The Deep Dive: A Work of Art Underfoot

As any issue of Dwell proves, the choice of material or joinery method can transform a good project into a design for the ages. The Deep Dive is a forum where design and building pros can obsess over those details. Here we ask expert colleagues to share the inspiration behind house elements that delight clients—as well as the nitty-gritty information about how they were built.

In the September/October feature "A Tiny Home Office in the Hollywood Hills Comes With a Floor That’s a Work of Art," architect Andre Herrero likens terrazzo to "a very lobby material." 

As did artists Ryan Bush and Raphael Martinez Cohen when they first stumbled across the polished composite of aggregate and concrete—it was the stuff of "big airports and court buildings," Martinez Cohen recalls. After establishing their joint sculptural practice Ficus Interfaith in 2014, Martinez Cohen adds he and Bush "were looking into ways to make monumental sculpture, and into the mediums that dictate monumentality." The surface seemed to invite the artists to insert their own imagery within it, and the pair became interested in making that happen.

Working with terrazzo in earnest since 2018, the artists have since mastered the material technically and transformed it into an expressive medium. The two achievements are on display in the terrazzo medallion that the duo created for the freestanding, 120-square-foot office that Herrero designed for homeowner Steven Alper.

Bush and Martinez Cohen are self-taught terrazzo masons via YouTube videos as well as trial and error. Today, Ficus Interfaith’s terrazzo artworks are made of aggregate that is often salvaged personally by the artists and then embedded in a colored cement or epoxy sluice poured between metal dividers. "The drawings took on this exciting new life," Bush says of weaving images into the medium, "I think the material guides the imagery. Considering the line width of the metal strips that we use and solder or the dyes that we use, a vocabulary quite literally emerges. In a way, our individual hands as artists disappear and a third voice is unified through the terrazzo."

For the gem-like home office in Beachwood Canyon, Charlap Hyman & Herrero principal Andre Herrero approached Ficus Interfaith with their client Steven, and Bush says it was immediately apparent that the matchup "had done a tremendous amount of work rooting the building in architectural history. They wanted the office to feel like someone had plucked it from the Seagram Building." Internalizing that precedent, the artists considered diverging from their own norm and proposed a non-figural terrazzo for the floor. They pitched wallpaper-like patterns alongside drawings of a winged man that they had conceived for a canceled commission, and CHH and Steven unreservedly asked for further development of the angel motif. The next presentation focused more on format than content, and participants settled on a medallion configuration.

"The project with Steve was unique in that we made a large tile in our studio and sent it to Los Angeles and CHH’s team installed it," Martinez Cohen says of the circular element. "Another terrazzo craftsman filed in the floor around the medallion. That black terrazzo with white aggregate was a great collaboration, because the company asked what dyes we used and they matched our work."

During their drawing phases, Bush and Martinez Cohen began referring to the angel figure as Icarus. "The myth seemed like a great pairing for a city of broken dreams like L.A.," Bush says, "Icarus is a story of ingenuity and it’s a cautionary tale." Yet even his and Martinez Cohen’s own interpretation of the work is evolving.  

In Dwell’s September/October feature, author Kathryn Romeyn explains that Herrero "pushed hard to face" the desk in Steven’s office toward downtown Los Angeles. "[B]ut his client was unwavering about having it face the opposite way. ‘It was the pandemic, and I became obsessed with people’s Zoom backgrounds,’ admits Steven, who was unapologetically fixated on having the very best one." Concurrently, Bush says, "I do remember one final tweak, which was Andre’s idea, to flip the medallion horizontally so that Icarus would be looking out over the valley instead of facing the hill." Today, Zoom attendees look over Alper’s shoulder to see L.A. laid out before them, while Icarus reaches for the skyline just out of their view.

On a recent site visit of the completed work, CHH’s installation revision underlined additional meanings that the artists had hoped to wrest from the Icarus tale, the morality of which Bush calls overplayed: "One thing we really appreciate about CHH is the amount of research behind unexpected, anachronistic design choices that seamlessly blend. [Our project] doesn’t center on Icarus’s demise, and you can read into that optimism now." Accessing multiple perspectives, he adds, "is one of the joys of working with a client and a designer."  

We welcome your thoughts and illustrative projects. Reach out to pro@dwell.com.