“Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?”  Theodore Roethke asked in his 1953 poem, “The Waking.”  Trees have been our natural environment since before we came down from them, and they hold a deeply embedded place in the human psyche.  Their generations of leaves are an intuitive metaphor for death and renewal.  In a poem that contemplates mortality, did Roethke want his listeners to unconsciously hear “blight takes the tree?”  Or just recall the redemptive wonder we feel on seeing a tree mysteriously transformed by horizontal sunlight?  Beyond a metaphysical import, every tree has specific qualities that might influence its selection as an intermediary between artificial shelter and nature.  The poplar pictured above, for example, has brittle leaves that make the wind audible as a gentle clapping sound.  

Philip Johnson called his Glass House a “pavilion for viewing nature,” and referred to its lush setting as “expensive wallpaper.”  A year after the house’s completion, Johnson explained its formal influences in the September, 1950, issue of Architectural Review.  The uncaptioned photo above accompanied his article, a goes-without-saying nod to his design’s source in the landscape.  The image also highlights the incidental but pervasive and integral effect of trees as animating sources of shadow and reflection.  

Caspar David Friedrich’s 1822 painting, “Noon,” captures the fundamental allure of a stand of trees.  In his 1963 book, Ecology, Eugene Odum wrote:  “Human civilization has so far reached its greatest development in what was originally forest and grassland in temperate regions. . . . Man, in fact, tends to combine features of both grasslands and forests into a habitat for himself that might be called forest edge. . . . in grassland regions he plants trees around his homes, towns, and farms. . . . when man settles in the forest he replaces most of it with grasslands and croplands, but leaves patches of the original forest on farms and around residential areas. . . . man depends on grasslands for food, but likes to live and play in the shelter of the forest.”

An admirer of Caspar David Friedrich, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel painted “Landscape with Gothic Arcades” in 1811.  The romantic appeal of Schinkel’s architectural vision is closely related to the natural pull of Friedrich’s grove in “Noon.”  The architect Robert Geddes’ 1982 essay in Architectural Design, “The Forest Edge,” quotes the passage above from Eugene Odum’s Ecology, and takes its title from his name for man’s prefered environment.  The forest edge, Geddes wrote, “can be seen both as man’s ideal habitat and as a mythical image.  Consequently, just as man has enjoyed the forest at the edge of the clearing which has offered him both shelter and openness, so today we enjoy being in architecture which recreates similar spatial conditions: arcades and colonnades, loggias and porches, thresholds, cloisters, courtyards and peristyles – all of which resemble clearings at the edge of the forest.”

A convention of Japanese woodblock prints creates spatial depth by framing distant views in a foreground of trees or branches.  Kawase Hasui’s 1922 view of a scene in Katsusa, Hizen Province, goes further by picturing an entire tree-defined foreground space, and placing the viewer within its protection.  Trees placed around a house can give its exterior views a similar spatial depth and sense of shelter, without the expense or artifice of a colonnade or porch.  

Frank Lloyd Wright’s rendering makes his 1905 Glasner House seem to peer out from the woods into a clearing.  

The double-height stair space of Richard Neutra’s 1927-29 Lovell Health House lets natural light and the moving shadows of trees deep inside.  

Charles and Ray Eames’ 1949 Case Study House #8, better known as the Eames House, has a planted forest-edge colonnade of Eucalyptus trees between its façade and the meadow and ocean vista it overlooks.  The trees not only frame the open view, but provide a play of shadows and reflections across the contrasting industrial surfaces and interior of the house.  Their animation is indispensible to the design’s vitality, as demonstrated in countless frames from the Eames’ film, “House after five years of living.”   

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House was completed in 1951.  Despite its 360-degree views, the house very much has a front and back.  Its living spaces and terrace overlook the nearby Fox River to the south.  A venerable sugar maple mediates this view, while providing much needed summer shade.  The ailing tree is now guy-wired together to preserve the integrity of Mies’s vision.    

Rule 8 is to use trees.

Trees can bring nature to affordable sites far from the shore or landscape vistas.  If a building lot offers no existing trees to exploit, new ones should be included in a house’s budget, and chosen and placed for maximum effect.  As well as providing shade and privacy, trees capture the mystery of changing light, give voice and visibility to the wind, mark the passage of the day with the sweep of their shadows, inform the seasons with their changing leaves and, in their slow growth, echo the accumulation of the years of memories that give a place personal meaning.  Use trees for these rewards and to extend a house’s sense of shelter and give a foreground to its exterior views.  Let the moving shadows of branches and leaves animate the surface of the house and fall inside to vitalize its interior and keep nature near.

Johannes Vermeer’s The Music Lesson was painted in the early 1660s.  As in most of Vermeer’s thirty-odd paintings, light enters from the left, spreading itself across a rear wall.  The situation is modeled on his studio, where a window and wall intersected to create just such a wash of illumination.  While light can be visibly suspended in the thick air of haze or smoke, it typically manifests itself on the surfaces it strikes.  Vermeer portrayed this presence so strongly that light is said to be a character in his paintings.  

Edward Hopper painted Rooms by the Sea in 1951.  Recalling Vermeer in both light and convenience of inspiration, the scene is based on the artist’s studio.  Hopper’s light takes on added mystery in its juxtaposition to a surrealistically immediate sea.  An alternate title, The Jumping Off Place, was abandoned because of its perceived “malign overtones.”  This title would have emphasized the interior-exterior dynamic that distinguishes Hopper’s painting from a Vermeer.  With its minimal frame, the opening to the sea is less like a hole in a wall than the mouth of a chute, implying outward projection and stating the spatial complement to the lighting effect of Vermeer’s window.  Painter’s sensitivity to light allows them to recognize its transforming effect wherever they find it.  Some architects share this sensitivity and have created powerful examples of what can be achieved with light’s deliberate manipulation.  

A tiny window admits disproportionate light in Jorn Utzon’s house, Can Lis.  (See Rule 6.)  The oblique incidence of sunlight here highlights the texture of  stone quarried on-site, reinforcing the relationship of the house to its immediate setting.  The moving shaft of light acts as a sundial, engaging the greater context of the solar system.  

The 1924 plan of a Brick Country House by Mies van der Rohe is often compared to an abstract De Stijl painting.  Radical for its time, the plan replaces traditional box-like rooms with flowing space.  Walls project out into the landscape, suggesting the further flow of interior space into the outdoors.  With only two exceptions, exterior corners are formed by a brick wall intersecting glass, thus recalling Vermeer’s window.  These corners would at once recreate his characteristic wash of light and invite the eye of the occupant to follow the opaque walls’ real (in some cases) or imagined projection into exterior space.  The house would not only have admitted light like no other of its time, but would have created an unprecedented sense of spatial release.  

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1924 Freeman House dates from the same year as Mies’s Brick Country House.  Extending from floor to ceiling, Wright’s glazed corners look less like conventional punched windows than gaps in exterior walls.  Interior space slides between the floor and ceiling planes and outside without interruption.  Wright rebelled against Palladio’s assertion that corners should not be opened because they are a building’s strongest support.  He wrote in his Autobiography:  ”I soon realized that the corners of the box were not the economical or vital bearing points of structure.  The main load of the usual building I saw was on the walls and so best supported at points some distance back from the corner.  The spans were then reduced by cantileverage.  So I took the corners out, put in glass instead . . .”   Wright turned what had been the darkest part of a house into the brightest.  He also struck one of his greatest blows against the tyranny of The Box, and shelter’s ancient baggage of confinement.  

Louis I. Kahn used a keyhole window of his own invention in the design of the 1959-61 Esherick House.  (See Rule 3.)  While respecting privacy, the street-facing window allows a maximum of natural light to enter at the top of a double-height living room, insuring that it will fall deep into the house.  Kahn placed its frame tight against the ceiling and walls, exploiting them in the manner of Vermeer and using their light-washed surfaces to soften the contrast between bright outdoors and shaded interior.  The narrow windows below, reminiscent of castle architecture that captivated Kahn, have shutters that can be closed for greater privacy.  Built-in shelves on either side make a sun-shielded place for books and a deep window recess.  Kahn reduced contrast and glare by fully glazing the more private opposite side of the space, balancing natural light throughout.  

Kahn’s 1959-69 First Unitarian Church in Rochester, NY, rebukes the entire history of stained glass.  Four center-facing light scoops rise from the corners of its sanctuary, cardinal point apertures that track the sun’s transit and lock the space into a celestial context.  Raw, glare-free light is captured on the humblest concrete surfaces.  The stark lack of artifice distills light to it’s essence, allowing it to manifest itself to the viewer as if for the first time, igniting wonder.  The space is a reminder that other worlds are no competition for the forgotten mystery of immediate reality, once distractions are removed and our attention is brought back to it.  

Luis Barragan’s 1947 House and Studio uses light not just for illumination, but to modulate space with brightness, shadow, attraction and mood.  For the devoutly Catholic Barragan, light clearly had a spiritual dimension as well.  

The main living space in Barragan’s house has a framelessly glazed end wall.  The eye is led smoothly into the landscape even as leaf-dappled light washes over interior surfaces, bringing trees and their wind stirred movement indoors.  (See Rule 8.)  

Tadao Ando’s 2001-03 4×4 House, a tower by the sea, showcases two basic window types.  The small one above the table classically frames a view within an opaque plane.  As is typical with such punched openings, the eye’s tendency to restore the wall plane’s unpunctured gestalt competes with whatever sense of spatial flow into the distance might be suggested by the window.  The constrained visual dynamic is the opposite of Barragan’s frameless window pictured above.  Ando’s placement of a TV screen next to the small window seems a wry commentary on its spatial superficiality.  The frameless glass wall at right presents no such hurdle.  Its ”jumping off” sense of outward extension and dramatic wash of sunlight recall Hopper’s Rooms By the Sea.  The small window serves as its counterpoint, but also provides orientation and integrates the house with the dining table, to which it is aligned and scaled.  (See Rule 6.)  

Rule 7 is to optimize natural light.

Make the most of natural light.  Provide large windows at living areas and economically supplement these with strategically placed smaller windows to balance interior light.  Place windows at corners to allow light to splay across adjacent surfaces and to break the corners’ sense of confinement.  Use tall windows to allow light to fall deep into interior spaces.  Conceive of the house as a means of modulating natural light and choreographing the sun’s movement.

Architect Jørn Utzon’s home, Can Lis, was completed in 1972.  Composed of individual structures and courtyards, it stands on a cliff overlooking the sea in Majorca, Spain.  A one-room building at its center contains a built-in crescent seat facing the vista through deep openings, with a fireplace on one side.

A primitive sketch by Utzon shows the house’s central seating pavilion in isolation, suggestin that it was the germ of the entire house.  

Can Lis was partly inspired by a cave Utzon found on the site, which informs the house’s site-quarried stone walls and tunneled windows, their concealed frames suggesting unglazed openings.  The central structure’s seating evokes a campfire circle, adding to the primal appeal.  A vision of relaxed family and friends enjoying each other and the scene would have made human experience the starting point of the house’s design.  As Thoreau wrote in Walden:  “What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, – out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life.”  Utzon’s centerpiece recalls the more succinct Thoreau who asked, ”What is a house but a seat?”  Most people admit to spending the majority of their waking hours at home in one or two pieces of furniture.  Given the favorite chair’s outsized role as life’s cockpit, the selection and arrangement of furniture warrants primary consideration in the design of a house.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1939 Goetsch-Winckler House is typical of his Usonian houses in its use of built-in furniture, here including a fireplace seat, two tables, a bar, a desk and bookcases.  Only the central living room furniture is left to the owner’s discretion.  Integrating furniture from the house’s conception, Wright unified the immediate accommodation and experience of the dweller to the overall dwelling.  The built-in furniture also makes efficient use of space, allowing a compact house to generously serve multiple functions, and gave Wright a high level of control; for costlier houses he might design all of the furnishings down to the napkin rings.  Wright once visited Graycliff, the summer house he had designed for Darwin D. Martin and his wife Isabelle, shortly after its completion.  Finding no one at home, he let himself in and discovered that furniture had been moved from the locations he had laid out.  The Martins later returned to find it pushed back into Wright’s preferred arrangement, and fresh flowers on the dining table.  The story doesn’t just portray Wright’s ego; it tells how fully he viewed furniture as an integral part of his architecture.

Furniture as architecture:  using raw space as a backdrop, a Design Within Reach catalogue photo demonstrates the power of furniture alone to create a domestic sphere and set a tone.  Animating even an unoccupied room, it suggests human presence, social interaction and lifestyle.  (Eero Saarinen’s 1948 Womb Chair, at right in the photo, was designed in response to a request by Florence Knoll’s for “a chair she could curl up in.”)  A huge share of classic twentieth century furniture, more popular now than ever, was designed by architects like Saarinen, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, and Arne Jacobsen.

In place of traditional partitioned rooms, furniture groupings define various living functions in Philip Johnson’s Glass House.  Johnson’s use of furniture designed by Mies van der Rohe acknowledges the inspiration of his Farnsworth House.  Mies pioneered not only the glass house, but the use of furniture to mark different activity areas within open and flexible space.  The Barcelona Chair Johnson incorporated was designed by Mies for his German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, as seating for the King and Queen of Spain to oversee opening ceremonies.  Created for a specific couple and building, the chair has long since become a lumbar-oblivious cliché  of corporate lobbies.   It’s thought to be inspired by folding curule seats used by Roman aristocracy, an appropriate provenance.  Mies also made the chair extra wide, turning the height of a throne on its side to suit both traditional prestige and the radically modern horizontality of his pavilion.  A bridge between body and building, the Barcelona Chair is a quintessential reminder that furniture is architecture.

Rule 6 is to incorporate furniture.

Design for furniture.  A house might be said to consist of furniture groupings and the paths among them.  Base the size, shape and orientation of spaces on optimal furniture arrangements, especially as they relate to light, views and circulation paths.  The final assessment of a house is made from the vantage of its sofas and chairs.  Starting with the view from these will insure a satisfying end.  Furniture itself is architecture, and its design has as much bearing on quality of space as do walls and finishes.  Include its cost in the budget for a house and, before scrimping, weigh its impact against other costs.  Consider that a person can be only one place at a time, and will spend the great majority of time in one or two preferred seats.  Match furniture to the character of its users and setting.

An illustration from William A. Bruette’s 1934 book, Log Camps & Cabins, shows an example of a cabin open at one end like a cave.  Outside, a campfire extends the domestic realm into nature.  The composition is the barest refinement of primitive man’s cave with banked fire outside.  The book’s epigraph reads:  “The cabin in the forest, on the banks of a quiet lake or buried in the wilderness back of beyond, is an expression of man’s desire to escape the exactions of civilization and secure rest and seclusion by a return to the primitive.”  Or in Huck Finn’s words, “The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.”  Few humans would prefer any kind of architecture to the pleasure and freedom of being outdoors in comfortable weather.  Even without retreating “back of beyond,” houses can make the most of their devil’s bargain between shelter and space.

The plan of Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1901 Henderson House is a near mirror-image of his Hickox House of 1900 (see House Rule 2) and very similar to his proposal for “A Home in a Prairie Town,” published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1901.  Each of these combines living functions into a single long but articulated space; dining area and library on either side of a living room with hearth.  In each house, the living room spills out onto a terrace that matches its width and axial relationship to the hearth; living room and terrace can be read as a single space incidentally divided by French doors.  In the drawing above, the living room’s ceiling beams - shown in dashed lines - extend through the exterior wall and over the open terrace, further claiming its outdoor space as an extension of the interior.

Wright’s 1905 Darwin Martin House Complex weaves together indoor and outdoor space. The main house is a more complex development of the Hickox and Henderson House plans Wright had earlier seen fit to repeat.  Their terraces are here replaced by a covered porch, the floor of which is finished in the same one-inch square floor tiles as the living area.  Above and below, the porch is a more committed relationship of interior to exterior.  A crescent of planting gives the porch privacy and defines an extended domain for the established grouping of library, living and dining room.

The enclosed space of Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion projects itself into open air by the suggestive effects of continuous flooring, interpenetrating walls and an overhanging roof.  Mies acknowledged Wright’s impact from the time of the 1910 German Wasmuth Portfolio of his work. 

Graham Phillips’ 2001 Skywood House adapts the exterior-claiming strategies of the Barcelona Pavilion to a home.  Pushing the limits of minimalism, it comes full circle to the image of a cave facing a clearing.

A drawing detail of Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe’s 1912 Kelling Hall shows a wing ending in a concave wall that seems to draw in outdoor space.  Maufe reverses the usual projecting bow-window in favor of an implied exterior room, blurring the transition from enclosed interior space to nature.  The primitive cave and its threshold are refined into a cut-stone concavity and terrace.  

Future Systems’ cave-like 1998 House in Wales is bermed into the ground at the top of a cliff.  It looks out over the sea through an elliptical wall of glass, like an eye.  Describing it, Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems said:  “There is only the grass and the glass.  Nothing else, no architecture.”

The floor plan of the House in Wales shows earth mounded up on either side and around the back, except for a narrow gap for the main entry door, centered on the curved rear wall.    The earth falls away more broadly at the straight section of wall, which is entirely glass where exposed, allowing an expansive view over the sea.  At the center of the house, a curved sofa focuses on a suspended fireplace, re-enacting the campfire circle of our cave-dwelling forebears and heightening the design’s contrast of primitive to futuristic.  Symmetrical teardrop-shaped cores contain bathrooms, utilities and the kitchen counter.  Their shape creates both a fluid transition between rooms and a sense of space expanding into nature.  The curved back wall embraces the vista, drawing the outdoors into the greater circle it implies.  Without any exterior effort to claim outdoor space, the house is made entirely one with it, and infinitely amplified.

Tezuka Architects’ 2005 Floating Roof House has banks of sliding doors on either side.  When they are fully retracted, the interior becomes an open-air pavilion protected only by a narrow roof.  Rather than spilling out to the exterior, the interior is itself transformed into outdoors.  The strategy, a hallmark of Tezuka’s work, was pioneered by Mies van der Rohe in his 1930 Tugendhat House, with its glazed living room wall that disappears down a slot into the basement.

Barton Myers’ 1999 House and Studio at Toro Canyon makes interior convertible to exterior with walls of glazed garage doors.  The house is a high-design response to the impulse of American suburbanites who in warm weather relax on lawn chairs in their garages, the door drawn up overhead, sipping beer from cans and paying unconscious homage to the threshold-dwelling ambivalence of our caveman forebears.        

Rule 5 is to engage the outdoors.

Conceive of the living space of a house as part of a greater whole that includes exterior space.  Minimize the barrier between the indoor and outdoor components of this whole and unite them with a common material, breadth or boundary, or by inflecting the inside of the house to address its surroundings.  The interior will gain a sense of release, its perceived boundary expanding into the outdoors.

A cutaway drawing of the Temple of Diana Propylaea at Eleusis illustrates Auguste Choisy’s 1899 Histoire de L’Architecture.  From tepees to temples to iconic mid-century glass houses, one-room buildings derive a primitive power from their simple integration of interior and exterior.

Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House of 1983-86 is a maximalist response to the call of the one-room building, with each of its several rooms a building unto itself.  Gehry said of his work from the period, ”I thought that by minimizing the issue of function, by creating one-room buildings, we could resolve the most difficult problems in architecture.  Think of the power of one-room buildings and the fact that historically, the best buildings ever built are one-room buildings.”  Gehry’s approach exceeds the budget of the typical American family, but his appreciation of one-room power is universally applicable.  For those who would tap into it, there are minimalist prototypes that suggest how to put multiple functions into what feels like a one-room house.

The plan of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House of 1945-51 is shown above that of Philip Johnson’s Glass House of 1945-49.  Johnson said:  “The idea of a glass house comes from Mies van der Rohe.  Mies had mentioned to me as early as 1945 how easy it would be to to build a house entirely of large sheets of glass. . . . I pointed out to him that it was impossible because you had to have rooms, and that meant solid walls up against the glass, which ruined the whole point;  Mies said, ‘I think it can be done’.”  Mies’s solution was to eliminate partitions and create a one-room house.  In doing so, he didn’t just find a way to make a pristine enclosure, but satisfied an inherited human impulse.  Arthur Drexler referred to this when he wrote that “Mies’ most original buildings are one-story structures, and the greatest of these consist of one room.  In this sense Mies has designed nothing but temples, which is to say that he has revealed the irrational mainspring of our technological culture.”  It’s no wonder that when Philip Johnson followed Mies’s lead, he found the requisite unpartitioned interior “less a defect than a boon,” according to his biographer, Franz Schulze.  Both houses in fact have more than one room, but disguise service spaces as freestanding objects.  The success of this strategy proves that there are effective ways to give a house of multiple spaces the sense of one room.

A floor plan of Comlongon Castle, a 15th century Scottish tower house, shows subsidiary rooms and a stair contained within the thick walls of a single central room.  The main room is so dominant, clearly defined and undisturbed by its surrounding support spaces that the castle retains the sense of a one room building.  Louis I. Kahn saw in it a way to provide services without compromising the integrity of primary spaces.  He wrote: “The Scottish Castle.  Thick, thick walls.  Little openings to the enemy.  Splayed inwardly to the occupant.  A place to read, a place to sew. . . . Places for the bed, for the stair. . . . Sunlight.  Fairy tale.”  This inspiration is most literally applied in the thickened wall that contains services in his Esherick House, illustrated in Rule 3.

An early version floor plan of Kahn’s 1957-61 Richards Medical Center at the University of Pennsylvania shows three square laboratory spaces clustered around a central service core.  Like the central room at Comlongon Castle, each laboratory is a pure shape surrounded by support functions - stair, ventilation shaft and columns - clearly illustrating Kahn’s idea of an architecture of served and servant spaces.  As at the castle, these would be stacked into towers.

A sketch of Alison and Peter Smithson’s 1959 “Retirement House” project for Alison’s parents owes a clear debt to the Richards Medical Research building by Kahn.  Here the surrounding “servant” appendages are bathroom, kitchen and storage and the central “served” space is a one-room house.

A more developed plan of the Smithson’s Retirement House turns the earlier version inside out, bringing Kahn’s servant spaces indoors as multiple offspring of the Farnsworth House core.  These are held away from the exterior walls, even though a glass perimeter isn’t at issue here.  The inviolate perimeter does, however, create much the same one-room effect as the Farnsworth House, with a simple shell enclosing a single flowing space.  A sense of freedom and endlessness is produced by the absence of dead ends or space-trapping corners; even the necessary inside angles of the outer box are each glazed on one side, suggesting continuation of interior space to the exterior, and flooding what would otherwise be dark corners with light.  The loose arrangement of the service cores creates separate areas for different functions which flow into each other, rather than the usual bento box of contained rooms.

Benthem Crouwel’s Benthem House is a high-tech, lightweight upfdate on the one-room house.  Its services occupy a thickened wall in the manner of Kahn.  The strip of cabana-like rooms at right contains kitchen, bath, mechanical equipment and two small bedrooms.  What the house gives up in the 360 degree outlook of its Farnsworth House ancestor, it makes up in livability.  The opaque service bar of such a solution might also provide privacy on a less remote and more affordable site than the Farnsworth House’s.

Thomas Phifer’s Salt Point House, completed in 2007, has an island service core on its first floor that creates privacy between its entry area, at right, and living area, at left.  The plan adopts the Farnsworth House’s model of a single room with a freestanding core, but affords privacy in a way that might be useful to any house on a narrow lot.

Pierre Koenig’s Bailey House of 1958-60, also known as Case Study House #21, uses both island-core and thickened-wall strategies.  The upper rectangle shows the house’s enclosed envelope, framed by opaque walls on each side and encircled by a moat that is occasionally bridged by brick-paved patios.  The living space is at left.  Its gridded floor encircles a core of two bathrooms flanking a tiny open-roofed court.  This claims the space all around the core as part of the living area, extending its domain right up to the bedroom and offiice at the extreme right.  These are defined not by partitions but only a change in flooring, and might be read as part of a thickened wall even though they are spatially open to the gridded floor associated with the living area.  They can be sealed off from each other by sliding doors, and from the living functions by pocket doors on either end of the bathroom core, aligned with the house’s centerline.  Closing these can convert the entire right half of the house into a thickened wall containing private support spaces.   With this design, Koenig takes Mies’s ideal of the one-room house into impressively practical territory.  By day, with its sliding doors open, the house can feel nearly as open as the Farnsworth House, all its spaces contributing to a building-sized expanse.  What might be constrained corridors in another architect’s hands here contribute to the house’s open area.  By night, its more private spaces have the option of being closed off.  The house was designed for a childless couple but might serve a small family as well, thanks to its easy flexibility.  The study is immediately convertible to a bedroom but meanwhile has a welcome openness not usually found in a spare bedroom.  The Bailey House is an open and flexible model particularly well scaled to the typical American family of today.

House Rule 4 is to pursue a one-room ideal.

Pursue the clarity and simplicity of a one-room house.  Give priority to a single continuous interior space, and treat services that must be enclosed, like bathrooms, closets and utility rooms, either as islands within this space or as part of thickened exterior walls enclosing it.  Minimize dead ends, interior corners and containment in favor of a sense of uninterrupted space.

“A Lake or River Villa for a Picturesque Site” illustrates A.J. Downing’s 1850 book, The Architecture of Country Houses.  Its orderly cruciform plan of perfectly shaped rooms is undisturbed by the messy supporting business of kitchen, laundry and storage hidden out back.  Unprepared for the encroachment of modern equipment, the villa’s designer simply tacks on a perfunctory service wing that drifts off the page while he focuses on the familiar building blocks of room and stair.  Today’s house designer has even more services to integrate, with bathrooms, wrap-around kitchens, utility rooms and attached garages.  He seems just as ill prepared to integrate these, and often puts up a dummy house-front of formal rooms to simplify composition of the street façade and to serve as an uninhabited buffer zone shielding the private family spaces and their services in back.  As with Downing’s example, the rear face of today’s house is a secondary concern.  The accidental backs to be glimpsed across rear yards of housing tracts attest to this.  Modern house-plan fare visibly strains to juggle curb appeal, integrity of rooms, and integrated services.  Downing’s example drops the ball on incorporation of services in favor of whole rooms and a picturesque face.  

Rudolph Wittkower’s influential 1949 book, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, is illustrated with “Schematized plans of eleven of Palladio’s Villas.”  Wittkower identifies the grid pattern at lower right as the basis for all of these.  By stretching its zones slightly and selectively omitting line segments, Palladio used this diagram to define all of a villa’s spaces at once.  The simultaneity and comprehensiveness of this method allowed rooms of varying shapes, sizes and orientations to mesh perfectly within a simple container.  The approach contrasts with that of the designer who plants rooms sequentially across a house, one decision limiting the next, and each additional room more awkwardly forced into whatever space remains.  This hapless approach is evident in the gerrymandered outline of the combined living spaces in so many of today’s houses, shapes no one would ever intentionally set out to make but could only have backed into.  

Wittkower’s pattern is here overlaid on Palladio’s Villa Foscari, “La Malcontenta,” of 1558-60.  Working from this pattern, Palladio not only insured perfectly formed rooms that would fit together with the precision of puzzle pieces, but pre-loaded the building faces with a classical rhythm.  As the walls were all load-bearing, the pattern also automatically gave his villas a workable system of structural bays.  The vaulted ceiling at the center of La Malcontenta illustrates his method’s marriage of structure and form.  The pattern’s “tartan” alternation of wide and narrow zones would be adopted by later architects to integrate modern services, as foreshadowed by its unintrusive accommodation of stairs in Palladio’s villas.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1894 Winslow House compactly internalizes services like kitchen and pantry (upper left), stairs, driveway entrance and storage without compromising the shape or organization of its living spaces.

Above, Palladio’s grid pattern is laid over the Winslow House plan, demonstrating its adaptability to the machine age.  A geometric pattern allowed Wright to absorb services into a coherent plan.  While most often recognized as history’s most influential architect for his classical vocabulary, Palladio’s way with order has extended his impact into modern architecture.

Louis Kahn’s 1959-61 Esherick House applies a simple abab rhythm of narrow (service) and wide (living) zones to a one-bedroom house for a single woman.  Kahn was fascinated by Wittkower’s illustration of Palladio’s villa pattern, which contributed to his conception of buildings composed of served and servant spaces.  He saw in the narrow bands of the tartan grid an opportunity to assimilate a building’s smaller support functions without disrupting its primary spaces or overall order.  The Esherick House echos the wide-narrow-wide pattern of the traditional center-hall house but adds another narrow zone on one side, containing the modern service machinery of kitchen, toilet and laundry downstairs and the master bath and closets upstairs.  This zone is effectively a closed but permeable “servant” block placed functionally between the driveway and the open “served” living space, the upper and lower levels of which are united by a double-height living room.  Sliding partitions allow the single upstairs bedroom, above the dining room, to open onto the two-story living area, making the entire house except for the service block into a single uncomplicated space for Kahn to treat as a laboratory of natural lighting.  The service block can be read as a thickened wall out of which the small support rooms have been carved, bookending the house with the nearly blank fireplace wall at its opposite end, each providing privacy from side neighbors.  In its response to context, Kahn’s diagram not only results in an internally coherent house, but one which is optimized to its site.

The organization of the Esherick House is legible in its rear façade.  From left to right are the double-height living room, stair hall, bedroom-over-dining room, and service block.

Rule 3 is to design from a diagram.

Design from a diagram.  Begin with the spaces and functions the house must contain, and an analysis of its site.  Rather than starting with individual rooms, think in terms of a few ordered zones of spaces related by size and function, and array them to exploit the site characteristics and serve an overriding design direction.  A comprehensive diagram for a small house can be very simple, but will yield a purposeful design made up of simultaneously conceived spaces that are all deliberate and whole.  The resulting clarity of plan will not only be economical to build, but will minimize the material and psychological clutter that a house can place between its dwellers and their simple enjoyment of lfe.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hickox House of 1900 opens its dining room, living room and library onto each other, combining them into a single expansive living space that runs the full length of the house.  The glazed ends of this space imply its infinite exterior projection, even as the doors leading from its center onto a terrace allow the living room to spill outside.  “Vista without and vista within,” were Wright’s words for the effect.  The outward thrust of the living space is countered by its focal hearth.  Wright attuned his houses to the ingrained daily rhythm by which our forebears faced outward to hunt and gather in the landscape by day and returned to the fire at night, tapping into the primitive brain with the calculation of a movie about alien predators.  In its human insight, its simultaneous appropriation of exterior space and indoor simulation of outdoor scale, and its diagrammatic clarity – pure living pavilion on one side and unintruding support functions on the other – the Hickox House is a particularly compact illustration of Wright’s multilevel genius.  It was a radical dwelling in its time.  In his 1954 book, The Natural House, Wright described how he had broken the box of the American house a half-century earlier: 

“Dwellings of that period were cut up, advisedly and completely, with the grim determination that should go with any cutting process.  The interiors consisted of boxes beside boxes or inside boxes, called rooms.  All boxes were inside a complicated outside boxing.  Each domestic function was properly box to box.  I could see little sense in this inhibition, in this cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions, except for the privacy of bedrooms on the upper floor.  They were perhaps all right as sleeping boxes.  So I declared the whole lower floor as one room, cutting off the kitchen as a laboratory . . .  Then I screened various portions of the big room for certain domestic purposes like dining and reading.  There were no plans in existence like these at the time. . . .  The house became more free as space and more livable too.  Interior spaciousness began to dawn.”

The lived-in rear of today’s typical American house, with its combined kitchen, informal dining area and family room, owes its existence to Wright’s pioneering vision, even as today’s self-contained, under-used and obligatory formal living and dining rooms are over a century behind him.  

Rule 2 is to combine living spaces. 

 Who has more?

Combine living, dining and other activity areas to partake of each other’s space.  Create a single generous area rather than several smaller constrained rooms.  If private activity areas are needed, incorporate them in bedrooms or circulation space, so these do double-duty.  Most homeowners spend the great majority of their at-home waking time not only in a favorite room, but on one or two favorite pieces of furniture, and even the richest mansion owner can experience only one room at a time.  Redirect resources from unnecessary partitions and redundant spaces into the best of all possible – and always used – living spaces.       

Cape Cod, saltbox, colonial, barn; American vernacular prototypes have simple rectangular plans, and shapes that are mere extrusions of their end walls.  These plain and practical forms represent the oldest and arguably most authentic stream of American domestic architecture.

A.J. Downing’s hugely influential 1850 book, The Architecture of Country Houses, is the prototypical rule book for designing an American house, and a key to understanding its direction ever since.  Downing championed houses designed in picturesque historical European styles, largely abandoning the unadorned foursquare early American tradition.  Pictured above, ”A Villa in the Norman Style,” described by Downing as the work of  architect W. Russell West, “is highly picturesque, and, in a suitable locality, would have a very striking and spirited effect.  Such a locality, of course, would hardly be found in a flat country, but amid wild scenery and hills, whose pointed tops are in harmony with the strength of the heavenward-pointing round-tower.  Of course, this is not a house to please a practical, commonsense man.  It is not a rational house, in the same manner that the classical villa, full of logical, straight lines, is rational – for there is here hardly a single continuous, unbroken line – every opening is arched, and all tendency is toward the pyramid or the curve.”  The design’s meandering perimeter, arched windows and piled up gables and peaks are hallmarks of today’s tract mansion, even as Downing’s format of seductive rendering above floor plan is now the standard of every house plan book and housing development brochure.

To Downing, a landscape architect, a house was only as good as its resonance with its natural setting.  He certainly wouldn’t approve of today’s suburban mansions on flat tracts, co-opting his naturalistic roof peaks to vie with each other as mountains of conspicuous consumption while betraying their owners’ egos and insecurities.  The examples in Downing’s book were designed by accomplished architects of his day including the great Alexander Jackson Davis.  The uninspired designs in today’s house plan books and suburban developments are less likely to be by registered architects than members of the self-serving American Institute of Building Design.  (“Use your AIBD affiliation to enhance your credibility.”)  

“A Laborer’s Cottage” is the first and simplest example in The Architecture of Country Houses, which has sections on cottages, farm houses and villas.  The book’s farm house and villa illustrations prefigure modern suburban house forms, while its modest cottages are actually more suited to the small households of today and make better models for a people carrying unprecedented levels of personal debt.  Downing wrote:  ”In each of the three classes of country houses, there is a predominant character, to which all other expressions . . . should be referred.  In cottages, this predominant character is simplicity.”  (Four years later, Thoreau would declaim in Walden, “Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”  Even as Downing cautioned against spending beyond the owner’s means, Thoreau lamented those who are “needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a [house] as their neighbors have,” homeowners who “have become the tools of their tools.”)  Downing idealized cottage dwellers as “industrious and intelligent mechanics and working men, the bone and sinew of the land,” but the seductiveness of his book’s romantic villas and the national promise of upward mobility made the humble cottage an unlikely American ideal.  In naming the simplest example in his book “A Laborer’s Cottage,” Downing stigmatized the simplicity he espoused for cottages as the mark of a working class that was also viewed as lower class.  (When an immigrating woman was screened for mental competence at Ellis Island with the question, ”How do you wash stairs, from the top or bottom?” she replied, “I don’t come to America to wash stairs.”)  The elaborate European house models Downing imported spread like invasive species in the soil of an American class consciousness that had only wishfully been defeated with the British.  The lasting and anxious lesson developers have taken from The Architecture of Country Houses is that complicated houses project success and higher class.  How much better today’s houses would be if – like both his examples shown here – they instead followed just one of Downing’s practical rules:  ”The principal entrance or front door should never open directly into an apartment of any kind, but always into a porch, lobby, or entry of some kind.  Such a passage not only protects the apartment against sudden draughts of air, but it also protects the privacy and dignity of the inmates.”

An American icon, the Airstream trailer was originally designed in 1935 by Hawley Bowlus, chief designer of Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis.  (Photo courtesy Airstream).   At once an advanced industrial product and a self-contained dwelling unit – with bed, table, seats, kitchen and bathroom – it indicts both the technological backwardness and material excess of the standard American house.  Only the mobile home segment of the housing industry has followed its lead, with less mobile results, and without the grace needed to overcome the class stigma enshrined in the words “trailer trash.”  Beyond freedom and mobility, theAirstream promises a chance to trade the burden of all one’s possessions for a single object as smooth and unitary as a river stone.  Motivated by aerodynamics, its single surface is the opposite of one of A.J. Davis’s spiky villas while answering like nothing else Thoreau’s call for simplicity.  The Airstream brings out the subversive Thoreau in each of us, secretly craving liberation from our belongings.  It points to where the appeal of a new American house might lie.    

Rule 1 is to build a small and simple shell.  

Build as small and simple an enclosure as possible.   (Don’t be tempted to add bedrooms or a basement you don’t need just for resale purposes.  The next buyer is just like you.  Most American households are an individual or a couple.)  For a small house, a pure rectangle will almost always make the most sense.  Construction costs will be reduced by minimizing material and labor, while life cycle costs will be kept down by a compact envelope that’s both energy efficient and easy to maintain.  If conventional, modular construction materials are to be used, base the dimensions of the house on a 2-foot module to reduce waste and labor.  If a garage is to be attached, try to include it within an overall simple enclosure, and locate the main entry to the house near the garage, close to the driveway by which guests will arrive.  Place the door leading from the garage to the house – often used informally by guests – near the main entry door, so both doors can share a transitional entrance area within the house, screened from private living spaces.

A 1958 Corvette, one of the last models designed by the line’s visionary creator, Harley Earl.

No design product is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette.  Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air.  It is as much about the experience it promises (and delivers) as about its material allure.  The two-seater’s reductiveness is arguably far more American than the prevailing national tendency toward bigness.  Today’s ubiquitous SUVs hold only an empty promise of off-road driving.  They are parked outside equally pointless and oversized houses full of formal spaces and bedrooms that are never used, “empty guest chambers for empty guests,” as Thoreau observed of the typical American house over a century and a half ago in Walden.  

The American house has doubled in size since the first Corvette was launched in the 1950s, even as households have become smaller.  According to the 2000 census, less than a third of American households are families with children under 18 at home, and over a quarter are individuals living alone. 

American life needs a new vehicle.  American literature offers the introduction to the rules of its design.    

1841

A 1919 drawing by Harry Clarke illustrates ”A Descent into the Maelstrom,” first published in 1841.

Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelström,” is narrated by a man whose schooner is drawn into the funnel of a giant storm-whipped whirlpool.  As his brother clings desperately to the boat’s deck in terror, the narrator accepts the certainty of death: 

“Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. . . . I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power. . . . After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself.  I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was about to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see.” 

His calm allows him to observe how the boat and other large pieces of spinning debris that have been pulled into the whirlpool descend quickly, while smaller objects of specific shapes are drawn downward more slowly.  He sees a chance of survival in abandoning the boat.  Unable to pry his brother’s attention or hands from the deck bolt to which he clings, the narrator lashes himself to a barrel from the boat and throws himself overboard.  The schooner is pulled under while the narrator descends slowly enough for the storm and whirlpool to abate, allowing his survival.

Poe’s story illustrates a basic psychological paradox.  As Ekhart Tolle argues in The Power of Now, fear of what might happen in the future robs us of the only place we can ever truly live, the now.  As with the doomed brother, fear of death takes our lives.  Releasing our death grip on the ego and turning outward to observe the present moment is our only hope of life. 

In the course of trading fear for wonder, Poe’s narrator also lightens his physical load, trading boat for barrel.   This exchange of material weight for life, and the theme of salvation through in-the-moment atunement to nature, anticipate central themes of Walden, published 13 years later.

1854 

The framing of Thoreau’s one-room, 10′ by 15′ cabin at Walden Pond was researched and documented in this drawing by Roland Wells Robbins.  As noted by Theodore M. Brown, Thoreau’s construction was needlessly heavy, the balloon frame having been recently developed.  Had he been aware of it, Thoreau would certainly have opted for the new, less substantial envelope.   

“I went into the woods,” Thoreau explains in Walden, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only on the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”  Thoreau saw possessions and domestic architecture in particular as barriers to true living, not only as physical obstructions between man and nature, but as sources of debt, drudgery and worry about the future inimical to enjoyment of the present:  “In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.”  After listing the material luxuries of a civilized house, he asks:

“But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage?  If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man . . .  it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

Thoreau notes that “Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually and needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have.”  He charts the path from man’s first shelter-seeking domestic impulse to his final divorce from nature:  

“We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter.  Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold.  It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it.  Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave?  It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us.  From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles.  At last, we know not what it is in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think.  From the hearth to the field is a great distance.  It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof . . . However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.  Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary.”

1885

One of E.W. Kemble’s illustrations for the original 1885 publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  ”We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t.  You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

Early in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck and the runaway slave Jim encounter each other on an island in the Mississippi to which they have separately fled.  Jim soon predicts rain on the evidence of birds flying a yard or two at a time before lighting.  He and Huck make camp in the shelter of a riverbank cave.  As Huck narrates:

“The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to build a fire on.  So we built it there and cooked dinner.  We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there.  We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern.  Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it.  Directly it begunto rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so.  It was one of these regular summer storms.  It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest – fst! it was as bright as glory, and you’d have a glimpse of treetops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down-stairs – where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know.  ‘Jim, this is nice,’ I says.  ‘I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here.’ “

Huck’s acute observations show him to be intensely in the moment.  The birds’ awareness of the oncoming storm and Jim’s reading of their behavior draw a picture of man, creatures and environment as parts of a single nature.  Huck and Jim haven’t moved beyond the stage of Thoreau’s cave-fascinated child.  The perfection of this condition is endorsed by Huck’s statement of contentment.  

1977

A high dynamic range photo by Josh Derr shows color and light in a way that is close to firsthand visual experience.  The technique is especially effective at capturing atmospheric effects.  Applying it to gritty urban settings, as Derr often does, shows the potential of the everyday to be transformed by the alchemy of light.  This too is nature and, if not of the Walden Pond kind, can impart wonder.  Our resonance with light reminds us how fundamentally we belong to something larger.  It regularly provides opportunities to - like the narrator of “A Descent into the Maelström” – release the weight of the ego and rise to a higher level.  

In Anthony Hecht’s childhood-evoking poem, “Apprehensions,” an experience referred to as a “gift” recalls Huck’s ringside seat on a summer storm from an island cave.  In Hecht’s version, Manhattan is the island, an apartment window the cave mouth, and he himself the boy watching.  Hecht’s polished words contrast with Huck’s rough poetry, but the arresting effect of the storm is the same; the sharpened perception and deep satisfaction of being purely in the moment.  The world isn’t the ego’s adversary at such a moment, but rather just as it should be.  Hecht may nod to Twain in the shape of his lightning:     

“We were living at this time in New York City

On the sixth floor of an apartment house

On Lexington, which still had streetcar tracks. 

It was an afternoon in the late summer;

The windows open; wrought-iron window guards

Meant to keep pets and children from falling out. 

I, at the window, studiously watching

A marvelous transformation of the sky; 

A storm was coming up by dark gradations. 

But what was curious about this was

That as the sky seemed to be taking on

An ashy blankness, behind which there lay

Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose

Tarnishing now to something more than dusk,

Crepuscular and funerary greys,

The streets became more luminous, the world

Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness. 

The brickwork of the house across the street

(A grim, run-down Victorian chateau)

Became distinct and legible; the air,

Full of excited imminence, stood still. 

The streetcar tracks gleamed like the path of snails. 

And all of this made me superbly happy,

But most of all a yellow Checker Cab

Parked at the corner.  Something in the light

Was making this the yellowest thing on earth. 

It was as if Adam, having completed

Naming the animals, had started in

On colors, and had found his primary pigment

Here, in a taxi cab, on Eighty-ninth Street. 

It was the absolute, parental yellow. 

Trash littered the gutter, the chipped paint

Of the lamppost was still chipped, but everything

Seemed meant to be as it was, seemed so designed,

As if the world had just then been created,

Not as a garden, but as a rather soiled,

Loud, urban intersection, by God’s will. 

And then a chart of the Mississippi River,

With all her tributaries, flashed in the sky. 

Thunder, beginning softly and far away,

Rolled down our avenue toward an explosion

That started with the sound of ripping cloth

And ended with a crash that made all crashes

Feeble, inadequate preliminaries. 

And it began to rain.  Someone or other

Called me away from there, and closed the window.”

Hecht’s light-induced awakening is echoed in Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual rebirth as described in The Power of Now:  ”The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains.  Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize.  That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself.  Tears came into my eyes.  I got up and walked around the room.  I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before.  Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence.”   In “Apprehensions,” Hecht bypasses the woods and waters of garden variety nature, and relies instead on that most fundamental fact of nature, light.  ”Something in the light” is enough to spark transcendence.  Shelter in the poem is just a viewing platform on the outside world.  The best it can do is stay out of the way.  Barbara Lamprecht’s monograph on Richard Neutra quotes his client for Case Study House #20:  “The thing I like about this house,” said Dr. Bailey recently, nodding to the trees beyond the glass walls, “is that there is no house.” 

The All American Un-house

Reyner Banham (multiplied and, yes, naked) occupies an un-house.  This illustration by Francois Dallegret show’s Banham’s Environment Bubble, a “transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output.”  At its center is a Transportable Standard of Living Package that provides all mechanical services, entertainment, etc.  The drawing accompanies Banham’s 1965 essay, “A Home is not a House,”  which begins, “When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters – when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?”

“Left to their own devices,” Reyner Banham wrote in the 1965 essay, A Home is not a House,  “Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture. . . . America’s monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors – the porch, the terrace, Whitman’s rail-traced plains, Kerouac’s infinite road . . .”  He goes on to distinguish American architecture from European, citing the former’s relatively thin shells, less compartmentalized interiors, emphasis on hygiene, and more advanced plumbing and environmental controls.  These distinctions lead to an epiphany:

“Somewhere among these clustering concepts – cleanliness, the lightweight shell, the mechanical services, the informality and indifference to monumental architectural values, the passion for the outdoors – there always seemed to me to lurk some elusive master concept that would never quite come into focus.  It finally became clear and legible to me in June 1964, in the most highly appropriate and circumstantial circumstances. 

I was standing up to my chest-hair in water, making home movies at the campus beach at Southern Illinois.  This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner – scenically, it is the ole swimmin’ hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames chairs on poles in the water) and it’s chlorinated too.  From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller’s experimental domes.  And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether.

Bucky Fuller, of course, is very big on this proposition:   his famous non-rhetorical question, ‘Madam, do you know what your house weighs?’ articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental.  This suspicion is inadvertently shared by the untold thousands of Americans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes which, though they may never actually be moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ground-anchored structures costing at least three times more.”

Banham’s essay carries these observations into visionary territory.  He caricatures the American emphasis on service machinery and disregard for permanent structure into what he calls the “un-house,” which might be a mere inflated plastic bag containing a centralized package of mechanical systems.  As he explains:

“Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment:  one by avoiding the issue and and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a camp-fire, which, in more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion.  Unlike the living space trapped with our forebears under a rock or roof, the space around a camp-fire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability.”

Just when he seems least serious, Banham points to an actual example of an American un-house; Philip Johnson’s Glass House.  Recalling “the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial shells of the houses consumed by the fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing chimneys,”  Johnson’s house ”consists essentially of just these two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit which is a chimney/fireplace on one side and a bathroom on the other.”  Describing its glazed “insubstantial shell,” Banham notes that “the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter physically and operationally so in summer when when the four doors are open.  The ‘house’ is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There.”

Philip Johnson’s Glass House was completed in 1949, two years ahead of the Farnsworth House, but influenced by the Farnsworth’s earlier conception.  Johnson called his house a “pavilion for viewing nature.”  Proclaiming it an un-house, Reyner Banham saw it as the answer to America’s deepest domestic impulse, to get rid of the house altogether.

Much of Huckleberry Finn was written while Mark Twain and his family summered on his wife Olivia’s family farm outside Elmira, New York.  His in-laws built him a detached studio in which to write, their generosity tempered by a distaste for his cigar smoke.  Twain wrote to William Dean Howells that it was “octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, . . . perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.  It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head – imagine the luxury of it.”  Comprised of a fireplace and a largely transparent shell, it is the ur-un-house, perfectly matching Banham’s description of Philip Johnson’s Glass House as ”a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There.”

Johnson’s House may have seemed a better example of an un-house to Banham than its comparable precedent, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, because it has no exterior porch, isn’t lifted off the ground, and has a smaller service core that does a better job of passing for a chimney.  Or maybe just because Johnson was easier to talk to than Mies, and Banham could have fun kicking the idea around with him.  (Johnson didn’t buy it.)  The fine points of Banham’s un-house notwithstanding, it’s the Farnsworth House that really gave form to the distinctly American impulse Banham puts his finger on.  As Arthur Drexler noted in his 1960 monograph on Mies, ”It is often said that Mies could have realized his ideas only in the United States, and that only Europe could have produced him.  But Mies has seemed more American than the Americans:  the Puritan tradition and the transcendental philosophers of nineteenth century New England must seem sentimental beside Mies himself . . .”

American literature, and much of American cultural history, supports Banham’s view of the way Americans would live, ”left to their own devices.”  A strong case can be made that only market forces and limited choices prevent them from living this way.  When he published “A House Is Not a House” in 1965, it must have seemed perverse to suggest the country house of a gay connoisseur as a model for the middle-American home.  Even Mies’s glass house was built for a then-exceptional client, a wealthy, single, female doctor.  Just after the completion of the Farnsworth House in 1951, though, Mies designed a prototype glass house meant for a family that might have children.  Despite this major distinction, it is - like the Farnsworth House and Johnson’s Glass House – a one-room building.  Its substantial 50-foot square plan would in theory allow for distance between the occupants and flexible layouts by means of screening elements.  For Mies, the interior spatial potential of an undivided container trumped practical considerations.  Maximizing interior space was an invaluable way of simulating outdoor space.

Mies van der Rohe’s 50 x 50 House Project proposed a glass-walled one-room house for mass production.  In his 1960 monograph on Mies, Arthur Drexler wrote that his “most original buildings are one-story structures, and the greatest of these consist of one room.”

The 50 x 50 House was designed as a prototype for industrial production.  “Designing and building houses individually is an old fashioned idea . . . much too expensive and time-consuming in the age of the assembly line,” Mies said.  The concept prefigured today’s obsession with prefabricated houses, many of which also take Mies’s spatial priorities to heart.  Resting on the ground and without a porch, 50 x 50 takes the Farnsworth House two steps closer to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, and Banham’s un-house.

The 50 x 50 House embodies both the appeal of undivided interior space together with minimized separation from nature.  It is more pertinent than ever.  At 2500 square feet, it would have been gigantic in its day, but the size of the average American House now stands at 2349.  Meanwhile, the American household has shrunk and is typically without children at home, making the one-room model more practical, even at a much smaller scale.  Gay sophisticates and single professional women are now everyday Americans.  The last decade has seen a burgeoning response, in modular and prefab concepts, to Mies’s call for an industrialized house.  Following his lead, these typically have a single open living space with extensive glazing.  It’s tempting to see their popularity mainly as a result of these characteristics rather than prefabrication.  It’s also tempting to set aside the concerns of industrialization and focus on these design qualities and how they can be applied to affordable, practical houses.    

In each of ten posts, ArchiTakes will present a new rule for the design of a house that honors the truest American instincts, favoring quality of experience over quantity or richness of material.  When this is done, a new site will be launched, providing dimensioned plans and 3D computer models of prototype houses designed by these rules.  Intended as points of departure, they will be free to download.

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is elevated in response to its location within the flood plane of the nearby Fox River.  With its open plan and 360 degree views, the house has very much the character of a raft even when its site isn’t flooded.  Huck Finn would approve.  So would Thoreau, according to Theodore M. Brown’s 1965 essay, Thoreau’s Prophetic Architectural Program:  “Mies van der Rohe’s dictum, ‘Less is More,’ is a capsule formulation of Thoreau’s position and a cornerstone of contemporary architecture.”  Lord Peter Palumbo, the second owner of the Faarnsworth House, wrote that “the man-made environment and the natural environment are here permitted to respond to, and to interact with each other.  While this may derive from the dogma of Rousseau or the writings of Thoreau, the effect is essentially the same: that of being at one with Nature, in its broadest sense, and with oneself.” 

The ZenKaya is one of many current prefabricated houses clearly inspired by Mies.

“What is a house but a sedes, a seat?”  Thoreau asked in Walden.  ZenKaya seems to have learned its Zen from him.  Beyond its promise of technological advantage, much of prefab housing answers his complaint that “We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”   

Linked Hybrid, a Beijing complex designed by Steven Holl, was completed last year.  As with his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT, Holl sets windows deeply into a uniform and pervasive grid, camouflaging them as dimples in an enveloping waffle texture that’s applied like shrink-wrap.  He so accentuates the window grid that it takes on the geometric purity of abstract sculpture.  Like many other architects today, Holl hides his windows in plain sight.  Unlike so many others, he does this by embracing the grid rather than fleeing it.

Georgia O’Keefe’s 1927 painting, Radiator Building – Night, New York, shows Raymond Hood’s tower at an hour when its dark window openings can’t disappear into its black brick façade.  The randomness of a city’s lit windows at night violates the tyranny of the grid with chance, mystery and individual volition.  In recent years, architects have brought this defiance of regimentation into daylight.

Forty years ahead of its time, an otherwise anonymous 1963 hotel on West 57th Street willfully offsets windows from their expected vertical alignment.  The effect is so successful at destroying the usual window grid that the building at first appears to defy structural logic.  Only on close inspection does it become apparent that there are still continuous vertical paths for the exterior wall’s columns, and that windows are merely jiggled left and right within conventional column bays.  While the building’s countless identical windows are no less visible and repetitive, they are less suggestive of coercion than windows in a grid, and seem to belong to the liberated realm of surface decoration.  Gridding is so much a part of the Gestalt of urban windows that to take them out of alignment camouflages them, effectively hiding them in plain sight.

SHoP Architects’ critically acclaimed Porter House condominium at West 15th Street and Ninth Avenue, completed in 2003, adapted and added onto a 1905 warehouse.  The addition roughly matches the bulk of the original building, a key to its success in the role of mirror-opposite.  By contrasting itself in every possible way, even offsetting itself from the old building’s footprint, the addition leaves the integrity of the original perfectly readable.  Among its points of departure, the addition sets its windows free of the grid and varies their width.  They are closely enough spaced not to disfavor any of the identical stacked floor plans within on any given floor. 

SHop takes no chances in pusuit of the romantically staggered lit windows of Georgia O’keefe’s Radiator Building portrayal.  Fixtures built into the addition’s face insure a balanced distribution of haphazard light sources, regardless of occupants’ contributions.

Polshek Partnership’s Standard Hotel, completed last year, straddles the High Line near Washington and West 13th Streets.  The building’s floor-to-ceiling glass makes the rooms’ curtains a facade-determining feature.  By day, they contribute the shifting randomness and vitality that variations in artificial lighting typically provide at night. 

The Standard Hotel’s jiggled window pattern, echoing that of the 1963 hotel pictured above, further defuses the deadening effect of the grid and suggests the decorative freedom of textile design.

One Ten 3rd, a condominium at 110 Third Avenue, was designed by Greenberg Farrow and completed in 2007.  Listing the building’s pros and cons, CityRealty cites its “unusual fenestration pattern” as a “con,”  while New York magazine’s Justin Davidson called the building an “impressively awful tower, full of fussy fenestration and clutter.”  These assessments overlook how efficiently the design avoids gridlock by simply varying the color of the panels covering columns.  This variation, within a limited color range, also blends with the predictable chaos of individual owners’ window treatments to produce a painterly effect.

SOM’s addition to John Jay College is approaching completion at Eleventh Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets.  Glass units with fritted glass dots in varying densities create patterns that override the framing grid.

Based on paint manufacturers’ color sample chips, Peter Wegner’s 2001 painting, 49 Greys, might have inspired SOM’s façade at John Jay College.  The painting resonates with current architecture’s use of the grid as a point of departure for vibrant destinations.

The Zollverein School of Design in Essen, Germany, by SANAA, was completed in 2006.  (photo: Michael Hoefner, CC/SA)  It practices a different kind of windowflage from the same firm’s mesh-encased New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery.  Here, windows are set free of the familiar grid in all directions and even deny its possibility by their varied sizes.  While emphatically expressed, the windows contribute to, rather than detract from, the overall building as sculpture.

In his “Vision Machine” condominium, nearing completion at West 19th Street and the West Side Highway, Jean Nouvel takes the liberated window into new frontiers.  His design not only rejects the grid, but tilts individual glass panels out of planar alignment.  Even on the tower’s faces that aren’t cubist curtainwall, Nouvel’s punched windows avoid alignment and consistency of size and shape, as at SANAA’s Zollverein School.  The building avoids grid-based window radar by multiple means.  Beyond, the fritted glass of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building catches light like a lampshade.

The 1960s National Maritime Union annexes at West 17th Street and Ninth Avenue were designed by New Orleans architect Albert Ledner.  Beyond their obvious nautical inspiration, the portholes resist interpretation as building windows and contribute to an abstract sculptural quality.  Now the Maritime Hotel, the upright annex on the right faces Ninth Avenue and has openings on a standard vertical-horizontal grid.  The structure on the left is more relaxed, sloping back from 17th Street and setting its portholes in a diamond array that even further camouflages them into the appearance of decorative surface pattern.

As rendered by Spine 3D, the West 17th Street Maritime Annex’s façade is currently being reworked into an even freer assembly of multi-sized round windows in its conversion to the Dream Downtown Hotel.  The redesign, by Frank Fusaro of Handel Architects, argues that even diagonally arrayed round windows aren’t up to today’s standard of windowflage.