Life ahead of the curve / The world is finally catching on to iconoclastic architect Dan Liebermann's way of building—in the interest of old newspaper removal. An excellent young architect the Toph worked with went to work for his eminence after the Mt. Vision fire and moved a project forward. The office approach was to be be assertive, let's say, with building officials, and the results are truly unique buildings with a basic umbrella-like structural system seen nowhere else. The article describes this and the characteristic canoe-shaped floorplan and building pad he uses for his hillside buildings:

Liebermann says the most efficient structure requires a circular floor plan. Rather than "cutting a big, nasty, square hole" in the ground and building a "nasty retaining wall with a cold space behind it that fills with dirt and leaves," he works with a hill's contours (most of his houses are on steep hillsides), making an elliptical cut, "a bite out of an apple."

Borrowing from his father's expertise as a dam engineer, Liebermann then creates a concave, curving retaining wall, like a bowl halved top to bottom. (Curved structures are stronger, he maintains, so they predominate in nature, as in craniums, eggs and seashells.)

His retaining wall doubles as the main interior wall of the house. Because such a wall could look forbidding, he usually softens it with a massive fireplace. Featuring a hollow large enough to roast a boar, and stacks of limestone stretching across the wall, the ensemble beckons aesthetically and emotionally. Liebermann explains that a fireplace provides "tremendous therapy" because it's a "primordial, womb-like cave, a place of warmth and security."

As for the rest of the house, he figures the best way to cover an ellipse is with an umbrella. He constructs a central column, perhaps a straightforward steel pole or a birch trunk salvaged from a forest fire. Sometimes he opts for a structure of woven steel beams, the straight pieces appearing to curve as in an Asian wicker stool. Planted deep in the ground like a tree and braced firmly at the floor slab, the central column acts structurally like the tower of a suspension bridge or the mast of a boat.

Liebermann says that during an earthquake the whole building moves together like a boat on waves: "You have a holistic, static relationship between all the parts in my buildings."