Camouflage House, Burr Ridge, Illinois (Cornell Box)

The Camouflage House is a conceptual project for an imagined planned community called Falling Water in Burr Ridge, a western suburb of Chicago. Garofalo’s design takes the architectural and aesthetic conventions for such corporate-controlled developments and turns them on their head to emphasize the absurdity of prevailing, idealized notions of landscape and domesticity. The plan for the Camouflage House exaggerates the idea that the automobile is an integral part of suburban living. Cars are treated like extra family members; the garage is integrated into the room layout as a pivotal programmatic element and the entire house is oriented toward the bifurcated driveway. The seemingly random pattern of colors and materials that cover the house and extend into the landscape emphasize the absurd conceit that a man-made, million-dollar house could fit in with its natural surroundings. Here the relationship between the term “natural” and the highly choreographed landscape of suburban America is called into question with a fragmented, “camouflaged” structure that fails to obey the rules of suburban taste.