Just when I was thinking perhaps it’s time for architects to leave the cube alone – what more can anyone do with it? –  I was invited to see Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena’s daring, new house not far from downtown Los Angeles. This team has worked out how to make a classic architectural form float in air again, and by giving it this radically new skin, white Sarnafil thermoplastic membrane, they’ve removed its formal, icy quality. Now loose and relaxed – sensitive to changes in temperature, the Sarnafil wrinkles like a soft fabric when it’s cold – the cube seems completely lovable once again.

Part of the trick is that Escher GuneWardena never saw the three floors of their 3500 square foot house as a stack of elongated cubes.To them they were always tubes. It was a singular vision that informed the design choices that followed.

Inside, for example, they pull the floor-to-ceiling windows back 3’ at each end. Although it creates these useful, small balconies, what it really does is heighten the feeling of being inside a tube. The same can be said for their decision to paint all surfaces of the tube, the high-pressure commercial laminate floors, walls and ceilings the same color: white.

On the second floor, which houses the bedrooms, the library and gallery area – important for their clients , the artist, Joe Sola and his wife, Erin Wright, who works at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – the architects went with a visually contradictory material – 3/4” ‘construction grade’ ACX plywood – to make the partition walls. They are so different that even standing in the plywood hallway, the eye never looses sight of the tube-like quality of the surrounding space.

On the outside, the side windows are placed flush to the exterior so that the surface remains smooth and visually uninterrupted. Again, the tube stays supreme.

And it’s from this vantage point, you see what happened as a result of not placing the tubes directly atop one another. The architects shift them along from each other and it’s this sleight of hand that gives the structure its truly unexpected sense of lightness.

Walking away – the house is next to Elysian Canyon – I couldn’t help but think about the playful juxtaposition of both the cube and the sphere. Many artists, including such icons as Picasso and Braque, have obsessed on how to place these two together. Not that such history worried the highly thoughtful and soft-spoken pairing of Escher and GuneWardena for a moment. Their firm’s fertile relationship with the art world includes designing exhibitions in New York and Minneapolis for such artists as the photographer, Sharon Lockhart. Last year they were chosen to the design the 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and recently their highly-touted vision for Blum &Poe, this city’s largest commercial art gallery opened on La Cienega Boulevard.

For the Sola/Wright house, they decided the best way to combine the two contrasting geometric forms was to make them look as if they overlapped. Carving out the minimum possible space from a steep convex hillside, they squeezed the stack of tubes into it. At points the house even touches the retaining wall which lines this cavity. From afar, it looks like the loose, white tubes are rising from deep inside this sphere we call Mother Earth. It’s breath-taking.