peter martin

IF I was ever to become suddenly, bewilderingly, filthy rich…I would immediately set about building a Xanadu-style absurdity of a house that would feature such “eccentricities” as:

• a Cinerama theater with a single electronically rising seat that suspended itself in an acoustically perfect sphere that resembled the Cerebro chamber in X-Men…
• separate wings of the house would represent extreme stylistic breaks that would be reflected in the choice of music (always playing, of course)…surf rock here, jazz there, postpunk in the lower levels….
• an open dormitory-style live/work art space that acted as a sort of living museum for a dozen or so rotating artists…walls continually painted over to the point where the dried paint and materials on the floors created a canvas that was unique in its own right…

However, the one absurdity that has stuck with me and which continues to flourish is my library concept. The latest iteration houses the entire library in a four-story circular turret…no windows, books lining the walls, and a circular staircase that runs all the way around the room, allowing any book to be reached easily. A handful of leather chairs & couches and an enormous desk with many cubbies would be on the floor, with the center of the room dominated by a gigantic globe, which of course had a hidden switch to reveal a whisky cabinet inside. The ceiling would be glass and would be a working clock, shamelessly stealing from the Clock Tower apartment in Brooklyn, though perhaps with some stained glass added in…and the spiral staircase would terminate on the roof, where I could roam the battlements and look down about my absurd creation.