Paul Raff
-
story by Brian Libby
photos by Ben Rahn and Steve TsaiBefore becoming an architect, two experiences shaped Paul Raff in a way that affects his design sensibilities today: growing up on the Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan and being an artist.
“I can’t help but feel that’s important: the power of light and sky, atmospheric conditions, the landscape,” Raff says of his early years in Canada’s grassy heartland. “Buildings have a more powerful effect when you drive across the prairie: grain silos, barns. It allows you to sort of mediate your body with the landscape.”
In later years, as he worked at architecture firms in the dense, diverse and energetic cities of New York, Barcelona and Hong Kong, he never lost this sense of how buildings relate to the landscape. In fact, it drives Raff’s embrace of sustainable design and its way of relating to the landscape.
By the time he founded Paul Raff Studio in 2003, Raff was a sought-after installation artist and sculptor for whom architecture was central, like Gordon Matta-Clark. For example, Raff’s installation “Unbuilding Ways” staged the demolition of a historic but condemned cottage in downtown Toronto. “I became more familiar with questioning what is possible than what one gets going to architecture school or walking through even the most wonderful house,” he explains. “I think that helps make our house designs more original, unique and surprising.”
Today Raff’s firm has designed projects from Toronto to Argentina and Peru. Houses are his favourite type of commission. “It’s more personal than the other type of work we may do,” he explains. “It’s an intimate part of your life. It’s not just the place you live. I think anytime someone phones me, it’s because they have an understanding that we can do something that’s really for them, something special that will be very much a part of their own life.”
The clients for one noteworthy Raff project, the Cascade House in Toronto’s tree-laden Forest Hill, were moving from sunny Arizona and asked for as much natural light as possible. Appropriately, a distinctive feature of the house is a cascading glass wall in the front.
“We wanted to do some sort of privacy screen, something that allows light but privacy,” the architect explains. “I found a way to take standard sheets of three-quarter-inch glass and to break it into little pieces and laminate it together with silicone, to create this beautiful translucent, slightly greenish, glowing screen. Every time a tree shimmers in the wind or someone walks by, that effect is sort of multiplied in these vertical streaky pixels. It also adds some colour and vitality on grey, dark days.” The wall is made with glass cut into 475 narrow pieces joined with standard silicone.
On the south side, an expansive window allows the low winter sun to penetrate and warm the house with the help of a large internal slate wall that captures and stores available solar energy to heat the house during evening hours. Smaller apertures within the wall dapple adjacent rooms with light, making a kind of art installation born of function—the work of an architect who is also an artist.
“The summer sun can never hit it, and the winter sun hits it all day,” Raff says of the slate wall. “Light is important in a number of ways. It has poetic qualities, it brings warmth, and it connects you to the outside. Cascade House is about that connection to the outside.” The master bedroom, occupying the entire third floor, is set back from the first two levels to give privacy; its view through the adjacent treetops makes it feel almost like a treehouse, as do the bamboo floors and built-in cabinetry. In the back of the house, a terrace adjacent to the pool encourages outdoor dining.
The house has also been designed to adapt to the family’s needs as they change over time “It’s a principle of sustainability,” the architect adds, “the flexibility to meet future needs.”
