Camouflage House, Burr Ridge, Illinois, Model

Douglas Garofalo’s Camouflage House proposes a new kind of site-specificity for a sloped suburban lot. Rather than approaching the landscape as an idealized natural form, Garofalo translated the topography of the site into a complex network of lines that determine the contours and surface of the structure. In this model for the project, the intersecting lines are filled in with vibrant color, creating an elaborate field and cladding for the building that both defines and obscures the shape of the structure. Here the idea of camouflage—a concept that drew the attention of many modern artists in the early 20th century—has a double sense, as the shape of long, ramp-like volume of the house was designed as an extension and distortion of the neighborhood’s typical suburban driveways.