Words Stephen Greco Photography Jason Schmidt

Published in No 16

Calling the architect Christian Wassmann “grounded” is perhaps an understatement. Sensitive as most architects are to the ground on which he builds, Wassmann also commands a concept of site that seems to incorporate his entire home planet, as well as the sun and stars that surround it. Writing of his early travels in India, he describes exploring the Jantar Mantar — the monumental-scale, eighteenth-century stone astronomical observatory built by the Rajput ruler Sawai Jai Singh — “with my own body, mind, and senses.” He writes, “I felt an unexpected encounter with gravity as I was pulled toward these masses and climbed the stairs, following their reach up to the sky.”

Wassmann’s cosmic sense of place is confirmed during a visit to his airy, light and book-filled ninth-floor studio in Manhattan’s West Village. Sketches and studies relating to his current and past projects abound, some as arcane looking as those of an ancient master of the natural sciences. In the course of taking a visitor through an exquisite scale-model of the house he was building at the time for his family, on a hill near Woodstock, New York, Wassmann explains that the structure was designed with the course of the sun in mind and built to semi-enclose a massive bluestone boulder that has sat in place, there on top of the hill, Wassmann supposes, since the end of the last Ice Age.

“From the moment we discovered the rock on the highest point of the property I felt we needed to build the house around it,” says the Swiss-born architect, who was trained in Zurich and Vienna, and worked with theater director and visual artist Robert Wilson, before relocating to New York in 2000 to work with architect Steven Holl. “I wanted the house to be an observatory to live in, and preserve the nature in and around it as much as possible. After a few months I made some sketches for different possible buildings, with the rock further away or as part of the interior. But I always returned to the first idea of a square building with the round courtyard and a cone-shaped roof. I always liked courtyard buildings, and in our case I wanted to frame a piece of nature exactly as it was when we arrived.”

A desire to live with nature is one of Wassmann’s driving forces. His house is structured of prefabricated timber elements, built on a 50’ x 50’ concrete platform made out of bluestone gravel sourced from the site, and topped with a dramatic, almost exultant-looking cone-shaped roof surfaced with photovoltaic shingles. The roof’s main beams radiate toward a curved beam surrounding the rock, as panels of curved glass frame the boulder, defining a courtyard blessed with picturesque views of the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires. The house, explains Wassmann, is designed “to collect energy from the rays of the sun, water for a swimming pond from the rain, and geothermal heat, from the earth below. Our goal is that the building generates more energy than it uses.”

Wassmann, who is married to independent development consultant Luisa Gui, with whom he has two children, Kiki, 7, and Lorenzo, 11, grew up in the suburbs of Zurich.

“My village was at the foot of the mountain overlooking Zurich — Uetliberg — where I went biking a lot and was always in the forest. Building huts and living out in nature was a big thing for me growing up, and I realized I couldn’t offer my kids that, so we started spending more time with friends upstate. We tagged along with our friends looking for houses — never for us to buy, but to offer them advice. I would always recommend tearing buildings down if they were in really bad shape, but the property was nice. And sometimes we saw handcrafted houses from the ‘60s and ‘70s that really had charm but were ruined by renovations.”

Then, in the spring of 2016, with his own architectural practice thriving, Wassmann came upon a property that triggered the desires he had for his children to “see things I saw as a kid, like real forests and rocks and animals.” He describes driving up what is now his driveway to an area where the greenery became thinner, a manmade clearing that afforded dramatic views.

“There was this tree in the foreground, and then a cliff, and to the left the rock and a few little pine trees,” he says. “That’s when we decided. We made an offer, and we got it. On our first weekend on the site, I made the first sketch of the house. There were lots of evolutions along the way, but the idea of harvesting the sun and rainwater was very important to me, because when you’re on such a high point you don’t have a river or natural ponds.”

The house would be constructed of engineered wood and metal elements, fabricated in Switzerland, shipped to the U.S. in cargo containers, and assembled on site. “Switzerland has had this tradition of engineered wood since the ‘70s, which is now becoming popular here,” says Wassmann. “We see the first ones popping up in Brooklyn — like, six-story buildings — and all these local building codes are slowly adjusting to the fact that wooden buildings are actually better in a fire. As we saw at the World Trade Center, steel beams will heat up and fail, while actually a wooden truss has a long life in a fire. It can be charred and still, after two hours, hold up the building. The master Swiss carpenter I worked with was a student of [timber engineering pioneer] Hermann Blumer, whose disciples, like Shigeru Ban, designer of the new Centre Pompidou-Metz, in France, and the Aspen Art Museum, in Colorado, create forms… I don’t wanna call them crazy, but they are really out there.” During the summer of 2016 Wassmann bought an Airstream trailer and installed it on the site so that he and his family could occupy their property. Living there was gratifying, he says, despite occasional family squabbles that were magnified by the trailer’s tight confines, and by some extremely cold weather, which induced the family to stay with neighbors. “We had many barbecues,” says Wassmann. “But it was getting to know our property in all seasons that was important to me, living on the land before I put a shovel in it, to mark it, or took a saw to cut down trees.”

Over the next few years Wassmann developed the design of the house in a series of evolutionary drawings, studies, and models. Finally, in 2019, together with a crew, he was ready to begin work. He mixed the concrete and started to pour the house’s base slab. Then the pandemic hit.


The pandemic came at a perfect moment in his life, Wassmann says. He was 45 when it started, his office was doing well, he had four people on staff, and they were working on several projects. “But maybe I wasn’t motivated — some form of a mid-life crisis.” With the pandemic, much of the world’s business, including architectural projects, went on hold. “I panicked a little,” says the architect, “but I realized that it was the perfect time to take a sabbatical and really, physically, build my house. This became my main occupation — and it’s been almost three years now.”

The plan was to bring the containers of pre-engineered wood elements to the site and assemble them with a crew consisting of Wassmann’s brother and father, his best friend from architecture school days, and two master carpenter-engineers from the Swiss manufacturer of the elements, Trilegno. “It’s the spring of 2020 and I have arranged all this free help, and the containers leave by boat on March 15 — the big joists, elements for the walls, 64 roof panels that we call ‘pizza slices’ — and then everything goes on hold.”

Borders were shut, so Wassmann’s relatives and the Swiss experts were unable to travel. After searching around for local carpenters knowledgeable about the pre-engineered system that he was using, Wassmann found two from Cooperstown, New York, who were available for the project. The containers arrived in the harbor and were put on four trucks to head up the Thruway and across Route 212, and up the hill to the site between Saugerties and Woodstock. They arrived all on the same day, one after the other, every two hours. “It was probably the most stressful day in my life,” says Wassmann, “because the shipping business has very strict rules about how much free time you have to unload the containers, and every extra hour was, like, $150. But if you have four containers and there is a delay with the first one, then each one after that is also delayed, which incurs charges for all of them. To just drop the containers and leave them, it’s cheaper to buy them, but the shortage of containers at that time meant that the price had doubled — and I'm not in the business of owning containers. On top of that, there was a storm on the horizon that day. The crane operator I hired for the day told me that when he saw the first lightning strike he would call off the day’s work. I was nervous, because we are on a high point, and the winds were blowing through, ripping off tarps, and we had to constantly battle with the elements. In the end it worked out. No lightening, nobody got killed. It was a very long day, probably with a couple of drinks at the end.”

And so began Wassmann’s pandemic project, with an improvised crew. The assembly process was fun, he says, like a puzzle — but not like Lego, because Lego has a lot of identical pieces. In this puzzle, every piece was different. “I had a three-dimensional guide on my computer that I could consult, and just say “Next” or press a button to see the next element popping up, so it was very logical. There was a proper list of which screws went where. The electric conduits were already in the panels, so all I had to do is connect them. And the Trilegno engineers promised to be available for Facetime calls if I was struggling. Occasionally, I did have to call.”

Hardships? “I can't deny there was some pain,” says Wassmann, drawing attention to his slightly beat-up-looking hands. “I was working on the roof again recently. You get cuts and bruises no matter how carefully you work. In this case, I even had gloves on.” While there were lots of setbacks, Wassmann says that having “all the time in the world” allowed him to make the project better, a lesson he says he learned while working with both Steven Holl and Robert Wilson. “It’s great to start with a great design,” he says, “but as you’re actually moving along, your original idea can either get diluted and you just execute that, or you really get to the matter of it and make things even more interesting.”

Some hardships resulted in felicitous design changes. A series of rainstorms that threatened to flood and erode already poured foundation walls led Wassmann to dig down farther and discover that the bedrock was not much deeper at all, prompting him to amend his plans to include a sunken living room area. Of course, all the delays and COVID restrictions entailed additional costs. “I’m glad we underestimated the project, because we would probably not have started the house if we had known how much cost and work would be involved.”

 Even before its final touches are in place, the house has been a center of activities for Wassmann family and friends — barbecuing, swimming, soccer, sunbathing. “Now that the house is almost finished, I have to find the rhythm to become a normal dad, doing normal activities,” says Wassmann with a laugh. “Every time we’ve been up there, I’ve been on a ladder with my son assisting me, and that’s a little bit how I grew up, but it’s not necessarily the ideal way. So, I want to go mountain biking with my kids, and there are several other activities in the pipeline once the house is finished….”

 ChristianWassmann.com

Stephen Greco’s novel, Such Good Friends, based on the friendship between Truman Capote and Lee Radziwill, will be published by Kensington in May 2023.

Jason Schmidt is a photographer and director specializing in documenting artists and cultural figures, as well as architecture and interiors. His books, Artists and Artists II, were published by Steidl. He is currently at work on his first documentary. ba-reps.com