Johan WijeSinghe
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Pilot House
The Pilot House (1948, A. Quincy Jones and Whitney R. Smith with structural engineer Edgardo Contini) was built as the model home for the Crestwood Hills cooperative an attempt to deliver five hundred homes on difficult sites for working-class Angelenos. Theodore Payne designed the native plant garden. The house was landmarked, and by the time EGA came to it, several decades of alterations had eroded the raw material character and the fluidity between inside and out that Jones and Smith had intended.
Working as a designer at Escher GuneWardena Architecture, I contributed to the restoration across documentation, design, and construction. I led conditions documentation using reality capture software, establishing a baseline accurate enough to identify what had been lost and what remained. Kitchen and mechanical systems were upgraded; lost architectural elements and integrated furniture were recreated from archival drawings. I supported on-site delivery of the bathroom and kitchen works, and built physical models for client presentations.
The project was a collaboration with Oliver Firth Interiors and was featured in Architectural Digest (2020). Working within EGA's approach preserving original fabric, keeping traces of historic wear, restoring for long-term use — gave me a precise understanding of where restoration decisions are irreversible, and what it costs to get them wrong.
Drawings
Partners
Frank Escher, Ravi GuneWardena
Project Team
Sasha Plotkinova, Cristiano Aires Teixeira, Johan Wijesinghe