
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, January 15, 1995                   TAG: 9501190004
SECTION: HOMES                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KENNETH SINGLETARY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

DECEPTIVE BY DESIGN

Dennis Kilper's house near Blacksburg is elegant and eye-catching, but what may be most interesting about it is what you don't see, at least initially.

Kilper, a 53-year-old professor of architecture at Virginia Tech, recently won an Award for Exellence in Architecture from the Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects for the design. It emphasizes what Kilper and other architectural theorists have called the spaces-in-between, empty spaces that contrast with and help define the occupied areas.

The house is on a steep south-facing slope. It has a two-level, 2,500-square-foot residential area and a lower-level artist's studio. An 850-square-foot roof terrace may be its most striking feature.

Outside, the house, which was completed in September 1992, is sided with stained cedar and painted plywood in the recesses. The west wall is tilted to minimize the hot afternoon sun. The exterior, said Jane Weinzapfel, a Boston designer who helped judge the 75 entries in the awards program, "is very brash and arresting, with a boisterous skin."

But it is the interior that seems to have won the majority of Kilper's attention. Contemporary American design, he said with obvious disappointment, "has gradually shifted to the exterior decoration approach to architecture."

The house is precise and spartan in its furnishings, and open in design, providing a lot of what architects and art historians call negative space, another way to think of spaces-in-between. Spaces-in-between, which highlight what is and what isn't or juxtapose one place with another, can be seen as transitional. In Kilper's design, the dwelling's stairway and the nooks and crannies on the terrace are significant.

Spaces-in-between invite the user or viewer to consider the absence of form and to think about what could be. Thus, ultimately, the interior of the house is dynamically engaging, Kilper's desired effect. The owner or user of a building, he said, "should be charmed again and again."

Indeed, transitions are an explicit quality of the dwelling. An east-facing floor-to-ceiling glass wall dominates the living area, and throughout the interior, dividing walls are kept to a minimum.

The accommodating nature of the house begins at its entrance, where the outside wall overhangs the building, beckoning residents and visitors.

"In a sense you're enveloped by the surface before you actually go into the house," Kilper said.

"The house is trying many things and most of them are well controlled. There is a good order of structure and a nice serenity in the interior spaces." said Warren R. Schwartz, another Boston architect and awards program judge.

But the house is site specific, as well. It is "nested into the slope of the land ... In a sense the site is allowed to design the building," Kilper said.

Until last winter's damaging ice storms, trees on the upper slope overhung the house.

"That something I can't imagine myself doing except in this site."

by CNB