This 3800 sq. ft. suburban home for a young Argentinea couple with three children gave an opportunity to investigate and reexamine the potential possibilities of a suburban home in the next millennium. The owner's paradoxical love/hate relationship with both, the city and the suburban life urged us to evaluate and address the changing attitudes of new generation of home owners, toward privacy and space vs. public interaction and urban density.

Conceptually, a new Datum line or ground plane was established by partially using an existing rectangular structure into creating a new one story, horizontal, L-shaped volume. This volume contains the children bedrooms and the gym room in the East wing and living, dinning, kitchen, eat-in area, laundry, maid’s suite and garages in the west wing.

Connecting the two wings in the center of the house is no longer the family room but an open media room, equipped with a large-screen television and state of the art digital telecommunication equipment, connecting the inhabitants globally to the rest of the world.

Inspired by the rock formations punctuating the surrounding landscape, a cluster of vertical volumes each in a different geometrical form penetrates the center of the house creating a dramatic urban entrance to the project. The main walls of the house on the north and south are enclosed by translucent fiberglass curtain walls occasionally interrupted by sections of clear glass. These walls acting as a device to conceal and reveal at the same time, now allow the visitor to get a glimpse of the life inside the private house.

A virtual and actual transparency starting from the entrance hall, continues within the house up to the master bedroom suite. This highest room in the house has an angled roof and offers views of the landscape behind the house through a frame of industrial windows inserted within the grid of a white translucent wall resembling a shoji screen. This room is a place of solitude and dreams where one contemplates the interplay between being and non-being.

Filled with abundance of a calm, soft, filtered light during the day this house transforms into a lighthouse at night, emitting and radiating its inner light and being.