Design Principals: Claus Benjamin Freyinger, Andrew Holder
Project Team: Noah Rubin, Jesus Aguilar, Neil Cook, Michael Loverich, Antonio Torres
Type: Single-Family Residence
Location: Los Angeles, California
Year: 2006
Status: Schematic Design

Villa "Down the Rabbit Hole" is a small addition to an existing house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Situated on a steep hillside, a variety of site and zoning constraints make the back yard the only remaining developable space on the parcel. Rather than completely fill the lot with building and eradicate open space, the project proposes to insert the new space underneath the back yard, allowing the residents to continue to use the entire open space (effectively the roof of their new addition) as a cactus garden.

Numerous form-active models have been built to simulate the conditions of the project. The models are not simply intended to find a structurally efficient shape, but to explore the aesthetic and spatial territory that emerges as the extreme weight of the ground overhead is applied to a variety of structural and material systems. In this sense, as the ground closes in around the volume of the project - as it goes "down the rabbit hole" so to speak – strange new formal and aesthetic possibilities proliferate under the weight of a new set of physics.