In the famous Case Study House they designed for themselves in Pacific Palisades, Calif., in 1949, the Eameses faced the problem of building low-cost housing for the postwar suburb. Their solution was a classic modern machine in the garden, a steel frame, inserted with panels of glass and wood, set in towering eucalyptus. To the eye, the house offered a happy reconciliation of nature and technology, achieved at one-fifteenth the cost of a traditional masonry house. Nearly 50 years later, Ms. Lin's clients face a different set of problems. Suburbanization has drained parts of the city of people, jobs and stability.
Landfills are full.
Clean water and air turn out not to be limitless. Nature can no longer be treated simply as scenery. Solutions to these problems do not reside within the realm of visual imagination. Without her clients' experience in economic and environmentally sustainable growth, Ms. Lin would be hard put to solve them. She operates, rather, at the place where visual metaphor and material reality intersect.