12/24/2022 0 Comments Susan downey![]() ![]() ![]() “Plus, we love a character.”Įrecting it turned out to be the easy part. “We wanted to try something that hadn’t been done before,” says Susan. The actor was skeptical at first but eventually embraced the idea. A mutual friend, the English designer Robert Clydesdale, suggested they consider Nicolò, who had been working to update his father’s Binishells - and bring them up to code - on a remote plot of land in Joshua Tree. They wanted a stand-alone place for entertaining and to house guests, and were underwhelmed by other architects’ restrained proposals. The Downeys decided to have Nicolò build them their dome in 2013, just as the “Iron Man” trilogy was coming to an end. “They wanted to live in a sculpture,” says Bini, who once accompanied the director to a local quarry to smell “the scent of the universe” in a freshly split slab of pink granite. Bini’s favorite may be La Cupola in Sardinia, a now-derelict cliff-top monument to the love affair between Michelangelo Antonioni, a master of Modernist Italian cinema, and his muse, the actress Monica Vitti. The structures were also erected as grain silos in the deserts of Afghanistan and to protect seismographs atop Mount Etna in Sicily, where, through earthquakes and eruptions, one remains standing 50 years later. “It was to figure out a better way of building.”Īt the height of their popularity in the late 1970s, Binishells popped up like soap bubbles across Australia, where Bini, who got the idea for the domes after a game of tennis under an inflatable roof, had been hired by the public works department of New South Wales to build schools his prototypes were adapted for homes, gymnasiums, libraries and shopping centers. “My intention wasn’t to propagate his work,” he says. Nicolò didn’t so much follow in the elder Bini’s footsteps as stumble into them while puzzling over fast, efficient solutions to the global housing crisis. Downey’s Binishell was designed by the creator’s son, Nicolò, a 55-year-old Beverly Hills-based architect who’s reimagining his father’s innovation. The now-90-year-old Italian industrial designer discovered that by topping a nylon-coated neoprene air bladder with wet steel-reinforced concrete, then slowly inflating it, he could make - in an hour or so, about the time it takes for the material to cure - a naturally aerodynamic and durable thin-shell bungalow. “It was a crucible of faith,” says the actor about his elaborate version of the typically humble Binishell, a form originated in 1964 by Dante Bini. But the most expressive signifier of the Downeys’ whimsy sits in the other direction, behind the kidney-shaped swimming pool: an undulating 6,500-square-foot white concrete domed structure that could either be prehistoric or from the distant future. Down the gravel driveway, a tennis court overlooks Zuma Beach to the right, alpacas rest on a sunny patch of grass not far from the cottage-style main house where the actor lives with his wife, Susan, a 48-year-old movie producer, and their two young children. A BREEZE CUTS through the ocean air as a mechanical gate opens onto Robert Downey Jr.’s seven-acre Malibu, Calif., estate. ![]()
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