“Architecture is really something that is always kind of the art of the day: what technology provides and what you can build,” Killen said. “So when people are attempting to redesign these buildings that were constructed 500 years ago, and built over time…I mean, you go to Florence, and you look at the villas. You can see where they added the toilets, because they predated plumbing, and you can see the little appendages on the buildings. And that was the charm of it – it was built over time, and not these things that are basically foam homes. Foam should only be on a cappuccino.”
“The thing that is frustrating is that then they take these things and they try to revisit them in some kind of insidious fashion, and then they end up really being stepchildren – not even really stepchildren, but abortions, and I hate to say that word. Because they don’t match the proportions or the scale or even the context of what it was developed for. That is the thing that amazes me. People want to drive Ferrari’s, they want to drive Porsches, they want to have Armani clothes, they want to have TAG watches, and so they want thing that represent the best technology today has to offer. And then they ask somebody to design a building that was done 500 years ago that has nothing to do with Southern California, with the culture we live in.”
D’Agostino, who served as the general contractor for the project, was less concerned with making any kind of an architectural statement than he was providing a viable, different option for the South Bay marketplace. The bottom line, he said, is the homes are just plain cool.
“If you are not on the beach,” he asked, “where else would you want to be?” ER