Both Pratt and West have incited outrage among architecture fans for destructive choices they’ve
made after purchasing beloved properties
It’s hard to imagine Chris Pratt and Kanye West having that much in common. The rapper has
become a polarizing national figure for his antisemitic rants and other provocative, unhinged
behavior, while Pratt strives to maintain an agreeable, PG-rated, family-friendly persona.
Kanye West and Bianca Censori attend the Marni Fall/Winter 2024 Fashion Show during the Milan Fashion Week on Feb. 23, 2024, in Milan, Italy. (Alessandro Levati/Getty Images for Marni Srl/TNS)
Now, this week, West has became the subject of a lengthy piece in the New Yorker, which chronicles his destruction of a unique oceanfront home in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master architect Tadao Ando and built in 2013. The New Yorker piece chronicles how the the hip-hop star’s “beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy” turned the Ando home “into a ruin.”
West, a fashion designer and self-taught architectural enthusiast, purchased the 4,000-square-foot Ando home in the fall of 2021 for $57.3 million — with that exorbitant price largely paying for a residence that itself was considered a sculpture, or a work of art.
Like other Ando homes, this home is largely built of untreated concrete, which communicates “contemporary, if not avant-garde tastes” and a “controlled, sober beauty,” New Yorker writer Ian Parker explained. Incidentally, around the same time, Ando designed a much larger, 42-000-square-foot home, about four miles west along the coast, that was purchased in May 2023 by Beyoncé and Jay-Z for $190 million, the most ever paid for a house in California,
The box-like home West bought stretches out over a narrow slice of beach and is propped up by four pillars at about the high-tide mark, Parker said. The front door, off Malibu Road, leads into an entrance gallery, which, in turn, leads into an open living room area where the house “delivers its vast, binary view of sky and ocean, through floor-to-ceiling windows,” Parker said.
But the “Guardians of the Galaxy” star has joined West in becoming a unique kind of cultural villain. They are both celebrities who used their considerable wealth to buy Los Angeles-area homes that were deemed architectural treasures. Both men then destroyed these singular residences out of an desire to impose their particular aesthetic visions on their properties and surrounding neighborhoods and, in West’s case, to make a statement in the larger world of design.
Both Pratt and West have incited outrage among architecture fans for destructive choices they’ve made after purchasing beloved properties
It’s hard to imagine Chris Pratt and Kanye West having that much in common. The rapper has become a polarizing national figure for his antisemitic rants and other provocative, unhinged behavior, while Pratt strives to maintain an agreeable, PG-rated, family-friendly persona.
But the “Guardians of the Galaxy” star has joined West in becoming a unique kind of cultural villain. They are both celebrities who used their considerable wealth to buy Los Angeles-area homes that were deemed architectural treasures. Both men then destroyed these singular residences out of an desire to impose their particular aesthetic visions on their properties and surrounding neighborhoods and, in West’s case, to make a statement in the larger world of design.
In April, Pratt and his wife, self-help author Katherine Schwarzenegger, became targets of widespread outrage among architecture fans, preservationists and even the national media when it was learned that they “surreptitiously” razed a classic mid-century modern home in Brentwood by famed Southern California architect Craig Elmwood. The couple had essentially purchased the 74-year-old Zimmerman house as a tear-down, to make way for a 15,000-square-foot structure that Dwell magazine scathingly said would be built in the “increasingly ubiquitous, though contentious” farmhouse style.
The previous owner, a money manager, used the house to display his collection of contemporary art. West had other ideas.