Apparently the key to making living in a lifeless desert marginally tolerable is sports cars.
Note how the imaginary rendered cars keep moving around so they are conveniently visible in almost every view.
Even inside.
Okay so the rear shot of this imaginary home hugging the hillside doesn’t appear to have the sports cars. Oh well.
For some reason the official listing photos on this one are tiny, but you can view a much higher-resolution set a Sotheby’s Realty.
Word to the wise in general…
“High Concept” = “Low Useability”
Now about this design in particular… The word “behemoth” comes to mind. Appropriate, as this exercise in ego is frighteningly reminiscent of the Romulan Empire emblem from classic Star Trek. (http://www.deviantart.com/art/Romulan-emblem-101897509) I’m not sure which is more bloated, the size – over 16,000sqft – or the price tag – a whopping $30M. Of course both of those are dependent on whether anyone cares to actually have it built (thankfully, it currently exists only in the mind of someone with way too much time on their hands). If you’re fond of the location (northeast of Phoenix in the euphemistically named “Paradise”) but don’t care for the design, the Sotheby’s link says you can pick up the land alone for a little under $3M. And right after you buy that I’d like to show you a gorgeous private island I’m selling… just off the north slope of Alaska. It’s a steal at only $10M.
I can honestly say that if I’d tried to pawn this design off to one of my architecture school professors I would have been denounced even more loudly and and with more vitriol than usual. It’s simply a horrendous treatment of the site. It looks more like something from “Aliens” has attached itself to the face of the hillside than it does a home. Even if it were something glitzier, like, say, an art gallery, the building/site interaction manages to be both clumsy and atrocious. In such a upscale area I would have thought there would be “No Dumping” ordinances.
In other words, what a piece of garbage. We can only hope no one takes the bait. If they do, at the very least they deserve whatever happens with the apparently tempered glass pillars out on the terrace. I’d pay good money to see what happens to them during a massive desert temperature swing.
Perhaps the attraction is that it looks as though it might fold up and disappear… e.g., hope springs eternal in the human breast.
@anodean: Or perhaps spread its wings and fly away? Like that famous desert denizen, the vulture? I like both ideas…