“The Hilltop House, one of the Morgan’s greatest designs, epitomizes his intention to build with the earth, not on it, the essential attribute of his earth architecture. The site is a hill located in central Florida, 2000 feet in diameter, rising 70 feet, the top of which the clients chose as their favorite picnic spot before the house was built. When first seen from a great distance, the house strikes one as being at once natural and artificial, archaic and modern. The house draws the massive heaviness of the hill up into a pyramidal form, its corners oriented to the cardinal points, and its spaces framed by earth-retaining walls of geometric precision. The rooms of the house open in four directions, fronted by protected terraces cut into ground, so that this most earth-bound of houses is paradoxically, cross-ventilated by all four winds. The upper level, named “the Observatory”, is a single, central room, crowned by a pyramidal roof that brings the lines of the house and hill to its peak, and from which one is afforded uninterrupted views of the surrounding landscape. Inspired by prehistoric earth architecture, this house provides its occupants both modern spatial freedoms and an intensely spiritual connection to earth.”