Beauty and the box; Silverstein residence

Much has been written about the architecturally significant Silverstein home on Casey Key, designed by internationally acclaimed architect Toshiko Mori, FAIA, and constructed by Sarasota custom builder Michael Walker. Architectural Digest is among the publications that have raved about the "beautiful balance" of strength and ethereal lightness that characterizes the dwelling, which Mori has compared to a horseshoe crab, with a hard protective shell outside and a soft interior.

Looking out the windows toward the Gulf of Mexico on a January afternoon, I was not surprised to see the effect the house had on a pair of passing bicyclists who paused in the crushed limestone drive to gawk at the modern glass-and-concrete facade set upon eight piers above them. The tourists stared in open-mouthed wonder at the two-story, floating box; an apparition of modern composition rising up from a narrow barrier island between the Gulf of Mexico and Little Sarasota Bay.

Honoring a continuum of modernism found in the mid-century Sarasota School of architecture, Toshiko Mori's commission belongs to Mike and Renee Silverstein, a knowledgeable and discerning couple who live here seven months of the year with Calypso, a Yorkshire terrier, and a Maine Coon cat named Frazier. The couple has built or renovated nine dwellings in their 48 years of marriage, working with major architects, such as Charles Young, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, Alan Watzenberg and Henry Meyerberg. They have nothing but admiration for Toshiko Mori, the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2002. She is also principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, which she established in 1981 in New York City.

This home represents a new stage for the design connoisseurs. For Casey Key, the Silversteins desired a spare beach retreat that would express their modern sensibilities and serve as a suitable showcase for a panoply of museum-quality, 20th-century furniture and art from their extensive collections. Renee and Mike say they've "done the museum-quality, 18th-century mansion thing" at the corner of 64th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan (which an article in New York magazine described as "The Greatest Apartment in New York"), and currently own a three-story, circa 1910 Dutch Colonial on the north shore of Long Island at Sands Point.

"If you have studied museum-quality, 18th-century historical design and understand its complexities and beauty, you then are able to pare down and become a modernist with pure enjoyment and appreciation," says Renee.

Toshiko Mori designed a structure that both embraces and defends itself from the water on both sides, and challenges the corrosive effects of wind, sun and salt air. "The house has a tough exterior, which gives it a monumental scale against the Gulf of Mexico and strength to withstand adverse climate conditions," the architect says. "Yet the interior is filled with ethereal light -- airy and atmospheric." Despite its mass, the structure touches the ground lightly at two points: one being the pillars and glass vestibule underneath, and the second at the end of a suspended walkway that tethers the house to the tropical gardens on the east, or bay side of the property.

Rising up through the center is the single-most dramatic element: a glass core that begins at ground level with a transparent, enclosed entry space, flows up the stairs through a translucent glass floor at the first level and culminates in a prismatic skylight in the roof. But it is not just any skylight. This is a masterpiece by Toshiko Mori's husband, James Carpenter, an artist and sculptor of great renown, who blurs the lines between architecture, engineering and fine arts. Fascinated with the phenomenon of making light visible, Carpenter has developed new glass and material technologies for some of the most famous structures in the world. His company's installations have included an animated podium light wall for 7 World Trade Center; a transparent, double cable-net wall for the Time Warner Center; and an undulating glass dome for Penn Station.