Ooh boy, if you thought the cantilevering was dramatic...
The New York Times leaves unmentioned the complicated calculations that went into the creation of Madrid architect Anton Garcia Abril's house for his wife and two kids. And I'm not talking about the concrete I-beams, irrigation ditches, and other infrastructure components.
But the pieces of the puzzle are all there for the stacking:
ANTÓN GARCÍA ABRIL is 41, but he hasn't lost his childlike impulse to experiment.Seven years ago, when Papa Anton was 34, Ms. Mesa was 22, and Baby Anton was 1, and when the first Mrs. Abril was perhaps less-than-thrilled with her husband's childlike impulses to experiment....
...the major construction on the two-story house he shares with Débora Mesa, 29, an architect at his Madrid firm...
...
The 2,190-square-foot home was built...on a lot Mr. García bought a decade ago...
...
On the second floor are the master bedroom, where Alejandro, the couple's 1-year-old son, sleeps with his parents; the other bedroom belongs to Antón, Mr. García's 8-year-old son from a previous marriage, who often stays with them...
...
The house, Mr. García said, represents the culmination of a process that began seven years ago, when he and Ms. Mesa "were thinking about how to start our new life."
Which is all less complicated than figuring out why they got everything from Ikea except the one piece of furniture they should have: the Antilop kicks that Primo Pappa high chair's butt.
An Architect's House Made From Infrastructure [nyt]
video of the construction from 2007 [!] [youtube]
tons of photos of the Hemeroscopium House from early 2009 [ifitshipitshere]
Yakshemash! I like! Also, the Trip Trap kicks the Antilope's wiry ass and would fit better to the i-beams, would'nt it.
PS ... at least he has an Artemide Tolomeo lamp over his crappy IKEA bed ...
Easy there. My son sleeps in that IKEA bed and sleeps quite well, thank you very much. Last night the bed withstood several rounds of 'No More Monkeys...' with no ill effects.
Only thing in that slide show that looks like crap is the lawn. Looks like they've carefully positioned poor Anton in an attempt to cover part of a really bad seam.
Good call on the lawn; it looks like bad Photoshop cloning.
I am generally an Ikea fan, and K2 is sleeping in the kid's spacey silver Ikea bed right now. And at first, I was surprised that Ikea didn't get credited on a couple of slides--until I realized that practically everything was Ikea.
Go Antilop! We bought two of them for our darling toddlers, and it's the best baby gear money we've spent. Hard to resist the peer pressure to buy two Tripp Trapps, but K1 (27 mos) managed to tipp the Tripp over backwards with one push of the feet on the table. That was enough for us to breathe a sigh of relief that two Antilop chairs only set us back $40.
We had an Antilop for the first kid, but when our second was born we decided to leave the 5 year old Antilop at my parents' and pick up a couple Tripp Trapp-ish chairs in Japan (Japanese designed, Chinese made) for ~$40 each so we could have matching chairs for kids almost 5 years apart in age... can't say I regret that. They're not exact copies but they actually look a bit more stable than the original.
The bonus is that the baby can actually climb into his high chair by himself at just over 1 year old. Let's see a kid do that with an IKEA chair.