LA's Most Beautiful Tennis Court

Sheats-Goldstein Residence

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The Trophy and the Court

The Inaugural MAK Games at the Goldstein Infinity Court

Photograph by John Sciulli

In October 2013, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture staged the inaugural MAK Games — a benefit tennis tournament played on the Infinity Court, the cantilevered concrete court designed by Architect Duncan Nicholson as a major addition to the Sheats-Goldstein Residence. It was a natural pairing: a fundraiser for Schindler House at a Lautner landmark, played beneath open sky with the city spread out below.

The event drew players and guests from across the architecture and arts world, and was covered by the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, T Magazine, and the Hollywood Reporter. The winners — musician Danger Mouse, filmmaker Stephen Gaghan, and MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer — received a custom trophy designed by Duncan Nicholson and fabricated by Breakform Design, the El Segundo metalwork and fabrication firm that has been central to the Sheats-Goldstein project for decades.

A trophy where the seams of a tennis ball become structural cantilevers in polished steel — designed by the same architect who cantilevered the court it was awarded on. The logic is continuous.

Left to right: Danger Mouse, Stephen Gaghan, and MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer. Photograph by John Sciulli

Winners holding the Nicholson-designed trophy on the Goldstein Infinity Court. Photo by Emily Berl for the New York Times.

The trophy is worth pausing on. Nicholson's design — fabricated by Breakform in mirror-polished stainless steel — takes a tennis ball as its form but refuses the expected representation. Where a real tennis ball has painted lines on a continuous surface, the trophy has none: those lines are replaced by actual breaks in the skin of the sphere, gaps where the stainless steel panels peel away and cantilever outward from the body of the object. The seams become structure. The decoration becomes space. It is, in miniature, exactly the move the Infinity Court makes at architectural scale — cantilever as the primary gesture, material precision as the finish.

Breakform Design has been the fabrication partner at the Sheats-Goldstein Residence since the early 2000s — responsible for the custom stainless steel windows, doors, furniture, floors, bars, and railings that give the Lautner interior its particular material weight. That the tournament trophy came out of the same shop, in the same metal, by the same hands, is entirely in keeping with the character of the place.

For more on the Infinity Court itself — its geometry, cantilever, and concrete construction — see the dedicated Infinity Court post.

James Perry with the Nicholson/Breakform trophy at MAK Games, 2019

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Press Coverage — October 2013

Los Angeles Times  ·  Architectural Digest  ·  T Magazine / New York Times  ·  Hollywood Reporter

Original article URLs from 2013 are no longer reliably accessible. Links go to current publication homepages.

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Related on Architectoid

The Infinity Court — Nicholson's Cantilevered Addition
Goldstein Entertainment Complex
Goldstein Post-Tensioned Concrete Slab
Sheats-Goldstein Residence — John Lautner

Architectoid  ·  Sheats-Goldstein Residence Series