CREATIVE TRANSITIONS
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Based on the loops and twists of the Möbius strip, an icon of mid-century Mexican design has become an integral part of the creative process for its custodian, designer and ceramicist Perla Valtierra. Casa Möbius was designed by Ernesto Gómez Gallardo in 1978 and was until recently inhabited by the architect. In 2019, Valtierra took ownership of the brutalist-style house where raw concrete stairs and mezzanines blur notions of up and down. “The Möbius is like a figure eight,” notes Valtierra, “and so when I’m moving around the house I often feel like I’m following this shape.”
Like Gómez Gallardo, Valtierra combines the personal and the professional in the house, a retreat for a restless and creative mind, a place of calm focus. But changing tastes and needs means she is also breathing life into his visionary design and plans to open up the middle floor, creating fewer but more generous rooms to reveal uninterrupted swathes of the defining feature of the house, the concrete ceiling composed of tessellating triangles.
Working with what is already there, Perla Valtierra’s wish after four years in residence, is to strip back and to simplify, to embrace the raw honesty of Casa Möbius and to remove all that is not necessary: which are, in essence, all very brutalist concerns.
Read more in Ark Journal VOLUME XI.
WORDS ROSANNA ROBERTSON
PHOTOGRAPHY LUIS GARVAN
CASE STUDY
— DISSONANT BEAUTY
As in music, interior design calls on many elements – rhythm, contrast, repetition – to create that most subjective of visions: beauty.
CINCINATTI MODERN
High on a hillside in Cincinnati, sits a two-storey modernist wonder by two unsung heroes of American architecture, built for an art collector in the 1980s and that has been given a sensitive makeover to accommodate the collection of its second owner.
THE REAL PHILLIP LIM
Phillip Lim has changed. The designer sees beauty in another way and his simple beachside shack on Long Island was a catalyst to a shift in perspective and priorities.
CREATIVE TRANSITIONS
Home
Based on the loops and twists of the Möbius strip, an icon of mid-century Mexican design has become an integral part of the creative process for its custodian, designer and ceramicist Perla Valtierra. Casa Möbius was designed by Ernesto Gómez Gallardo in 1978 and was until recently inhabited by the architect. In 2019, Valtierra took ownership of the brutalist-style house where raw concrete stairs and mezzanines blur notions of up and down. “The Möbius is like a figure eight,” notes Valtierra, “and so when I’m moving around the house I often feel like I’m following this shape.”
Like Gómez Gallardo, Valtierra combines the personal and the professional in the house, a retreat for a restless and creative mind, a place of calm focus. But changing tastes and needs means she is also breathing life into his visionary design and plans to open up the middle floor, creating fewer but more generous rooms to reveal uninterrupted swathes of the defining feature of the house, the concrete ceiling composed of tessellating triangles.
Working with what is already there, Perla Valtierra’s wish after four years in residence, is to strip back and to simplify, to embrace the raw honesty of Casa Möbius and to remove all that is not necessary: which are, in essence, all very brutalist concerns.
Read more in Ark Journal VOLUME XI.
WORDS ROSANNA ROBERTSON
PHOTOGRAPHY LUIS GARVAN