Shapeshifter Reno House, Nevada Home, New US Property, Architecture Images
Shapeshifter Reno House, Nevada
Modern Real Estate USA for Stremmel Gallery – design by OPA Architects
Jun 16, 2018
Shapeshifter Reno – New House in Nevada
Architect: OPA
Location: Tucson, Arizona, USA
Shapeshifter Reno House, Nevada
Two art collectors and dealers specializing in contemporary art and art of the American West decided to move from the arid high desert outside of Reno to a less remote site overlooking the city. They wanted a house that would both reflect the contemporary moment and be explicitly of the West.

The new site, a large lot located on a bluff in an established neighborhood, gazes off at the desert mountains in the distance, but otherwise offered little other inspiration. We joined the site in gazing off at the bare mountains and decided to think about the desert as a real environment as well as its ambivalent role in the cultural imaginary.
The American desert has a history of being understood as a place of lack, emptiness, or otherness. Framed as a barren wasteland, a kind of ?no place?, the desert has been appointed the perfect test site, a place for all genres of experimentation ? military, scientific, and social.

The desert is rarely seen for itself, instead acting as a mirror for various projected fantasies: wilderness, frontier, and heterotopia. Enduringly mercurial, it is a sandbox that changes forms to fit the imaginations of the user, a space of ambiv...