BE IT EVER SO SMART

Hollywood's glamour couple is building the high-tech home of the future. There's no place like it.
By Curl Steinburg

Captain of digital industry Michael Rheingelt was a household name even before he landed the biggest private infrastructure contract in the history of the galaxy. His pioneering broadband network, BigBand LLC, cast a net of glittering glass fiber over the entire United States of China. Then China Unicom bought Rheingelt out for a sum of money that left old man Gates looking hard up. It's safe to say that Rheingelt now has some spare time on his hands, but what to do with it? He's rich, successful, and married to gorgeous three-time Oscar winner Genevieve Welch. How could he possibly add to a life so crowded with success?

Well, by finally fulfilling his childhood dream of building a home for himself and his family. But not just any home. Rheingelt's "electronic cottage," as he calls it, is a daring breakthrough in postindustrial construction. It is the largest and most ambitious smart home ever designed. With it, Rheingelt hopes to create a new architectural ideal, one that combines elegant design and cutting-edge conveniences with the highest ideals of ecological awareness.

Of course, the public expects nothing less from a couple that happens to be one of America's most glamorous in two of its most glamorous industries, technology and entertainment. Success has not spoiled them. When we caught up with Rheingelt and Welch on the construction site, they still showed the charm that has made them media darlings.

"I couldn't tell you what it was that first attracted me to Genevieve," says Rheingelt, who had swapped his trademark geek uniform for a Kevlar hard hat and denim overalls." I guess it's a tradition — almost a cliché — for us network moguls to fall for eccentric left-wing actresses."

"Who are you to call anyone eccentric?" Genevieve retorts, hugging her husband as their army of computer-guided bulldozers rumbles in the background. "Did you know this guy still sinks money into cold-fusion research? It's true!"

"Cold fusion could still happen," says Rheingelt defensively. Then, staring out at the West Virginia strip mine destined to be the site of his new high-tech mansion, Rheingelt begins to prophesize.

"We're going to make jokes out of Gates, Dell and Ellison," he says. "Those dorks had no sense of style. If good taste had bitten them in the leg, they would have screamed in horror and whacked it with a rolled-up newspaper."

Welch, clearly, has heard all this before, and she rolls her eyes affectionately.

"Look at this place," Rheingelt goes on, his arm sweeping the horizon dramatically. "See what I mean? Gates built his house in an earthquake zone, for crying out loud! Compared to me and Genevieve, Gates, Rockefeller, Jobs, Ford, Edison — the whole 20th century lot of them — were crude, cave-fish versions of wealth. We are the fully evolved, civilized rich people. And we're about to prove it to the world."

Both Rheingelt and Welch are fans of classic architecture. Rheingelt favors the severe industrial style of Lord Foster of Thames Bank, designer of the Hong Kong Airport and restorer of the Reichstag in Berlin. Welch prefers the work of Art Nouveau geniuses Hector Guimard and Victor Horta, who pioneered curving, organic forms in their buildings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The couple points out that their 20th century tastes unite the two periods before and after Communism. But how to bring these divergent styles together?

Rheingelt and Welch decided to sponsor an international competition. All entries had to be certified with the highest possible Environment Rating, and the winner would receive a prize of $30 million. That prize was ultimately claimed by the Amsterdam-based architecture firm Slippery Logic, in partnership with the Berlin engineers Grunen & Grunen. The result is a vast, sprawling, truly fantastic blend of the organic and the geodesic.