"Ideal" House

“Ideal” House

The house architectural typology has been an object for investigation and testing of architectural principles since the beginning of the 20th century.  The house provides a scale at which principles can be tested and architectural theories verified, without the public pressures or oppositions faced by other building typologies, such as a court house, museum or civic center.  Given the house is the place where people live, sleep, and eat, the house or home is associated with a mixture of values that requires a skillful hand to manipulate correctly by any architect wanting to make a statement regarding the discipline.   

The first value the house often is stability, often symbolized by traditional architectural elements or styles.  This often makes the house’s foray into modernity sometimes difficult to accept by reserved clients; yet this also makes any such change in the “vernacular” that much more obvious.  A second value may be knowledge, explicitly represented best in Roman Villas, which were designed to show the “knowledge” of their inhabitants, through sculpture and decorative motifs derived from famous literature and arts.  The house is often associated with stature and learning, and to such a degree, ideal houses often boast this as a characteristic of their inhabitants.   A third value is utility.  The house, like other building types, requires an attentive eye towards use and function, especially for domestic tasks. Those tasks requiring repetition, and the ease by which the house provides for them, can add or subtract greatly to the livability of a space.

All of these values pertain to houses, but not necessarily to the “ideal” house.  Ideal is defined as “existing as an archetypal idea” or “existing as a mental image of in fancy or imagination only; lacking practicality” (www.merrianwebster.com).  A number of ideal houses have been less than “ideal” for inhabiting due to a number of reasons.  Often these ideal houses are the first model of a new type of living, and thus they often lack the fine resolution of a more traditional house type.  Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier was rarely lived in by its inhabitants, yet it has been claimed as revolutionary to the architectural discipline.  It proposed a radical rethinking of man’s relationship to the the automobile, man’s proportion related to the spaces of the home, and embodied a design theory, a “machine for living in.”  Although habitation of the house may have been less than perfect,  Le Corbusier did accomplish through this “ideal” house the integration of modern, industrial construction techniques with traditional proportioning systems, linking the modern era with that of the past.  Furthermore, this type of proportional system provided a reasoning and rational to the system, which assuaged people’s concerns and  provided an optimism to what living could be like in the 20th century.  The ideal house often fails at habitation because of its often radical stance on how we might live.

From this example, we can begin to address the question of what makes a house “ideal”?  It is important, however, that as we move forward in this discussion, that we keep in mind that the “ideal” house often mediates between the needs of the inhabitants and the furthering of the discipline of architecture.  The best “ideal” houses, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, will tend to succeed both in terms of habitation and in terms of architectural discourse.  In contrast, however, other houses, such as Eisenmen’s numbered houses, further the architectural discourse yet lack the habitability necessary to be viewed as spaces to be lived in, and more sculptural than utilitarian.

From observing both Villa Savoye and Falling Water, we can begin to see important patterns for positioning of the “ideal” house.  First, there is a notion of the importance of space as the architectural medium.  Both of these houses exhibit a spatial complexity that follows a spatial concept that is revolutionary.  Villa Savoye explores the dissolution of interior and exterior through the free floor plan while Falling Water explores the open plan and free flowing spaces.  This focus on space is critical, as it is the basic medium of architecture.  Second, “ideal” houses focus on new methods of construction.  Villa Savoye and Falling Water both rethink how we build and what we build of.  Le Corbusier’s five points provided a set of building elements, which became universal for all of his projects.  Frank Lloyd Wright used steel to provide for his far flying, cantilevered roofs, which gave the impression of being constructed of wood.  To give a modern day example, the Loblolly House by Kieran Timberlake investigates new methods of designing, factory fabricating, and assembly and dis-assembly, a syncing of modern day fabrication techniques with the idea of the “ideal” house.  Third, “ideal” houses provide for a new way of living.  Ideal houses make statements about the manner by which we live, whether it be a “machine for living in” or a house that provides for all the users needs in subtle, intricate manners, such as Alvar Aalto’s houses.  All of these “ideal” houses express the idea that the age we are living has changed, and thus the way we live should change too.

The program of an ideal house does not vary significantly from previous housing models.  Mankind has been living for thousands of years, and there is a number of necessities he has consistently established in any house.  These include: sleeping, cooking, storing, eating, socialization, and relaxation.  The ideal house does less in regards to progamming - as in adding more variety of programmed spaces to the house -- and more in considering the relationships by which man does each of the previous activities, whether this be in interlocking of spaces, visual separation, or relationship between exterior and interior.  This consistency of program allows for architects to compare and contrast this house with previous houses, making its ability to become “canonical” and “ideal” more easily categorized.   The programming does not significantly change, but the size and amount of such program does.  The new American “ideal” house might provide for inter-generational living, a direct response to decreasing wealth and rapidly increasing baby boomer population.
The disciplinary role of the “ideal” house, as we have previously touched upon, is to provide a further exploration of the discipline within the residential typology, that is manageable and to some degree isolated, from a tentative public.  This furthering of the architectural discipline does not mean the house needs to be completely different from projects that came before it.  What it does need to have, however, is a strong concept of spatial relationships, a position on technology, and a new way to think about how mankind lives.

The concepts of architecture employed by FLLW and Le Corbusier were ideal during their time of development. But alas, that time has passed, and we enter into a new age.  We are in a global world, where cultures collide and intersect, values mingle, transform, and are confronted by each and everyone.  The idea of a homogeneous architecture, if one ever existed, no longer exists.  We live in a world where technology is pervasive, lights, information, sounds, swirling in a constant tempest of  technology; which is exciting, enlivening, to us, we cannot deny.  But this heightened sensitivity comes at an expense, that of the a deadening to the physical world.  An ideal house today would make one more aware of man’s physical disposition, more able to feel the size of one’s body, more aware of the sense’s that are mans faculty; it is a house that makes one feel alive, and it does so through proportion and alterations to that proportion.  It may be like an old Roman sculpture, meant for the viewer to circumvent around it, one’s eyes distracted from the day’s preoccupations as It is an architecture that engages its site, but possible not in a harmonious way, as people now are less to remember, or maybe less alive, with that which is harmonious than that which is divergent.  A house likewise today will not be of a particular style related to a geographic setting, it will be comprised of the reducable substance of the global, a kind of hybrid architecture - which always has existed, lets not forget how images transfer and disseminate architecture across the globe - one that  calls back to mind the travels of its inhabitants.  Through referential geometry this is accomplished, a kind of compressed memory of thing and places, a enlivening house.    

The previous discussion has mentioned a few ideal houses, but now I will explicitly investigate five “ideal” houses, with the intent to not only illustrate my own values or interests, but also a means to provide a foundation from which to focus my investigations at this time.  









Concept 1:  House and Relationship to Habitation
Le Corbusier’s concept of the house as a machine for living in challenges previous notions of the house and poses that this could be the “ideal” way to live.  

Concept 2: Hybridity

Hybrid architecture, in this context, means establishing a relationship with other architecture of the time period.

Concept 3: Engaging Client

Nearly all ideal houses have a narrative of design and construction.

Concept 4: Architectural and New Construction Methods

The Loblolly House, although it clearly tries to claim itself as “ideal,” is still an excellent example of architecture responding to new construction methods and materials, an absolute necessary for a house to be considered “ideal.”  Ideal implies some uncertainty, thus becoming more potent.


Concept 5: Architectural Concept of Space 

Falling Water, like Villa Savoye, posed a new way to think about and live in space.  In particular, Frank Lloyd Wright investigated organic architecture and the free plan.