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GIFFEN CLARK OTT: My name is Giffen Clark Ott, and I'm an
architecture student at Cornell University.
We're in Ithaca at the Simon Ungers Cube House.
Simon Ungers was a German architect who was the son of
Oswald Mathias Ungers.
I think this house is definitely meant for winter
when it's surrounded by a blanket of snow.
It's extremely evil, which knowing the state of Ungers'
life in which he was in, it makes a lot of sense that he
built himself a isolationist concrete box in
the middle of nowhere.
I like it a lot.
But that being said, it's like he's clearly not a
functionalist.
A cinder block house, Upstate New York,
doesn't make much sense.
As far as just how things freeze and thaw
and crack and leak.
But in the winter, it's dismal and it's beautiful.
We're right now in what used to be the garage space.
When I first moved in, no one had closed this window for a
month and a half and it had been raining.
These stairs are definitely not legal.
This is Simon Ungers' signature staircase.
Meaning that this is the same staircase that he has in his
winery a few miles away.
This is our kitchen space.
I like it a lot.
Yeah, I think that everything's pretty rigid.
And I kind of like the rigidity of it.
I'm not a very curvy person and I like things when they're
pretty well spaced.
So I think that this sort of makes sense for me.
Opposite the kitchen is Rachel's bedroom slash the
other living space in the house.
This is hers.
So when Simon designed the house, he designed it as if it
was a New York City studio apartment.
I think this space just shows me that I still don't need
this much room.
It's like 800 square feet, and there's two of
us, and it's huge.
Then this is the bedroom space.
It sort of used to be an office.
This is where I sleep.
There are books and things.
A bed frame that was cheaply made.
Storage.
I think built-ins save a lot of space and they
make a lot of sense.
And you can kind of force what you want with the inhabitant.
Which is why a lot of small spaces actually use them.
Yeah, I think this space is plenty flexible.
This is actually a very great size bedroom, in my opinion.
This is the bathroom.
It's kind of standard.
Fiberglass tub, sink covered in toothpaste.
I'm surrounded by 150 acres.
This is probably the best part of the house when it's not
with the dead deer skin on it.
Out here, you can kind of see what was
allegedly once a runway.
Where there's a sort of a subtle depression and line
that can be followed out throughout the 150 acres.
It treats the landscape as sort of the whole tabula rasa
thing where it's a bare object in a field.
And then the inside is as much a field as
the outside, I think.
ERIKA STORM WASSER: Love home and design?
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