Alfred Preis

Mr. & Mrs. Carlo Panfiglio Residence (1952)

In the Panfiglio Residence, the procession throughout the house – which included a passage through a highly ordered architectural courtyard with pergolas that created dramatic shadows – consisted of a sequence of turns to the right and to the left. Throughout the house, he employed planar brick walls to block a full panorama of the space. Instead, pathways organized by the walls directed the inhabitant through rooms in a way that was the antithesis of an enfilade sequence. Preis’s growing affinity for Japanese-style carpentry – virtually all of Hawaii’s carpenters were Japanese – became a method through which he articulated habitation zones with a strong artistic sensibility. In one dramatic case, a suspended wooden ceiling extended between two rooms, floating above brick walls.

This effectively unified spaces across different habitation zones where the walls still kept them distinct from one another. Beautifully crafted, angled rafters hovering over the lowered ceiling created a clerestory zone for light and ventilation at one end.

There is a marked consonance between Japanese architectural idioms and the Raumplan (space plan) in the Panfiglio house. The planar walls recalled the partitions of shoji screens (now solidified into walls) confirming the circuitous procession. Preis went on to develop similar, Japanese-styled spatial sequences in many of his other houses. In another house of the same period, he elevated the dining area in a window-lit alcove. This arrangement recalls affinities to both Loos’s raised dining areas in several villas and the Japanese tokonoma (an elevated alcove for displaying art, objects, and flowers).