House Rules

Shinichi Ogawa’s 2002 Abstract House could illustrate any of the ten House Rules. It demonstrates not just their compatibility, but their potential to enhance each other. In exploiting the strategies on which the rules are based, this modest house efficiently summons spatial luxury and an undistracted connection to nature from an ordinary site. Ogawa’s floor … House Rules – Afterword

“I’d rather live in the nave of Chartres Cathedral and go out of doors to the john,” Philip Johnson told his architecture students.  His sentiment will resonate with anyone who’s ever stood in a meadow, greenhouse, park pavilion, industrial ruin or other non-house and impulsively felt “I want to live here.”  While such fantasies are soon … House Rule 10 – Embrace Inconvenience

  While not the first great modern house, Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is without doubt the most influential today.  It embodies two especially pertinent ideas that support flexibility.  Its standardized industrial components suggest a demountable and reusable kit-of-parts architecture which, sixty years since, is the concept behind today’s explosive proliferation of prefabricated modular and recyclable housing solutions.  The Farnsworth House is … House Rule 9 – Build for Flexibility

  “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 … House Rule 8 – Use Trees

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 … House Rule 7 – Optimize Natural Light

  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.

  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 … House Rule 5 – Engage 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.

“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 … House Rule 3 – Design from a Diagram

  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 … House Rule 2 – Combine 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 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 … House Rules – Introduction