervened extensively, and our client had taken on the task of stripping it down to the structural walls and wood framing that conforms the platforms.
The current configuration of the house is a progression of levels and platforms attached to a straight frontage wall, and a canyonlike patio that remains between the existing construction and the rear wall that retains the uphill hillside behind the house. Our approach to the project was to disassemble and re-purpose the wood framing of the platforms, and to insert a half-spherical element, creating a simple binary configuration — with a positive and a negative side — within the constraints of the existing building’s perimeter walls.