What should I do, go down to the basement and laugh…

Tobsucht, 1998, German Band

On the continent and especially in Austria, the Basement is a place for obsessions, from the very private and secretive to the benign and utilitarian. Some dwellers spend most of their free time (Freizeit) in the basement rather than in their above-the-earth living rooms, exchanging the dream of socio-cultural conformity for the gritty reality of obsession and darkness.

While European trends point toward a sustainable wood construction movement that can rise into the clouds, the Californian subcontinent is increasing its reliability on concrete to go more underground. Not only is the scarcity of real estate finally catching up with the LA LA Land of single-story buildings producing ever more underground parking structures and higher concrete buildings for speculative housing and new commerce. In addition, California is grappling with the highest cost of lumber ever, caused by Covid delivery backup. It is this shift of building technology and the circumstances of pandemic life that prompt me to reflect on the value of the and in-the-ground construction. It is in the nature of a building under the earth that the building material is matched with the conditions around it, using more permanent materials that can withstand moisture, earthquakes, marauders and animals.

The darker side of the underground and its secrets can be glimpsed in the work of Ulrich Seidl, the Austrian filmmaker and documentarian who exposes us to the human dimensions of the cellar as an obsessive space. His film, In the Basement (Im Keller) is a 2014 documentary film about basement escapists, and their underground lives. (It premiered in the “Out of Competition” section at the 71st Venice International Film Festival.)

The extreme side of basement obsession is embodied by the real-life Josef Fritzl. From Amstetten, a town in Lower Austria, he started to build a vast extension to his cellar in the 1970s under his suburban house, in order to enslave one of his daughters for over 24 years. He pretended that she had run away, raped her over a thousand times and fathered seven children. One of them died, three remained in the cellar, and three were allowed above ground: to explain their existence, Fritzl concocted a story for his wife according to which their run-away daughter had left them on his doorstep like “foundlings” for his wife to care for. At his trial, he claimed to have been a caring father and to have brought toys and videos to the basement.

To outside observers, such a crime seemed almost unfathomable in the wholesome normality of Austrian suburbia, but there is documentary evidence of similar cases of dark behavior in basements across the European Continent. An exception to this stereotype for me has always been Peter Noever’s The Pit in Breitenbrunn, Austria, built in 1970 (published on Domus 529, 1973). In this project the darkness of a subterranean wine cellar is forcefully undone by unearthing the underground space, a space that now reaches out to sunlight and opens to the surrounding landscape. Thus, the light-filled underground can now receive human interaction by creating an open and luminous ending to an otherwise dark conclusion. This project which also features Walter Pichler’s Conversation Pits, has over time become an optimistic example of how to escape the tyrannies of convention by reversing the intentionality of an existing programmed use into a newly found paradigm of an optimistic new beginning.

In contrast to the more dour Austrian reality, the sun-drenched West Coast and Central America feature garages that function as equivalent places of obsession and escapism: from garage bands (Nirvana), to the invention of consumer-oriented computers (Apple), to the frequent suicides by carbon-monoxide suffocation. Garages are the spaces where conventional behavior can be avoided and extreme behavior can take over. But being above ground, American buildings are more vulnerable to observation and surveillance by others, thus never rising to the clandestine status of darker basements. Even attics, another potential dark place, are compromised when reduced to superfluous spaces used only for the placement of heating ducts and blown-in insulation rather than to keep secrets. Californians may hide their criminal secrets in the vast universe of remote storage facilities, but that is another conversation altogether not yet exploited by current reality TV shows.

Around the turn of the century, the California sun and dry air also inspired the Sicilian immigrant Baldassare Forestiere to build a citrus grove behind his modest home near Fresno. He discovered that frequent watering made the root-balls of his trees so heavy that they fell 20 feet below into the already hollowed hardpan. After most of the other trees fell into his orchard’s understory, he started to horizontally connect the deep holes and thus created a network of tunnels and underground rooms. The trees thrived and his marriage fell apart, since he spent so much time underground. A developer talked him into digging a driveway into this underground paradise to open it up as a naturally cooled roadside motel. It is now preserved as a landmark, where a plaque celebrates the Forestiere Underground Gardens’ “creative and individualist spirit unbound by conventionality.” I visited these gardens in the late 70s and was struck by the optimism and life-affirming images of the orange trees reaching out of the dark into the light.

I conceived my own first architectural project as an underground building in the hills of Napa Valley in 1978 following my conceptual studies of appropriate architecture for a new California. The project, 10 Californian Houses (published in Domus 601, 1979) explored extreme living conditions void of representational features such as facades and conventional floor-plans. Mostly built into the ground, they offer a reading of different Californian obsessions manifested through dwellings, like the house for a runner, condominiums for high divers and surfers, a house for two fighting brothers, and a hotel for mountain climbers carved into a mythical rock formation. This exploration led me to my first client, who wanted to build a barn to live in and an underground storage space for all the clothes the family ever wore. This extreme programmatic contradiction prompted me to suggest a building built into the slope of the hill with the clothing collection fully submerged into the ground and the dwelling area reaching for the sun out of the ground. (Goldman/Ashford Residence, St Helena, 1978/Batey&Mack)

While the darker human obsessions can thrive in a world without natural sunlight, I would like to now take a more optimistic and positive view of the underground. Current West Coast building trends reflect the cultural and global concerns of climate change and it is just prudent to consider the warm earth as a companion in this journey towards using less energy for heating and cooling. On a recent surf trip to the Baja Peninsula, I encountered several buildings and enclaves that use the brute force of concrete as a new expression of form and comfort.

In Todos Santons, Baja Sud, Taller Terreno, Kevin Wickham and Mark Cruz created an underground home and ceramic studio on slightly sloping terrain overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Its brute concrete form peeks slightly out of its earthly embrace, cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Entering from above via a desert roof-scape, stairs lead down into its protective belly of living and sleeping rooms. The solar lap pool and south-facing glass front creates a minimal high-end interior where the harsh concrete walls are humored by eccentric furniture and surreal ceramic art pieces.

Similarly the nearby Paradero Hotel, built only of rough formed concrete, forms a protected oasis in an otherwise parched landscape. Designed by Yashar Yektajo and Ruben Valdez, the cleverly arranged compound locates all guest services (such as reception, restaurant, kitchen and spa) in fully outdoor concrete freestanding structures. The open, oasis-like space is surrounded by a protective ring of a two-story concrete rooms that are accessed by individual staircases. The almost nostalgic brutalist architecture is softened by a trendy Farm to Table dining concept and forces one to spend as much time outside as possible. The luxury hotel provides locally knitted ponchos and blankets for the cool desert evening and caters to design and food aficionados with its natural yet rough aestethics. Rammed earth construction re-emerges as a residential and commercial building material in the work of RIMA. The artist complex Casa Ballena in San Jose del Cabo, designed by Gerardo Rivero celebrates the natural prolongation of earth as a natural building material that was envisioned already in the 60’ and 70’ as a Hippie-favorite, DIY, building material.

So, with this new appreciation of brutish organic building materials, are we entering a more substantial way of building, close or into the ground, or is it just a trendy new view of architectural materialism? It has always been a wet dream for most architects to build with more real and solid materials and reconvene with the rigor of early modernist architecture. An architecture in its natural, pure state of haptic permanence. The investment in the subterranean suggests not only a new reality of building technology, but also leads to a more optimistic utilization of the usually hidden dimensions of the buildings. Unafraid of the darkness and of the underground, we can embrace now the opportunity this old material offers, by not burying our head in the sand but rather warming the body with warm earth, lying low to the ground, embedded and literally surrounded by our planet.