Some of the most memorable times of her youth were the times she would awake with no memory or recollection of how she got to where she was. These teleportation events -which was how she thought of them to herself- occurred so often that she eventually overcame her fear when awakening to unknown surroundings and learned how to remain calm while gathering her bearings and searching for clues as to her whereabouts. She developed a four step process to work through each of these occasions that would assist in her remaining levelheaded.

This particular time she came to on a polished marble floor in a large highrise penthouse apartment. Kitty’s first step when gaining consciousness was to make sure she was still clothed. If she wasn’t, her first objective would be to find any sort of clothing to put on. Luckily she was fully clothed this time and could proceed to step two: taking stock of her current location and confirming she was safe. Often times she had awaken in an alley or a sketchy backroom of a night club and so step 3 would have to wait and step 4 would be skipped altogether.

The penthouse apartment was exquisitely furnished by someone with spectacular taste. It was minimal but not stark or uncomfortable. The entire place was clean and well kept. There wasn’t anyone else inside the apartment and it felt like no one had lived there in a long time. Kitty opened the cabinets in the kitchen in search of glassware but could only find a few champagne flutes. She filled a flute with water from the tap, drank it down, and filled it again. This led to step 3 which was to nurse her headache, there almost always was one, while attempting to parse out any memories from the night before and how she might have arrived at her current location.

The hit and run accident that caused Sheila’s death was investigated, though not very thoroughly. This was not to the fault of the officers assigned to her case for they did not have much to work from. There were no witnesses to the accident. Paint scraping on Aldo and Sheila’s car indicated a black vehicle. Aldo’s only memory was that the other car was an SUV. The tire skid marks on the ground at the accident scene only confirmed Aldo’s memory that it was an SUV, which was not very helpful when every family in the country owns one and a large number of those SUVs are black.

With so little to go off of, all the officers could do was wait and hope for someon or something to present more information. This never happened and the case was eventually filed in with the rest of the unsolved.

Aldo did not move on as quickly as the officers, how could he? Although he did eventually come to terms with the fact that the death of Sheila would never be brought to justice. He never moved on completely though, as mentioned earlier in the reoccurring dreams of the accident. Those dreams would haunt him throughout his life, always occurring at the lake house. In his mind, the dreams were connected to the lake house because it was originally Sheila’s property and her father’s before that. He was right in a way, though he would later learn the true connection of that repetitive dream and the lake house on the fatal night that triggered his decline.

The work routine he set in place would lead to many more successful projects over the years that nowballed into overall great success and fame for Aldo. So it was a small request for help from a neighbor led to starchitectdom for a man who had not long before lost all he held dear.

Now, the rise of Aldo is all well and good. The story filled with its share of exciting struggles and difficulties, as well as accomplishments and triumphs. It follows much the same course as any other well known success story with the expected twists, turns, good times and bad times. However interesting that story may be, much more fascinationg is the story of Aldo’s decline, his tumble from the top and ultimate arrival at obscurity and ommittance from history. The odd and surrealistic events that were to be the cause of Aldo’s disappearance from stardom over time are so farfetched and so strange they wll hardly be believed as fact.

To properly tell the tale of Aldo’s fall, we must return to the fateful car accident and death of Sheila, mere years before the design and completion of Jonas’ house.

When the Jonas Lake House was first published it was promptly picked up by many other publications. Most of those had an audience primarily composed of designers, architects, and the like. Though, three different blogs and magazines with a more consumer based audience also published it. From those three came an over pouring of calls and emails to Aldo, inundating his inbox and leaving his phone constantly ringing for weeks. Many of those calls and emails were potential clients and many of those leads turned into important projects for Aldo’s career.

Early on Aldo juggled those projects on his own, being extra selective of who the client was and what the project would be, and bringing on draftsman as needed. The work load rapidly became too much for him to handle on his own and it was evident he needed to establish an office. This, though, would require a return to the city.

When first operating, it was an office of five employees, not including Aldo, and later grew to over 50 at its peak. The first few years were rocky, to say the least as the firm struggled to find its foothold. Many of his projects during that period were met with sharp criticism or were completely overlooked.

Aldo returned to the lake house once during that period with the intention of taking a break, though he ended up working the entire time. The home he designed when he returned to his workshop was the only project to be dealt with praise and a positive reception during those early years of the office. Being one always aware of patterns before him, Aldo made the connection of the success of his projects to that of the lake house. And so it was that his routine of work at the lake house from fall through spring, when the office was at its slowest, was established.

Jonas was more than pleased with the design of the home. He remained speechlesss, a rare occurence for him, throughout the tour of his home. After spending half an hour out on the balcony, staring at the view, he returned inside, arms spread wide as if he wanted to hug Aldo and said “It’s perfect! I knew you would nail it. Absolutely marvelous.”

The commission to design Jonas’ home proved to be a boon for Aldo and his career more than he could have imagined. Aldo, by nature, was humble and laconic, and it was beyond him to boast of his successes with the world. Jonas, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. Upon completion of the home, Jonas threw a massive party at his lake house to show it off. The guests were from a wide swath of individuals including city socialites, lake neighbors, executives, and even an editor for a well known architectural publication which Jonas claimed to have had a long-standing relationship with though Aldo held suspicions that claim was false. Two of these party goers would later hire Aldo to design projects, a country home for one and a mixed-use mid-rise for the other. More importantly, the magazine editor, being impressed with the lake house, offered to include it in an upcoming issue and requested exclusive rights to its first publication.

The rest of the home went up relatively quickly after the reinforced concrete structure. By the time Jonas returned, all that was left was outfitting the interior of the home. The first time he saw it, Aldo had him park at the clearing threshold. This was how the home was designed to be experienced. From the start of the forest opening, the house was hardly visible. A roof ridge barely peaked up from over the hill. Walking closer along a path surrounded by native grass, more of the roof became visible, which did not take on a classic form but was faceted with triangular planes that cascaded down with the building. After the grass field, deep steps were cut out of the natural stone that led down to a mouth-like entry.

Viewed from the sides, the home was tiered as it stepped down the hillside. The entire exterior was clad in wood louvers of varying sizes, all sourced nearby, which were arranged in an unrecognizable pattern that allowed the whole structure to hide amongst its background.

The entry of the home is dark and cave-like, with exposed colored concrete. It gives the feeling of entering into the hillside. Proceeding further down the tapering section of the home, past the private quarters, light slowly creeps into the space. When the large living spaces are reached at the lowest level, everything opens up into a tall open space, soaked in daylight with expansive views reaching out over the west balcony.

Some work obligation kept Jonas away for months. In the meantime, he had authorized Aldo to proceed with construction, though he had not yet seen the final design. “I like the idea of it being even more of a surprise. You are designing it to fit my needs and I know it will turn out right,” Jonas had said in reply to Aldo’s objections.

And so Aldo proceeded, as instructed, and brought on contractors to begin work. Shipments of materials soon arrived on site and Aldo cringed, watching as the first trucks tore through that untouched landscape. So, he created a system for staging where the trucks would be required to take only one route in and out and drop off materials at a designated zone close to the construction. The trails the trucks cut through the site would later transform into a small path as the native vegetation grew up around.

Drilling through the stone hill to set foundations proved to be no easy task and took up much of the time early on in the construction. It was a difficult site to work due to the steep slope. Soon the concrete pilotis grew out from the hillside and the floor slab took form. When the concrete trucks left and the formwork was taken down, what remained was a skinny profile slab that appeared to be floating feet above the hill, cascading downwards following the slope. It really was breathtaking how it was severed from the earth but already blending into the side of the hill.

Sitting in front of the boulder at his drafting desk, Aldo sketched out ideas on trace paper. Over the course of a few days, he had accumulated a dozen design directions he could take. As with most projects he had designed, it was the first idea and first sketch that stuck with him the most. He took that first design and broke it down, redesigned it in multiple iterations, and sketched revisions of it until he settled on the direction he wanted it to go. He quickly constructed a sketch model of the home and took it out to the site to study it further. Holding the model up in his hand, he envisioned the full-scale version built out before him. While studying it in this way, he broke off pieces of the model, discarded them or moved them around, broke off more and worked to simplify it until he reached what he knew the home needed to become.

It swiftly began to take form on paper and in the computer, as plans and details were drafted up. He had arrived at a home that would be mostly glass but also needed to blend into the surrounding landscape. The glass then needed to be hidden or screened or reflective, which wasn’t the right choice for this home. to achieve the near invisibility on the site, he came up with an external louver system that would wrap the home in wood slats, shading the glass and also keeping it hidden. Simultaneously, concrete, dyed to camouflage into the hillside, would form most of the structure, crawling down the hill. Aldo really focused on the joinery of the materials to pull this off. How they terminated or how they connected had to be seamless to make his ideas work. He mocked up a number of material details and arrived at some beautiful solutions. Solutions that would soon be praised by design critics as “bold and innovative” and “elegant in an exceptionally simple way.”

No time was wasted getting started in the design for Jonas’ lake house. He told Aldo that the fee would not be an issue, to bill him whatever it would cost, and he didn’t want to be involved with the design of it. When he first met Aldo, he said, he knew he could trust him with that project. His beliefs were reaffirmed that day he visited the workshop and saw the models and studies. The budget was also left open-ended. “Don’t show me anything until you have the design finalized and you know it to be the right one for this lot,” he told Aldo. No strict deadline was set, though Jonas made it clear he preferred things to progress relatively quick so he could move in sooner than later. Jonas was living in an RV on that lot, for the time being. He had sold his primary home to afford the lot and the cost of constructing the new home.

Aldo spent a lot of time at the site. He would saunter around, sit in different locations and take notes of the views and the feelings that spot invoked, draw sketches of the landscape to better understand it, and most of the time would just stand and observe. They had a surveyor out to ensure precision when it came to the topography. It was a complicated site to build on after all. Once Aldo felt he had a grasp on the site, he returned to the workshop to begin drawing up the ideas that floated around in his head.

It was a steep sloping site. The hillside crawled down to the lake below. It was heavily wooded to the east, northeast, and southeast. Off to the west, in the distance, snow capped mountain peeks protruded above the treeline and were reflected on the shimmering lake surface. The land was rocky and covered with stone slabs that broke off into smaller boulders scattered along the hill.

Aldo paced around the lot, taking in the views as they stole his breath. It was an incredible place.

“What do you think?” Jonas asked after giving Aldo some time to take it in.

“Absolutely beautiful,” Aldo replied, “I love it.”

“Good, because I want you to design a lake house for me here.”

Aldo looked at Jonas, then looked at his surroundings. At first, he felt a pain deep down inside at the thought of disturbing that pristine landscape. As he walked around more, the pain slowly transitioned to elation, excitement at being the one to place something in that setting. Something that could be respectful of the land, gently touching down on the ground and delicately integrated with the setting. It wouldn’t necessarily need to disturb the area at all, he concluded but could hold a symbiotic relationship with the land. It could add to the site and let it become more. Aldo returned to Jonas and agreed to take on the project.