From the Archives: April 29, 1966

The constructing was designed to be three tales, with the bottom flooring housing a library constructed into the hillside, a glass-enclosed floor flooring ringed by columns, and the clamshell containing three bedrooms, three baths, lounge, eating room, kitchen and solar deck, all related by an elevator.

The ENR profile of the architect, Charles Deaton, described how he “plastically shapes a constructing as a free-form sculpture, solely intuitively being guided by structural function, till he achieves a passable kind. Thereafter he matches construction to kind.”

The clamshell is a welded cage of ordinary metal shapes serving as a structural skeleton, coated with steel mesh and pneumatically utilized shotcrete. Deaton defined that his design required structural engineers to resolve issues of batter and torsion.

He additionally designed a number of unconventional financial institution buildings, together with one resembling flower petals and one other with an ovoid form.

Deaton had labored in plane design, industrial design and industrial artwork earlier than turning to structure.

He ran out of cash and by no means accomplished the clamshell house’s inside. It remained unfinished till it was bought in 1999 and accomplished in 2003.