Alfred Preis

Captain & Mrs. Robert Hudson Residence (1955)

The two-level plan and staircase for the Hudson Residence, a small house for a middle-class family of four and a mother-in-law, is archetypal of the ways in which Preis used details, materials, and spatial segmentation through changes in levels to create habitation zones. Although all of the main rooms were contained within a rectangular volume, Preis divided its zones of occupancy. A short stairway brought residents from the entry hall and a small dining area to the living room, which boasted views to the landscape and the ocean. Connected with the living room was a “hidden” bar alcove (revealed with a sliding panel) and a small master bedroom.

Similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of the hearth as a central axis for a house, Preis’s staircase was an axis from which the different living zones spun outwards. The stair thus formed the house’s visual and spatial center, connecting the rest of the rooms. Preis, like both Loos and Le Corbusier, often designed staircases to create a promenade architecturale. So instead of locating staircases in tangential areas, Preis used these moments of vertical circulation to center the richness of interior experiences. His careful detailing in wood and built-ins on one side of the stair in the adjacent dining room reappeared in the living room above. This configuration made the short ascent up or down the stair – with a handrail projecting directly from the brick – into a richly tactile and visual experience.

And as he had in the Scudder Residence, Preis used the Hudson stair to create an experience of compression at its base and then a release onto the living room landing with its expansive window views. Because the brick wall ran along the stair, from the first floor there was only a glimpse of the larger living area and windows above; the upstairs bar and master bedroom could not be seen at all. This small variation in floor levels and his strategic placement of walls and eye-diverting built-ins provided a visual “taste” of what lay above, but the whole spatial composition could not be ascertained from any single vantage point anywhere in the house, adding a certain sense of mystery and discovery through the processional pathways

In the downward view from the living room landing, Preis used changes in ceiling heights and a dropped, interior pergola to articulate the complexity of his spatial divisions, but all within a very compact area. Both interior and exterior pergolas would become one of Preis’s favored features for designating separate interior and exterior zones.