I had been interested in things of this sort for a very long time. As a mattter of fact, I often thought of making sunken gardens. I remember a specific place where a house had burned so only the excavation was left, so I put the house to one side and th excavation became a sunken garden. Quite a few of my houses have been partially below the surface. The first house I did, out in Ohio [Gunning, 1940], is partially below the surface, that is the earth comes up to the sill line on the outside and then the floor is below. At Fritz Bultman's studio in Provincetown [1945], one side of the building is about 4 feet below the surface. And then my scheme for Betty Parsons' house [1959]––the floor dropped about 2 1/2 feet below the ground level. I have always been interested in excavating and then piling the dirt up; a lot of it has to do with cutting into the side of a hill and then using excavated earth beyond that as fill. 

– Tony Smith, 1971