PLEASURE DOME

Superstar DJ and music producer Diplo assembles a team of visionary creatives to conjure a dreamlike compound in the Jamaican jungle

- MAYER RUS

The preeminent German poet-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously described architecture as “frozen music,” opining that “the state of mind produced by architecture is similar to the effect of music.” Over 150 years later, Frank Zappa—a somewhat less august personage, perhaps, but nevertheless prescient— reframed Goethe’s meditation on the corporeal and the ethereal: “Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance space is sculpted into something,” Zappa professed. One wonders what type of music might be frozen in the bold volumes and interwoven planes of the Jamaican pleasure dome created by Grammy-winning celebrity DJ and producer Thomas Wesley Pentz, better known as Diplo. Given his penchant for genre-bending and -breaking, mixing and remixing, the property reflects not so much a specific kind of music but Diplo’s approach to music and creativity in general. With its three dominant notes of concrete, wood, and lush greenery, the house feels like a mash-up of its rainforest setting, the land reconfigured and refined in ways that parallel the sampling and refashioning that are hallmarks of the musician’s practice. The rhythmic interplay of the artificial and the natural, the different pitches and textures of the various spaces, all offer a glimpse into Diplo’s dexterity as a songwriter and his intuitive grasp of what makes a project work.