"Scott Hughes: Surreal Imports"
Eric Owen Moss, FAIA

We're unlikely to confuse the Los Angeles/ South Florida architect Scott Hughes with Andre Breton, or Salvador dali, historic proponents of the doctrine of no doctrine called Surrealism.

Or are we?

The Surreal advocacy looked askance at any standardized definitions of the "real".

But what's "real"?

For Breton and his colleagues a culture's adherence to convention camouflaged an essential, underlying reality. The admonition: expose the unexposed.. The conventional "real" is simply a comforting lid that hides a disconcerting truth. And Surrealism proclaimed that the artist's duty was always and forever to document the reality underneath.

Surprise and shock were essential surrealist tools used to record the dismantling of generic societal preferences.

I think Scott Hughes was listening.

The old rules were [and will be] a bore.
The old rules were [and will be] a snore.

The old rules were a supercilious veneer.
Let's make them disappear.

Scott Hughes design advocacy is less a polemic, less threatening than Breton's. And in a world of paper architecture, depicted in over-sized, cocktail table books, Scott's work belongs to an idiom we have come to know.

Nevertheless, Scott's architecture, understood, not as photo and text, but qua architecture -- a physical presence on the land, in the sand, over the rocks, next to the sea -- tangible, palpable physiology in a tangible, palpable physical environment, clearly confronts a long established Florida building/belief system, and offers an entirely contradictory sensibility. On Jupiter Island Scott Hughes delivers a new way to think, a new way to see, a new way to feel, a new way to build.

On Jupiter, Scott Hughes is the progenitor of the surreal

On Jupiter, Scott rips away at an antiquated Florida veneer, and unveils an obstreperous surprise.


Let's start with Scott's less than reverent nomenclature. On Florida's east coast, hard by a stone sea wall, Scott gives us a building he calls the Sandbox, not the sort of Gatsby/Fitzgerald affluent society,North Atlantic transplant labeling we've come to expect.

Sandbox house is surreal.

There is always the argument that building qua building is finally the building. Meaning no discourse can alter that. Nevertheless Scott's naming reveals the architect's aspirations. Sandbox suggests children. Sandbox connotes play. Sandbox proposes building as ephemeral – what the kids construct crumbles quickly, to be re-done another day.

Florida building as content in flux. That's Scott's Florida's surreal.

Whether these were Scott's explicit intentions or not remains unconfirmed. But a building he poetically associates with the endless forming and re-forming of land at the edge of the sea, wind blown wild grasses, and the vicissitudes of sea life in the coral reef just off the beach suggests an ethereal, transitory mind set. And his building confirms that sense of precariousness.

The Breton surreal demands enemies. Ditto the Jupiter surreal. And Scott has made a few. Jupiter Island is a tradition filled land. An order to replicate. Shapes and images repeat. Ditto textures and colors. Standard rules rule. Building patterns confirm one another. Typologies are generic. Typologies pre- approved.

But Scott Hughes isn't listening.

In the lexicon of the south Floridian enemy:

balance is the plan,
and the plan is balance;
walls thick,
walls heavy,
walls of stone,
walls of plaster;
roof slopes two ways from the center,
gables perpendicular to the roof slope two ways from the center;
heavy roof,
stone roof,
tile roof;
weight the balance,
balance the weight.

Not so life in the Hughes Sandbox.

In Scott's hands stayed is no longer staid. Maybe Scott deposited the Los Angeles tradition of non-tradition on Jupiter.

Now L.A. Scott lands on Jupiter Island.
Heretofore, affluence in cahoots with the architecture of tradition.
The seaside veranda and the bilaterally balanced box.

L.A. Scott arrives, the progenitor of the south Floridian surreal.
Not no rules, but new rules the rule.

Comes the Sandbox:
Land and sea change places at the ocean's edge.
Ethereal? Yes.
Enduring? No.
A new real disrupts the antique version.
An obstreperous conception intervenes in a tradition loaded landscape.

There and not there.
Options:
Not a system, but systems.
Not a method, but methods.
Platforms separate the building from the land.
Weight and weightless.
Balance and imbalance.
Transparent, translucent, opaque.
See through,
Perhaps see through,
No see through.
Structure, yes.
Structure, no.
Apertures, curtains.
Apertures, punched.
The ocean below.
The pool in the sky.
And life in the middle.
Not single minded, but multi-minded.
That's the Hughes Sandbox.
A kid's game.
Seriously less serious.

See Scott Hughes: Surreal Florida Imports. Los Angeles, California.