TERENCE RUEY

The Un-Private House

All of architecture is colored by the problem of the house.

ean Helion's words point out the unique position the private house has
played throughout the history of architecture. Despite its relatively small
size, at least compared to other architectural programs, the house figures
large in the cultural imagination. It has been and continues to b e the
man-made environment's fundamental building block, its most irreducible
component, providing an essential daily need: shelter. Even so, its broad appeal
cannot be considered a function of necessity alone. Closely identified with
the individual and the nuclear family, it has been frequently considered as
an expression of widely held, even universal, values. Conversely, the private
house has also been emblematic of more subjective desires, desires that
change not only from person to person but from generation to generation.

Preston Scott Cohen. Torus

House, Old Chatham, New York.
Projected completion 2001.
Computer-generated image

While individual domiciles existed in the world of classical antiquity, the

private house as we know it today traces its lineage to seventeenth-century
Europe and colonial New England. 2 This new type frequently mimicked the
contemporaneous palaces and villas of the upper classes in its architectural
style, decoration, and relationship to the landscape. However, the characteristic that had the greatest influence on the private house's development was
not architectural fashion but the prerequisite of privacy itself.
Although it is precisely defined in the dictionary"the quality or state of
being apart from company or observation: seclusion" 5 the term privacy is a
thoroughly relative one. It has evolved over centuries and continues to do so.
Nonetheless, the privacy in the private house, since its inception, has been
predicated on a discernible separation of its inhabitants and activities from
both the public realm and other houses. The private house has also been from
its establishment a building type that enshrines family life to the exclusion of
all other activities. Furthermore, as a space so dedicated, it has been for
almost four hundred years largely responsible for the creation and development of those rituals and comforts that we now associate with the domestic.
Taken literally, the term private house might apply to any dwelling that
shelters an individual or family, whether it is a palace or a tent. However, in
Western culture the private house has been the subject of tremendous interest
and controversy in that it has been considered as a type of housing intended
for a specific class of people: the bourgeoisie in Europe and the middle class in
the United States. As such, the concept of the private house has become associated with a range of political, moral, social, and economic issues.
This confluence of associations, and their potential volatility, is amply
illustrated in Bernard Edelman's La Maison de Kant, a reflection on the life and
thinking of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant: "The house, the
residence, is the only rampart against the dread of nothingness, darkness,
and the obscurity of the past.,.. Man's identity is thus residential, and that is
why the revolutionary, w h o has neither hearth nor home, hence neither
faith nor law, epitomizes the anguish of errancy.... The man without a h o m e
is a potential criminal."4

--U",'-5^ i^i>,'\\
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P%n*i

FIGURE v. Jew's House, Lincoln,

England, c. 1170-80

A contemporary of Kant, Thomas Jefferson, characterized his own house

in much different terms, drawing parallels between it and his homeland.
From Paris he wrote, "I am savage enough to prefer the woods, the wilds,
and the independence of Monticello, to all the brilliant pleasures of this gay
Capital. I shall, therefore, rejoin myself to my native country, with new
attachments, and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages; for though
there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease, and less misery:'5
Despite the divergence in Kant's and Jefferson's respective points of view,
their ideas equally portrayed a vision of society, in Europe and in the United
States, in which the private house was playing a more and more central role.
Furthermore, over the course of the nineteenth century, whatever root differences might have existed between European and American conceptions
of the private house were heading toward convergence. That which we now
refer to as the "traditional" private house developed on either side of the
Atlantic as an expression of individual freedom and, paradoxically, as a
commitment to shared societal values.
Throughout the Western world, the private house's popularity has not
dimmed during the twentieth century. In Europe, a substantial amount of the
housing stock is dedicated to private houses, despite the relatively dense patterns of urbanization.15 In the United States and Canada, the percentages of
private houses are significantly higheras are the numbers of detached
houseswhich reflect the sparser settlement patterns in North America. In
1998, seventy-six percent of the approximately 1.7 million new housing units
in construction in the United States were private houses.7 In Canada,
detached houses outnumber attached dwellings by more than five to one.8
Experience suggests that the great majority of these houses, whether
attached or detached, largely conform to the same "traditional" physical
characteristics. The typical structure would have a series of common rooms,
such as living, dining, and family rooms, and a number of separate bedrooms. The former would be on a lower level, and the latter on an upper
level. The design of most of these houses would also undoubtedly have a
"traditional" appearance, with peaked roof, shuttered windows, and ornamental details, evoking the domestic culture developed over so many years
of Western civilization.
Even so, the current ubiquity of the private house in its most traditional
form isrifewith contradiction. The social conditions and structures that drove
the development of the private houseprivacy, the separation of living and
work, the family, domesticityhave all changed drastically, perhaps more so
in the last fifty years than in the preceding four centuries. In contrast to the
self-evident majority, a new and notable generation of house designscommissioned by forward-thinking clientsis addressing not only critical architectural issues but also the cultural parameters of the private house.
THE PRESENCE OF THE PUBLIC

From the early seventeenth century, when the private house began to
develop as a broadly popular type, until the 1920s, when the electronic radio
was introduced into the home, the privacy in the private house grew as the
presence of the public world diminished. The architectural historian Spiro
Kostof reminds us just how large this public presence could be in earlier
times: 'The medieval town house is not only the family home, it is also a

FIGURE 2: Artist unknown. The Birth of

Caterina Comaro. c. 1550-1600. Oil on wood,
16 %* x 20 %T (41.8 x 52.2 cm). Isabella Stewart
Gardner Museum, Boston

FIGURE 5: Carl Larsson. Cozy Corner. 1890-97.

Watercohr, 12% x 16%" (32x43
Nationalmuseum,

Stockholm

cm).

manufacturing locale, counting house, store, or shop."9 In addition, the socalled big house of the Middle Ages, such as the Jew's House in Lincoln,
England (fig. 1), sheltered the owner and his family along with relatives,
employees, apprentices, servants, and frequent guests. Those guests, perhaps
friends or relatives, were just as likely to have been on business with the
owner, who, in the absence of hotels and restaurants, would have been
expected to provide meals and lodging. The public character of these houses
is further underscored by the lack of separate rooms for these various activities. In most instances, the inhabitants lived, slept, and ate in large, open halls
that accommodated different functions principally by the rearrangement of
furniture. The realization of privacy within the house was an evolutionary
process that unfolded over centuries. During the Renaissance and on into later
eras, bourgeois and even aristocratic families continued to inhabit medievalstyle halls. This way of living is suggested by a painting from the sixteenth century. The Birth of Caterina Comaro (fig. 2), in which a great number of people are
milling about, talking, and preparing food, while attendants aid a new mother
who lies in bed at the left of the panel.
Nonetheless, beginning in the seventeenth century, the rising economic
fortunes of the bourgeoisie were inversely reflected in the declining pres- .
ence of the public in the home. By the early nineteenth century, the distinction between the private house and the public world had become so refined
that it was thought to reflect various broader dualities as well, among them
suburb and city, craft and industry, and nature and artifice. The literary critic
Walter Benjamin came to see the nineteenth-century private house as not
only separate from the public world but, more significantly, as a retreat from
it. In his essay "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior," he wrote, "For the private
person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of
work."10 The art historian Michelle Facos has applied Benjamin's position to
Lilla Hyttnas, the family home of the Swedish artist Carl Larsson. Larsson
documented the interiors of the house in a series of watercolors published
in 1899 as A Home. Coupled with Larsson's own words, an example of the
illustrations, Cozy Corner (fig. 3), epitomizes the transformed role of the private
house: "Here I experienced that unspeakably sweet feeling of seclusion from
the noise of the world.""
Even as the middle classes in America and Europe strove to limit the
intrusion of the public into their increasingly private realm, they retained a
natural fascination for the outside world as represented by what we would
today call the media in its earliest incarnations. The presence of books, maps,
and works of art tempered the inward-looking nature of the private house.
In the nineteenth century, a study or librarya room devoted to books,
newspapers, magazines, and journalswas not uncommon in an uppermiddle-class home.
Today, the private house has become a permeable structure, receiving
and transmitting images, sounds, text, and data. The German philosopher
Martin Heidegger made particular note of the fundamental difference
between the presence of the newer, electronic media and the more traditional
media, which had been present in the house over the centuries. In his essay
"The Thing," Heidegger expressed concern over the way in which the electronic broadcasting of words and images alters our fundamental relationship,
that is, our distance, from events and things: "What is this uniformity in

which everything is neither far nor nearis, as it were, without distance?

Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness. How? Is not
this merging of everything into the distanceless more unearthly than everything bursting apart?"1What Heidegger called distancelessness has been instrumental in the profound transformation of, among other things, the relationship between the
private house and the media in the second half of the twentieth century. The
extent of this transformation might be evident in comparing Larsson's Lilla
Hyttnas, where he found that "sweet feeling of seclusion," and Takahide
Nozawa's 1991 design for a house entitled TV Garden (fig. 4). Taking its floor
plan from Ryoan-ji, the walled rock garden in Kyoto that has become an
international icon of contemplation and serenity, TV Garden is essentially a
graveled living space that is enclosed on all four sides by 245 television screens
mounted in a steel frame. "Rocks" interspersed in the graveled area contain
bathroom,mist
bedroom, and kitchen. The then twenty-five-year-old architect
J* * *St^m&iBm0**MM>'M,
explained that the relationship between the inhabitants of the house and the
media would equal that found "among natural elements in the garden."15
Nozawa's inference of a "natural" relationship between the media and
the inhabitants of a house is wholly outside of Heidegger's conception of
"being," in German, Dasein. In his text Being and Time, the philosopher questioned the effect of the media on daily life: "All the ways in which we speed
things up, as we are more or less compelled to do today, push us on towards
the conquest of remoteness. With the 'radio', for example, Dasein has so
expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance
of the 'world'a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet
be visualized."1*1
... .T:..'....'-:
At the end of the twentieth century, the new kind of relationship to the
':""""i"-*""
world of events and things that Heidegger could not visualize, a new kind of
IlIBlIIIl
distance in daily life with its own parameters and definitions, is clearly evi J
dent in the ascendancy of digital technologies throughout everyday life. In
;......--....-,., :':V:':VI.I i:
both theory and practice, the media's potential effect on space has become a
catalyst for contemporary architectural innovation and experimentation.
While it is more and more common to find a "media room" in newer houses,
FIGURE 4: Takahtde Nozawa,
TV Garden. Another Glass House
such as the unbuilt Millbrook Residence (pp. 40-43) by Winka Dubbeldam of
competition proposal, 1991
Archi-Tectonics for a site in New York State, more profound innovations are
also evident. In Frank Lupo's and Daniel Rowen's Lipschutz/Jones Apartment (pp. 44-47) in New York City, digital screens displaying financial information are visible throughout the loft, alerting the owners to fluctuations in
international currency markets. In Jacques Herzog's and Pierre de Meuron's
Kramlich Residence and Media Collection (pp. 48-51), to be built in Napa
Valley, California, the interior partitions of the house are screens onto which
the owners' collection of video art is projected. These architectural manifestations of electronic events do, indeed, represent the distancelessness that
Heidegger believed was a threat to the dwelling. But this distancelessness has
become a commonplace, and Heidegger's unease has been replaced by an
equally common awareness of the distinction between the real and the virtual.
Elizabeth DiUers and Ricardo Scofidio's Slow House (pp. 52-55), an
unbuilt weekend house designed for a site on Long Island, New York, provides
an example of the architects' implicit recognition of the duality of the real and
the virtual, emphasizing in particular their relationship to consumption and

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FIGURE 5: Michael Trudgeon, Crowd

Productions P/L, and Anthony

Kitchener,

Cash Engineering Research P/L. Hyper

House Pavilion 5, St. Andrews Beach,
Victoria, Australia. Unbuilt, 1998.
Computer-generated image by Glynis Teo

possession. The rear of the house, which faces the desirable view, is opened up
by means of a picture window that frames the landscape beyond. A video
camera mounted above the house captures the same landscape digitally and
transmits it back to a monitor suspended before the picture window, as if to
compete electronically with, or even perfect, the "actual" view. In the architects' words, "The view may be recorded and deferred... day played back at
night, fair weather played back in foul. The view is also portable; it can be
transmitted to different locations in the house or back to the primary residence in the cityf5 How and what one views becomes completely subjective.
In a more speculative manner, other architects are trying to envisage
how the "virtual house" might be realized and how it might reflect the more
prosaic needs of daily life. The Digital House project (pp. 56-59), designed by
Gisue Hariri and Mojgan Hariri for House Beautiful magazine, and Hyper
House Pavilion 5 (fig. 5), a project by Michael Trudgeon and Anthony
Kitchener, are examples of such an effort. Both demonstrate the point made
by the architectural critic Beatriz Colomina in assessing the interrelationships between the house and the media: "The way the house occupies the
media is directly related to the way the media occupies the house."16
While the interior surfaces of Herzog's and de Meuron's Kramlich Residence are meant to serve as screens onto which digital art is projected, both the
interior and exterior surfaces of Trudgeon's and Kitchener's Hyper House Pavilion 5 and Hariri's and Hariri's Digital House are conceived as "smart skins" that
blur the distinction between the computer and architecture and perform various functions to assist or enhance daily living. In The Digital House project, a
Julia Child-like character pops up over the kitchen counter to provide advice
on food preparation, and digital guests appear in the living room for a virtual
visit. From every vantage point, the house has the ability to receive and transmit information, illustrating what media theorist Neil Gershenfeld has called
"mature technologies" in which it is "not possible to isolate the form and the
function."17 The Hyper House is equally permeable. According to one of its
designers, 'The mullions support the glass skin, which has fully adjustable
optical and thermal properties. At the south end, a television image is being
directly displayed from the glass skin. Also a message to the neighbors has
been programmed onto the electrochromic layer of the glass skin.",B
Just as architects are imagining what might be called the "un~private
house," so are others imagining its inhabitants. The cultural historian Donna
Haraway offers the following in "A Manifesto for Cyborgs": "The cyborg is
resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, Utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured
by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological
polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the
resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other""
PRIVACY

The implications of Haraway's manifesto for everyday life are difficult to

grasp, much less idealize. Readers who are both familiar with and disturbed
by the image of the cyborg (that is, cybernetic organism) may recognize
the chasm between Haraway's vision of a postmodern cyber-culture and the
world of the Enlightenment evoked in Edelman's La Maison de Kant. Moreover,

A Home, in a Prairie Town

FIGURE 6: Frank Lloyd Wright.

A Home in a Prairie Town. Project, 1900.
Page from Ladies' Home Journal,
February 1901

they might recognize how recently and how quickly that gap has made itself
manifest in contemporary society. Even a generation ago, the philosopher
Hannah Arendt could cite the modern concepts of nation and society as
reconfigurations of the oikos and polis of ancient Greece and Rome, albeit on
a scale far beyond that of the city-state from which they emerged. Although
Arendt saw these reconfigurations as having effectively "blurred" the idea of
private and public, they were still dependent on the concept of the household and public realms as "distinct, separate entities."20 Haraway's "technological polis" can be seen not only as a successor to the modern nation as
defined by Arendt but also as a new political realm, one in which the duality of public and private is no longer an operative concept. In her discussion
of the dynamics between public and private life in the classical period,
Arendt also pointed out that Zeus Herkeios, the protector of borderlines,
safeguarded these distinctions in the minds of the ancient Greeks.21 In a
piece written for the New Yorker recently, Nancy Franklin seems to have been
hoping that the ancient god still existed: 'The national pastime, playable in
all four seasons, has become show-and-tell, and there are few among us
who don't occasionally want to avert our eyes, or close them, in the hope of
rediscovering, at least in our own minds, the line between private life and
public exposure."22
Before looking at how the increased fluidity in the concept of privacy has
influenced contemporary design, it is useful to consider again how refined the
notion of privacy in the private house had become by the twentieth century.
For this purpose, Frank Lloyd Wright's A Home in a Prairie Town (fig. 6), an
idealized house design, can be considered as a highly articulated vision of
domestic architecture. Wright's project was commissioned by and first published in the progressive Ladies' Home Journal The project was comprised of not
only the design for the house but also a "block plan" for four identical houses,
affording each "absolute privacy" with respect to the public and the other
three.25 The extent to which Wright strove to achieve that "absolute privacy" is
notable. His model house is set back from the property line, with a low wall
and planting marking a threshold between the public circulation of the street
and the approach to the house. The entrance to the house is recessed within
the body of the house and shielded by low eaves. The window openings facing
the street are relatively small and are located high up, under the eaves; the
inhabitants could see out to the natural world, but the public could not peer in.
The library, which flanks the walk leading to the front door, has no windows
facing the walk, preventing visitors from glimpsing the inhabitants within.
While the intimacy and coziness promised by such a house might be
seen as an end in itself, Wrighf s words confirm that his emphasis on privacy
in the private house was also related to political considerations: "America....
places a life premium upon individuality,the highest possible development of the individual consistent with a harmonious whole.... It means lives
lived in greater independence and seclusion."24
The politics of privacy have been ever volatile but are now being further
roiled by the increased presence of the electronic media in people's homes
and daily lives. Writing recently, with considerable alarm, on the proliferation
of electronic media, the New York Times columnist William Safire said: "Your
right to privacy has been stripped away. You cannot walk into your bank, or
apply for a job, or access your personal computer, without undergoing the

FICUKE 7: Ludwig Mies van der Rone.

Farnsworth House, Piano, Illinois.

1946-51

fiCURE 8: Gordon Kipping, G-TECTS.

"3.9.00000000 Entity As Information Zoom." 1995.
From Ordinary Diagrams, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles:
Public Access Press at the Southern California
Institute of Architecture, 1997), sec. 3.9.

scrutiny of strangers.... Big Brother is watching as never before.... Isn't it time

to reverse that terrible trend toward national nakedness before it replaces
privacy as an American value?"-5 Safire's invocation of the draconian image of
Big Brother interjects the alarming predictions made by George Orwell in his
novel offiftyyears ago, 1084, for a faceless society with a diminished sense of
individualism and privacy. Underlying Safire's position is his exasperation
with a public that seems increasingly unmoved by Orwell's concerns.
In architectural terms, The Digital House, which is designed to maximize
the same technologies that arouse Safire's suspicions, is potentially more
Orwellian than anything Orwell could have imagined. Even Gershenfeld cautions, "We should now worry less about control of the means of communication and more about control by the means of communication."2'1 Yet to the
broad public, this image apparently fails to universally incite the same anxieties. Furthermore, The Digital House obviously meets the approval of House
Beautifiil magazine, which a generation ago fumed about the International
Style and Bauhaus design. In her 1953 article "The Threat to the Next America," Elizabeth Gordon wrote: "For if we can be sold on accepting dictators in
matters of taste and how our homes are to be ordered, our minds are certainly well prepared to accept dictators in other departments of life."27 In this
context, she derisively referred to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth
House (fig. 7) as "a one-room house that is nothing but a glass cage on stilts."28
In its virtual transparency, The Digital House multiplies the dangers that
Gordon saw in the Farnsworth House's literal transparency: it did not sufficiently guarantee the privacy of the home; it could not be shielded from the
public gaze. Edith Farnsworth herself was, ultimately, no fan of the house,
and her words, interweaving literal and technological transparency, reflect it:
"The house is transparent, like an X-ray."29 By contrast, Gordon Topping's
recent project for a "domestic enclosure" (fig. 8) proposes the same kind of
conditions in a neutral, if not positive, manner. Using both neologisms and
typographic devices to create an aura of technological rationalism. Kipping
writes that in his project "the living room facilitates a convergence of transmission and reception through a reordering of surveillance [subject to Unidirectional Extraction <3.o.oooooon>]."50
Unlike Heidegger, who was concerned about the very presence of the
media, Elizabeth Gordon, Orwell, and Satire were concerned about surveillance. Whether the issue is technological or literal transparency, the result is
a "nakedness" that, in Safire's opinion, is the antipode to privacy. While
Hariri and Hariri, Kipping, and others might find the idea of a "domestic
enclosure" that is both a receiver and a transmitter of information to be
intellectually appealing, for Safire this concept would undoubtedly call to
mind Orwell's "telescreen." That "interactive" device not only brought information into every household in Orwell's fictional Oceania but also provided
Big Brother with the ability to view all its inhabitants.
MVRDV's two row houses in the Borneo Sporenburg housing district (on
plots twelve and eighteen) in Amsterdam (pp. 60-63) demonstrate that
changes in the idea of privacy are not simply matters for theoretical discussion or futuristic projects. As opposed to the Farnsworth House, which was,
after all, set in an isolated location, these two row houses, like Michael Bell's
Glass House @ 20 design for a site in Houston (pp. 64-67), are located in a
fairly dense urban area. Displaying none of Safire's anxiety, MVRDV architect

FIGURE Q: Bjarne Mastenbroek and

MVRDV. Double House, Utrecht,
The Netherlands.

1995-97

Winy Maas has said: "Putting the inside, even your own, on display seems a
very modern topic. It might b e perverse b u t it has similarities with t h e mixture of privacy and publicness these days: walking on the zebra crossing
[crosswalk] and listening to the love conversation of the neighbour w h o is
phoning his girlfriend, the way people show their privacy on the television in
order to attract attention. In such a condition the ancient limitations between
privacy and publicity seem to be irrelevant."31
In the most common type of private house in Europe, the row house,
those "ancient limitations between privacy and publicity" have traditionally
been created by the party wall. In the house on plot twelve in Amsterdam, as
well as Bjarne Mastenbroek's and MVRDV's Double House (figs. 9, 10), the
architects intentionally manipulated that boundary. In the former, despite the
narrowness of the site, a semipublic open area was inserted along t h e party
wall, revealing the interior of the house along its glazed length. In the Double
House, the architects warped the party wall into a zigzag between the two
units. This structure affects in the residents a palpable awareness of their
neighbors and the interlocked spaces of the building they share, which clearly
counters t h e logic of t h e traditional party wall and the privacy it affords.
Bernard Tschumi has displayed a similar nonchalance about the literal
and virtual permeability of his unbuilt Hague Villa (pp. 68-71).32 Referring to
its transparent parts' orientation toward the public boundary of the site, the
architect remarked: 'The house is to b e seen as an extension of city events and
a momentary pause in the digital transfer of information. The borders of the
living room and work space, devoid of the camouflage of ornament, expand
beyond the property lines just as they [the property lines] are undermined by
the electronic devices of everyday use."33 Another example of a transparent
house within a dense urban landscape is Shigeru Ban's Curtain Wall House
(pp. 72-75) in Tokyo, which erodes t h e border between public and private in a
notable and even startling way. The outer skin of the house is comprised of
two elements: transparent glass panels and fabric curtains the size of boating
sails. Both glass and fabric can b e drawn back to open u p the interior to the
surrounding neighborhood. The result is a "nakedness" that even those w h o
live in glass houses might find surprising.
In Taeg Nishimoto's Plot House (No. 1) project (fig. 11), the "nakedness" of
the house involves virtual and actual transparencies between the public and
private worlds and also transparencies within the house itself. Nishimoto
has used the form of a fragmented conversation, which the reader seemingly
overhears, to describe an environment that intermingles the idea of scrutiny
from outside with that from within:

FIGURE 10: Bjarne Mastenbroek and

MVRDV. Double House, Utrecht,
The Netherlands. 1995-97. Section

6. When I see the shadow of her robe hanging on the bedroom sliding door, I
know she is sleeping.
7. The bed takes up the whole room.
8. "Bob, don't you think its kind of embarrassing leaving the box of condoms on
the glass shelf?" "Our bedroom walls are filled with all sorts of junk, nobody will
even notice."**
This idea of surveillance is taken to its natural conclusion in Kipping's
domestic enclosure, wherein technology allows individuals to observe
themselves. Unlike a conventional b a t h r o o m mirror, the project's "electronic

mirror consists of four surveillance cameras each positioned at a quadrant in

relation to the position for self-surveillance.""
It is, perhaps, tempting to interpret these contemporary attitudes as simple narcissism, through which daily life becomes an endless reflex between
voyeurism and exhibitionism. Yet it is possible to see a more critical position
within these new attitudes. Wright's interwoven concepts of privacy and
individualism are expressed in his prescription for "lives lived in greater
independence and seclusion." Could it be that at the end of the twentieth
century the splendid isolation envisioned by Wright simply no longer suggests the sense of well-being it once did? Or has this isolation now become
associated with alienation as much as independence?
Consider the project of Alex van Es, a systems analyst from the town of
Apeldoorn in The Netherlands, who has linked his doorbell, refrigerator,
toilet, alarm clock, and six cameras within his house to the Internet. (Is it
possible that the Dutch, having practically invented the notion of domestic
privacy, are now the least compelled by it?) Van Es allows a public viewing of
various intimate details of his life, as well as tabulations of the number of
times he went to the refrigerator, what he ate, how many times he went to
the toilet, how many visitors he had, and so on. Visitors to his Web site can
even determine which music will play to wake him in the morning."
Van Es's project reminds us that the root of the word regard, meaning to
look or gaze at, comes from the Old French garder, that is, to guard or watch
over. Through van Es's invitation to the public to observe the more intimate
aspects of his domestic routines, it is possible to recognize that someone
watching is not necessarily threatening. Rather, his position suggests that, in a
world of isolation, having someone watching can be reassuring. While it
remains problematic to reconcile such an attitude with the specter of Big
Brother, the interactive gaze of the media has now come to represent a comforting presence as much as an intrusive surveillance.
THE FAMILY

Radical changes in the concept of privacy are paralleled both in terms of

scope and pace by the transformation of the family and family life since
World War II. Before considering these changes, it is useful to look at the status quo ante. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy, in the
opening lines of his novel Anna Karenina (1873-77), wrote, "All happy families
are like one another""'7 Despite this overly generalizing tone, Tolstoy's words
FIGURE n : Taeg Nishlmoto. Plot House (No. 1).
Project, 1992. Elevation

have the ring of truth. Perhaps the reason Tolstoy could say that all happy
families were alike was that society wished them to be so. By the nineteenth
century, the term family referred more and more to the nuclear family
father-husband, mother-wife, and childrenand less and less to the idea of
the family as an extended group of people related by blood, marriage, and
other circumstances. Another idealized observation, this one from earlier in
the nineteenth century, speaks about the private house as nearly inseparable from the family: The possession of an entire house is strongly desired by
every Englishman; for it throws a sharp well-defined circle round his family
and hearththe shrine of his sorrows, joys and meditations.""'8 This relationship between the bourgeois or middle-class family and the private house
acquired a strong political dimension, as we have seen, since it represented
individual liberties. At the same time, ironically, the private house also
came to be seen as a means of enforcing social order and as a symbol of
moral values. The historian Catherine Hall notes that the nineteenth-century
English "Evangelicals saw the family as central to their struggle to reform
manners and morals. Families could be the 'little church' which the Puritans
had dreamt of, the Tittle state' subject to its master"'' The Evangelicals' belief
that social order could be best maintained if the head of each family, the
parents and particularly the father, enforced moral accountability and raised
the children within certain societal boundaries is not unique in history. The
attitude that the house should be an incubator for the proper raising of children is, in fact, central to its very inception. In his elegantly written history
of the house, urbanist Witold Rybczynski writes, referring to the seventeenth
century: "The emergence of the family home reflected the growing importance of the family in Dutch society. The glue that cemented this unit was
the presence of children."'10
In a more recent article that assesses the influence of many twentiethcentury avant-garde houses, Rybczynski seems to be restating his observation
about the role of children in the development of the private house. He
remarks that Robert Venturi's Vanna Venturi House (Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, 1959-64) and Philip Johnson's Glass House (New Canaan, Connecticut,
1949) "have not necessarily influenced domestic models for the general public," as they were designed to be "inhabited by only one or two people."-"
While Rybczynski's remarks might be correct historically, it is important to
note that today people who live alone or with one other person are the general public in many parts of the industrialized world. For example, around a
quarter of American households now consist of one person.-12 Half of the
families in America consist of couples without any children living under the
same roof." These statistics cannot be considered simply an indication of the
aging of the population. The great increase in the number of women with
professional careers, experience tells us, has created a proportionate increase
in the number of younger couples, well into their thirties, without children.
While many of these couples will have children eventually, they will have
fewer than a generation ago, and, hence, will spend fewer years of their
adult lives raising children. As such, it appears safe to say that a majority of
Americans will spend a large part of their lives living alone or with a partner, but not necessarily with children.
This new phenomenon is mirrored in a New York Times article by Joseph
Giovannini about a childless couple's search for a home: "Instead of a typical

FIGURE i a : Jose Oubrerie and Cicely Wytde-Oubrerie,

Atelier Wylde-Oubrerie. Miller House, Lexington,
Kentucky. 1992. Third-, second-, and ground-floor
plans showing three separate "houses" on top levels,
and shared spaces on ground level

high-end house, what they really wanted was a New York loft, set in Santa
Barbara."" Realizing that the design of most suburban houses reflected the
requirements and living patterns of a family with children, they decided to
hire an architect to design a home that would fit their own needs. The newspaper article points out, among other things, the very different spatial
requirements a couple with children has compared to those of a couple (or,
by inference, a single person) without children. Without the need for
acoustic and visual privacy, as one would have with children in the house,
the traditional upstairs/downstairs separation of the private and public
spaces is less compelling. Instead, the loft model has been deemed to be
appropriate; its flexibility and openness are in marked contrast to the structured spaces that typify the traditional family house and reflect domestic
rituals revolving around the presence of children. While none of them are
literally lofts, Dubbeldam's Millbrook Residence and Lupo's and Rowen's
Lipschutz/Jones Apartment, both designed for young couples without children; Michael Maltzan's Hergott Shepard Residence (pp. 76-79) in Beverly
Hills, built for a gay couple; and Francois de Menil's Shorthand House
(pp. 80-83) m Houston, built for a divorced woman whose children are now
adults, are all good demonstrations of that spatial option.-15
The possibilities of the loftlike space are also expressed in Mack Scogin's
and Merrill Elam's 64 Wakefield (pp. 84-87) in Atlanta. Scogin and Elam chose
to drastically reconfigure their already much renovated bungalow, eliminating many of the partitions between rooms and, perhaps most notably,
installing on the upper floor of the house a lap pool, which faces the street
but is shielded by a sheet of frosted glass. A critic described the results: "The
overlapping spaces are not conceived as a series of planned rooms as much
as a choreography of movement. T told my mother there are no rooms, just
situations,' reports Scogin of the first parental visit. This deliberate ambiguity
and open-endedness of 'rooms' is increased by the reflections of the open-air
pool against its shimmering glass partial-height walls."-"1
64 Wakefield as well as Homa Farjadi's and Sima Farjadi's BV House
(pp. 88-91) in Lancashire, England, also demonstrate other relationships
between changing family composition and the private house. The families
occupying both consist of parents who had previously been married and
children from those earlier marriages. In both designs, separate "houses" for
the children were constructed adjacent to the main buildings to afford the
children, as well as the parents, a certain sense of autonomy beyond the
newly constituted family circles.
The idea of generational separation is not necessarily unique to our own
times, and it is certainly not unique to families of second marriages. In the
Maison a Bordeaux, designed by Rem Koolhaas of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (pp. 92-95), two distinct routes lead to the parents' and children's areas. Both are on the upper level, but they are separated by an air
space open to the sky above and terrace below. In the case of Xaveer de
Geyter's House in Brasschaat (pp. 96-99), the architect has specifically
referred to the parents' and children's "apartments," each with its own private garden. Conceived as three separate "houses" within one structure, Jose
Oubrerie's and Cicely Wylde-Oubrerie's Miller House (fig. 12) serves as home
base for a far-flung family of four. Oubrerie described his clients, a lawyer,
his wife, and their two children: "All four live, work, or study in different

parts of the country," with the house accommodating "their various and
variable stays, in and out of Lexington, alone or together"47
Until just after World War II, only eight percent of American households
were comprised of one person. The fact that this number had jumped to
approximately twenty-five percent by the last decade of the twentieth century does pose questions. While it is difficult to interpret this data, experience tells us that this dramatic change is due to several factors. First, the
general population of the United States is older than it was before World
War II; the single occupant of de Menil's Shorthand House, for example, is
among the one-third of all American women over the age of sixty who live
alone.4" We also know that it is more socially acceptable to live alone,
whether by choice or by circumstances, than it was previously. Underlying
the mainstream media uproar about Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House
was an undeniable suspicion of Dr. Farnsworth herself, a single, professional
woman in her late forties, a sufficiently rare phenomenon in 1953 to attract
notice.47 Not only was she neither a wife nor a mother at a time when most
women her age were both, but the design of the house indicated she had no
particular plans to become part of a family.
The roots of this societal discomfort are deep. In parts of the American
colonies, "solitary living," that is, living outside of a family structure, was outlawed.50 In their effort to enforce social discipline, particularly as it related to
sexuality, the Puritans insisted that single adults remain at home, theirs or
someone else's, until they established their own "little state subject to its master" through marriage.
The belief that marriage and parenthood is the most desirable state for
an adult man or woman is still quite evident in society today. Yet the single
person who builds a house for him- or herself is certainly becoming more
common. Joel Sanders's unbuilt House for a Bachelor for Minneapolis
(pp. 100-03) c a n be considered to be a sort of domestic manifesto for single
people, men and women alike. "If the traditional suburban home laid the
foundations for the production of the nuclear family, this project, literally
built upon the foundations of a preexisting developer home, reconfigures
the interior to sponsor new spatial and visual relationships attuned to the
domestic lifestyle of the contemporary bachelor,"51 writes Sanders. His implicit
and explicit affirmation of solitary living could equally apply to Preston Scott
Cohen's Torus House (pp. 104-07), the T-House by Simon Ungers with
Thomas Kinslow (pp. 108-11), or Thomas Hanrahan's and Victoria Meyers's
Holley Loft (pp. 112-15), au" of which were designed for single occupants living
in New York State.
Part of the anxietywhich has not completely disappearedabout
unmarried adult men and women was the ambiguity of their social status
and by inference their sexuality. It is difficult to separate the legitimation of
the house built for a single person from society's somewhat increased tolerance for social and sexual relationships and lifestyles that fall outside the
traditional nuclear-family structure. In this respect, it is interesting to compare recent houses with those from earlier in the twentieth century. Consider the man's bedroom in the Piscator Apartment, designed by Marcel
Breuer (fig. 13). At a glance, the solitary white room devoid of works of art
or books suggests a mixture of monastic simplicity and military discipline.
With its overhanging canopy and continuous head- and sideboard, the

FIGURE 15: Marcel Bi

Piscator Apartment,
Man's bedroom

narrow bed appears designed to restrain its occupant more than anything
else. Aside from a few other pieces of spartan furniture, the only other thing
to be seen in the room is exercise equipment, which has clear associations
with the health and hygiene culture of the heroic modern period but can
also be seen in terms of anxiety over male sexuality. The punching bag, in
particular, seems to be a provision for the sublimation of male aggression.
By contrast, richly textured surfaces and lush materials characterize
Hanrahan's and Meyers's Holley Loft, designed for a single man. The bedroom is neither spare nor cellular, its ample space clearly visible from the
principal public spaces through a glass wall. In a slightly more demure but
no less suggestive way, a floating sheet of translucent glass screens the
equally spacious bathroom from the living area. An unexpected view
reveals the bathtub from the bedroom. In Sanders's House for a Bachelor,
the space of the bedroom also flows into the bathing area, complete with
pool and, like the Piscator Apartment, exercise equipment. However, in this
instance, the health and hygiene associations are overridden by the design's
more contemporary and more sensualized references to bodybuilding.
Perceptions about solitary living are certainly not the only manifestations of the moral dimension of the private house. For example, Wright's
idealized house design employs what were by the end of the nineteenth
century the standard practices of separating the public areas downstairs
from the sleeping and bathing rooms upstairs and of isolating as much as
possible the individual sleeping and bathing rooms from each other. As the
historian Roger-Henri Guerrand has pointed out, "In the nineteenth century
a heavy veil was thrown over the least manifestation of sexuality.... Once it
had been permissible to receive guests in a room with a bed in it, but that
time was past."52 It would be an exaggeration to say that this practice has
ended. However, in recent projects, such as Koolhaas's Maison a Bordeaux
and Scogin's and Elam's 64 Wakefield, the clear segregation of public and
private is no longer evident. In the Maison a Bordeaux, a central open space
allows a hydraulic platform to move between the three floors. This arrangement not only gives mobility to the owner, who uses a wheelchair, but also
imparts a new fluidity between the public and private floors of the house.
64 Wakefield also breaks the upstairs/downstairs pattern of private and
public. The master-bedroom suite is actually arranged vertically with the
sleeping space upstairs and the dressing areas downstairs, both of which are
visually screened from visitors but without the "heavy veil" described by
Guerrand. In Cohen's Torus House, the veil is completely gone; the sleeping
space is adjacent and open to the living area.
Such projects as the Millbrook Residence, the Ost/Kuttner Apartment by
Sulan Kolatan and William Mac Donald (pp. 116-19) i n New York City, and
the House for a Bachelor suggest a contemporary shift in attitudes toward
the other "forbidden" domestic space, the bathroom, as well. Unlike the spacious bathing areas in the Holley Loft, the Maison a Bordeaux, and many
other projects presented here, the bathroom in the typical middle-class private house has been foremost a functional space, usually no larger than
needed to accommodate the standard plumbing fixtures: bathtub, sink, and
toilet. Furthermore, the ubiquitous use of ceramic tile, often white, for wall
and floor surfaces emphasized hygiene over any other environmental or
aesthetic quality. In the Millbrook Residence, the spacious bathroom is open

to the bedroom, and a wooden soaking tub replaces the standard fixture.
From it, the bather can enjoy views into an enclosed court in one direction
and out to the landscape in the other. In Kolatan's and Mac Donald's
Ost/Kuttner Apartment, the master-bedroom suite is not only fairly open to
the public areas but the couple's sleeping and bathing areas are essentially
the same space. Only a sheet of transparent glass prevents the water in the
bathtub from flowing into the couple's bed. Aside from this transparent
membrane, the spaces themselves flow unimpeded one into another, accentuated by the fluid geometries of the cast-fiberglass architectural surfaces. In
the House for a Bachelor, the spa replaces the more prosaic bathroom. It is
highly visible and also more explicitly eroticized. "An aqueous curtain...
veils the backlighted silhouettes of showering bodies," the architect writes."
WORK

By the seventeenth century, the wealth of European town dwellers was such
that they were able to physically remove the source generating the family's
wealth from the living quarters. Separating the family's business from the
house did not just remove the noise but also eliminated the dirt, the
employees, the apprentices, the customers, and the suppliers. The house
could be, for the first time, quiet, clean, and relatively peaceful. The private
house could become a less idiosyncratic and more generic structure; its
activities could be more easily defined, and the elements of its design more
readily standardized. In effect, it became a building type from which sprang
the ubiquitous European row house, the English cottage, and the latter-day
American suburban home, among others.
Reversing a process begun nearly four hundred years ago, the reintroduction of work into the private house now under way is extensive, with some
twenty million Americans now using their homes as principal workplaces.54
How working at home affects house design can be seen on a variety of scales.
In one instance, a home office might be a fairly contained space that acts as
an appendage or an extension of a remote place of work, such as in the Holley Loft. On a larger scale, the home office might be a principal place of work,
in which one or more of the occupants spends all of his or her working time,
as in Clorindo Testa's Ghirardo-Kohen House (pp. 120-23) i n Buenos Aires
and Kazuyo Sejima's and Ryue Nishizawa's M House (pp. 124-27) in Tokyo.
In other designs, the presence of work is not limited to a single space,
instead merging with the living areas to create a new kind of space, as might
be seen in the Lipschutz/Jones Apartment. The owners of this loft are both
traders on Wall Street, and, in light of the globalization of international markets, their working hours are no longer fixed. Rather, work occurs when
market activity occurs. Hence, the home office is in effect a panopticonlike
trading room, its flickering digital screens visible from other areas of the loft.
Six screens in addition to those in the office display information at close
range in various locations: next to the bathroom mirror (so as to be visible
when shaving), next to the bed (to be visible upon waking), and so on.
In a more sculptural way, Ben van Berkel's Mobius House (pp. 128-31) in
Het Gooi, The Netherlands, symbolizes the seamless flow of living and
working that now characterizes so many lives. The clients are a husband and
wife who both work at home. Their separate work areas are folded into the
other spaces used in daily life. Unlike the traditional single-family home's

;-/|^'-^mpgf^:-

FIGURE 14: UN Studio/Van Berkei & Bos.

Mobius House, Het Gooi, The Netherlands. 1998.
Unfolded sections diagramming spatial flow

FIGURE 15: An example of

Celtic knotwork

sharp functional and social distinctions, the Mobius House's spaces are like
intertwined pieces of a ribbon that has no beginning and no end (fig. 14).
Dubbeldam conceived of a similar seamless expression of her clients'
daily lives in her design of the Millbrook Residence for a young professional
couple. The various work and living functionsas well as the interior and
exterior of the houseare woven together like the strands of, in the architect's words, a Celtic knot (fig. 15)." The two owners will work on different
levels of the house when built He, a graphic designer, will work on the
ground-floor media room, while she will work on fashion-industry projects
in a studio on the upper level. While they work separately in their daily routines, the "knotted" structure guarantees that they will constantly crisscross
each other as they move through the house.
The BV House by Farjadi and Farjadi is also a place in which the parents
work. To both integrate the work space with the parents' quarters and separate
it from the social spaces, the Farjadis grouped the parents' and employee's
offices with the parents' bedroom, dressing room, and bathing area. A lily
pond traversed by bridges separates this "unit" from the main social areas.
In considering a number of these projects, Heidegger's objections to the
presence of the media may come to mind. The image of a "seamless" back and
forth between living and working no doubt carries with it some anxiety, particularly as it might represent, in a hyper-capitalist world, a life of endless work.
Yet, for many, it also carries the somewhat romantic notion of the reintegration
of the dualities that have characterized the private house since the nineteenth
century: public and private, masculine and feminine, action and repose.
None of these potential reintegrations would be possible without the
radical changes wrought by the digital revolution. That these changes have
become relatively commonplace can be seen in the example of the graphic
designer mentioned above. For the majority of his professional activities,
he uses computer equipment, which is connected to his remote clients by
modem. Roughly fifteen years after the word processor became an innovation in the workplace, digital technologies have helped reintroduce work
into the house, sometimes interweaving it throughout the entire environment, even, as in the Lipschutz/Jones Apartment, on an around-the-clock
basis. Furthermore, the result is not some sort of mercantile bedlam breaking out in the living room but the silent flicker of an aestheticized flow
of information.
It should be noted that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the idea of working at home did not completely disappear. For
lawyers, doctors, and other professionals in the nineteenth century, an office
within the body of the house or even, as in France, within the apartment

was not uncommon. Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre (Paris, 1932), comprised of a gynecologist's offices and his home, is a good example of this residential type integrating work and living spaces. The "house of the artist,"
with roots in the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, is another
type that survived the segregation of the two activities. Reconfigured here in
the Torus House, this hybrid combines living space with the artist's studio.
Danelle Guthrie's and Tom Buresh's WorkHouse (pp. 132-35) in Los
Angeles, Neil M. Denari's unbuilt Massey House design also for Los Angeles
(pp. 136-39), and Reinhold Martin's and Kadambari Baxi's Homeoffice project (1996) merge elements of both the residence/office and the artist's house.
Designed as the architects' own residence, the WorkHouse serves as one of
many examples of the revitalization of the residence/office model. In the
WorkHouse, the boundary between public-work and private-living, which
was maintained in the Maison de Verre and the Massey House, is blurred by
the single stair that crisscrosses between the two areas, making the building
more like the artist's house. The Homeoffice equally blurs the distinctions by
reprogramming an existing corporate office tower through interjecting
domestic spaces into the existing work spaces.
The WorkHouse, Massey House, and Homeoffice are not the only examples of contemporary houses that subsume additional functions. Larger
houses, or at least those whose overall space exceeds the more prosaic
requirements of the household, have throughout history included various
nondomestic programs under the same roof as more traditional living areas.
Koolhaas's Maison a Bordeaux, Maltzan's Hergott Shepard Residence, and
Testa's Ghirardo-Kohen House all have ample space dedicated to the exhibition of art, and Lingers and Kinslow's T-House similarly devotes space to its
library and reading room. These familiar domestications of often more public programs have been adapted to reflect contemporary concerns in the
Kramlich Residence's video galleries and the Millbrook Residence's media
room. Spaces related to health and exercise do not have quite as long a tradition as libraries and art galleries. Even so, twentieth-century projects such
as Breuers Piscator Apartment, with its built-in exercise equipment, and Le
Corbusieris Unite d'Habitation (Marseilles, 1946-52), with its rooftop running
track and pool, established precedents for the workout rooms and swimming pools in the Hergott Shepard Residence, the House for a Bachelor, the
Massey House, 64 Wakefield, and various other buildings.
Also notable is the relative proportion of some of these programmatic
additions. In the T-House, the volume of space given over to the books is as
large as the living quarters, and in the Kramlich Residence it is difficult to
say where the living quarters and the video exhibition spaces begin and
end. The Torus House is similarly composed. Depending on how the owner
chooses to use the space, from twenty to sixty percent of the house serves as
an art studio.
Is the T-House then a house with a library or a library with living quarters? Does the owner of the Torus House sleep in his studio or paint in his
house? Do Lipschutz and Jones as well as Guthrie and Buresh work in their
homes or live in their offices? In each case, we are reminded that the separation of work and living into separate spaces was the catalyst for the development of the office and the house as distinct architectural types. As the
spheres of work and daily life are reintegrated, we can logically expect that

the sharp distinctions between the traditional architectural types will continue to become less definitive.
DOMESTICITY

FIGURE [6: Emanuel de Witte. Interior with a

Woman Playing the Virginal, c. 1660.
Paint on canvas, 3014x41%" (77.5x104.5

cm).

Loan: The Netherlands Institute of Cultural

Heritage, Rijswijk. Location: Museum
Van Beuningen,

Rotterdam

Boijmans

In describing typical representations from the first half of the nineteenth

century of German private houses, the historian Alexandra Richie mentions
"images of pretty but not grand interiors, of young men in their libraries or
young ladies practising the piano or having tea or singing Christmas carols.
The rooms were cosy and homely, with wooden floors and striped silk wallpaper, filled with dainty furniture of lavender and cherrywood. The centre of
this world was the family?54 The comfort of the houses suggested by Richie's
words, and the orderliness and functionality that would have maintained
them, were not spontaneous inventions of an architect. Rather, they represent highly refined attitudes that could scarcely have developed if it were
not for the fact that for over two centuries the intellectual and physical capabilities of bourgeois European women and their later middle-class American
counterparts had been channeled toward the near-exclusive responsibility
of tending their houses and caring for their families.
Rybczynski describes Dutch painter Emanuel de Witte's seventeenthcentury paintings of women within their homes (fig. 16): "It was natural for
women to be the focus of de Witte's paintings, because the domestic world
that he was depicting had become their realm. The world of male work, and
male social life, had moved elsewhere. The house had become the place for
another kind of workspecialized domestic workwomen's work. This
work itself was nothing new, but its isolation was."3. Within this isolation,
daily activitiesthe preparation and serving of meals, the raising and education of children, the furnishing of the house and the arrangement of its
contentswere transformed, achieving a near ritual status. Under the supervision of its mistress, the private house became, rather than simple shelter,
an environment dedicated to the physical and psychological comforts we
associate with the term domesticity.58
It must be remembered that, despite its widespread popularity over the
centuries, the private house and all it has come to represent have not been
without their critics. Charles Baudelaire's flaneur, the urban-dwelling man of
the boulevards and the antithesis of the proper bourgeois gentleman,
appeared, unsurprisingly, at the same time the cult of the domestic was exerting tremendous influence over French culture. Andre Gide's contemporaneous words were even more strident: "Families, I hate you! Closed shutters,
sealed doors, happiness jealously guarded."5'
The critics of middle-class life in America have turned not to the boulevards but to the highway, from Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road"
(1856) to Jack Kerouac's On Tlie Rood (1957). Feminist voices have also seized
upon the hermetic quality of the private house and the limited horizons it
has presented to women, from Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) to Joyce
Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1974).
While the aforementioned literary critiques by virtue of their eloquence
have been the most pointed, architects and clients themselves have contributed
to the discussion. In some instances, such as Peter Eisenman's House VI (Cornwall, Connecticut, 1972-75), the critique is quite evident and specific. Stairs that
lead nowhere suggest the claustrophobia so many feminists associate with the

FIGURE 17: Clorindo Testa, Architect

Ghirardo-Kohen House, Buenos Aires. 1994.
View of original moldings with alterations

FIGURE 18: Gordon Matta-Clark. Splitting.

1974. Cibachrome, 30x40"

(76.2 x 101.6 cm}.

Courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

and David Zwirner, New York

private house. A column inconveniently interrupts the dining-room space,

becoming a silent presence at the table and creating a sense of tension. The
twin beds in the master bedroom were originally separated by a gap in the
floor, creating a psychological distance despite the obvious proximity.60
Testa's Ghirardo-Kohen House, a complete reconfiguration of a grand
suburban residence north of Buenos Aires, might equally be interpreted as a
critique of the cult of domesticity. Built in the 1920s, the original house was
designed in a Tudor style, the very image of the house as an institution
devoted to tradition and comfort. Testa's design deconstructs this image,
with slashing interventions that slice through the house and open it up
(fig. 17). Along with these excisions, which recall the work of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark (fig. 18), Testa expanded the house by adding to it strange
new forms that are as disquieting and inexplicable as the original house's
imagery was soothing and familiar.
Similarly, Koolhaas's Maison a Bordeaux strikes an unsentimental pose
in opposition to traditional expressions of domesticity. Perhaps Herbert
Muschamp, the New York Times architecture critic, has described it best as "a
shelter from shelter!'*1 Denari's resolutely aloof design for the Massey House
might be discussed in the same terms. This aloofness is, in a sense, a kind of
antidomesticity, a highly stylized, constitutional unfamiliarity that is both
challenging and liberating.
Other houses might be cited that do not necessarily reject domesticity
per se, but certainly avoid the evocation of any traditional visions of domesticity. Designs such as the T-House, Bell's Glass House @ 20, and Craig Konyk's
Luini House (fig. 19) may not elicit the same sense of the profoundly unfamiliar that characterizes Koolhaas's and Denari's houses. Yet they are adamantly
unsentimentalparticularly when compared to the ersatz classicism of postmodern domestic architecturein rejecting any sort of allusion to traditional
house design.
Whether any of the houses presented in this book aspires to the physical and psychological comforts of domesticity, the question still remains:
who is going to perform the work that creates these comforts? By the end of
World War II, opportunities for women to work outside the home, out of
choice or necessity, were such that approximately thirty percent of women
were in the United States labor force. Since then, that number has leapt to
sixty percent and now shows no sign of diminishing.*2
Perhaps the loss, or at least diminishment, of the traditional concept of
domesticity is the price that has to be paid to insure that men and women
have equal opportunities to develop their talents in both public and private
spheres. Who would at this point in time insist that there is a real alternative
to this proposition? Yet this raises even more questions. If the private
house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?
The easiest solution may be to simply look beyond the domestic status
quo (or at this point, perhaps the status quo ante would be more appropriate),
as the architect and owners of the Hergott Shepard Residence have done. The
two gay men who commissioned the house were intent that its design would
reflect their own needs rather than any existing notion of domesticity. In
Wright's idealized plan for A Home in a Prairie Town of 1900, "a certain wellestablished order" underlies the kitchen/pantry/dining-room arrangement. In
Maltzan's plan, a new kind of order has been created. The kitchen is notice-

Kjlgri

FIGURE 19: KONYKarchitecture. Luini House,

Long Island, New York. 1997-99

FIGURE 20: Daly Genlk. Slot/Box,

Santa Monica. 1998

ably small for the size of the house, reflecting the fact that neither of the owners cooks on a regular basis. However, the kitchen is placed adjacent to the
garage, which doubles as a set-up space used by catering services for, among
other things, the many fund-raising events the men host for political causes.
The owners conceived of the central living areas as public spaces for these
events. As they have a large art collection, this public space has also been
designed to serve as a gallery with two distinct spaces appropriate to the scale
of the works in their collection.
Other variations on the traditional house plan have been made to
accommodate the owners' way of living, from the provision of separate
offices at opposite ends of the house to adjacent shower stalls in the master
bathroom. As the owners do not plan to have children, the upper level contains only the single bedroom/bath/dressing suite and one of the offices.
The rest of the house is principally at ground level, with the loftlike spaces
flowing rather easily one into another. The largest room, with the best view,
is the gymnasium.
Maltzan's design for the Hergott Shepard Residence may be an implicit
critique of traditional domesticity, but it is much more about thoughtfully and
articulately seeking an alternative. In this sense, the house reflects a longstanding American attitude toward the private house and its design. In
describing Catherine E. Beechefs A Treatise on Domestic Economyfor the Use oj Young
ladies at Home and at School of 1841, Rybczynski points out that its early discussion of the planning and building of domestic architecture in America was not
written by an architect: "Beecher was expressing a point of view that had not
been heard since tire seventeenth century in Hollandthat of the user. This
was the prime characteristic of American domesticity;'" While the qualities of
the average family may change, Maltzan's design reflects a continuing belief
that the best design, the only logical design, for a house is one that reflects its
owner's needs and desires. Indeed, the designs for all the houses presented in
this book do not claim, as have so many model homes in the past, to be new
paradigms for living. Rather, they are responses to specific needs.
At this point, it is interesting to reintroduce the topic of the loft. If the
spatial structure of the traditional house derives from the ritualization of
certain domestic activities, such as the preparation and serving of meals and
the receiving of guests, the loft's absence of structure is notable. While the
relative openness and flexibility of the loft have inherent spatial and visual
pleasures, the appeal of the loft is not simply aesthetic. Choosing the
unstructured space of a "New York loft set in Santa Barbara" over a traditional house might also be seen as a desire to live in a house that more
accurately reflects the domestic patterns of contemporary living, whether
the inhabitants are single people, couples, or families with children.
No longer a "found" space, the loft-type structure has become an alternative to the one-, two- or three-bedroom private house for a variety of
reasons. Designed for couples with children, the Glass House @ 20 and the
Slot/Box house by Daly Genik (fig. 20) are similar in their flowing, unstructured interiors, their long, narrow footprints that exaggerate the sense of distance within, and their untraditional appearance compared to their neighbors. Mastenbroek's and MVRDV's Double House and Steven Holl's Y House
(pp. 140-43) in New York State remind us that the loft-type house is more an
attempt to re-create the openness and lack of rigid structure of an industrial

FIGURE 21: Donna SekneSeftei

with William

Wilson. Culebra House, Culebra, Puerto Rico.

Project, 1992. Exterior perspective

loft rather than its form. In this sense, the Double House might be considered a vertical loft, and the Y House a loft that is folded onto itself. These
projects are also evidence that a New York loft in Santa Barbara, or anywhere else for that matter, is not necessarily an oxymoron. Even so, their
emphasis on open, flowing spaces is no less than a reversal of the prescriptions for domesticity in la Maison de Kant: "stability and finitude, not openness and infinity!'6*
Some recent examples not only invert that emphasis on stability but
also make a relative virtue of instability. In the Ost/Kuttner Apartment, the
dining room virtually disappears when the table is folded up into a partition. Similarly, the Ghirardo-Kohen House and the Holley Loft can be transformed to accommodate various social situations, from hosting formal
dinner parties to housing overnight guests, by a complex series of sliding
and pivoting walls and disappearing doors. De Mend's Shorthand House,
with its movable partitions, reflects the play between the French word for
office, cabinet, and the English sense of the same word, which refers to a piece
of furniture with sliding drawers and pivoting doors. In the architect's
words, "What defines one space from another are things that move."65
In the Maison a Bordeaux, major architectural elements can be manipulated. The entire twenty-five-foot-long glass facade of the main living level
can be moved away electronically to transform the spaces into an open-air
room. Furthermore, installed in the ceiling of the main living space is a
series of tracks that allows sliding sunscreens to control the amount of light,
hanging works of art to be moved from place to place, and a variety of richly
textured fabrics to be positioned to change the atmosphere. Similarly, the
structure of Donna Selene Seftel's and William Wilson's 1992 Culebra House
project for Culebra, Puerto Rico (fig. 21) is composed of over thirty Dutch
doors and a sliding glass wall, all of which can be manipulated to change
the interior spaces and to accommodate sun, airflow, privacy, and security.
Recalling the moving partitions of Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder House
(Utrecht, The Netherlands, 1924) and the mechanical character of the architectural fittings and furnishings of Chareau's Maison de Verre, we cannot
consider the idea of moving parts a recent invention. However, at a time
when so many aspects of contemporary lifeoccupation, residency, personal relationshipsseem more transient than permanent, a changeable
interior might be as much a metaphoric statement as a functional one.66
THE PRIVATE HOUSE: AN ARCHITECTURAL BELLWETHER

While it might be said that the private house is just now beginning to catch
up to the fundamental social and cultural changes of recent years, if not
decades, the private houses discussed here can also be seen as both a collective bellwether of the current state of architecture and a harbinger of its
future direction. Throughout history, the private house has played this role.
Unlike larger projects, which normally require broader societal, corporate,
or political consensus, the private house can be realized through the efforts
of a very few people. It often expresses, in the most uncompromising way
possible, the vision of a client or architect, or both.
In this sense, the houses discussed here reflect what have emerged as the
two most influential areas of contemporary architectural theory. While they
need not necessarily be seen together as a dialectic, these areas of study are

/'

FIGURE 22: Mdbius strip. Drawing by Paul Bourke

FIGURE 2 3 : Klein bottle. Drawing by

Paul Bourke

FIGURE 24: Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio. Raybould

House and Garden, Fairfield County, Connecticut.
1997-99. Exterior perspective.

Computer-generated

image by Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio

FIGURE 25: Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio. Raybould

House and Garden, Fairfield County, Connecticut.
1997-99. Interior perspective.

Computer-generated

image by Kolatan/Mac Donald Studio

often characterized that way. Moreover, they are all too frequently seen as
antipodes in a partisan polemic. This latter view is most accurately summed up
in the oft-cited conjunction of mutually derisive terms: "blobs" versus "boxes."
The term blob refers to the results of new architectural investigations into various geometric models. Ignoring traditional sources of architectural form, these
investigations are based on topology, a branch of mathematics concerned with
certain geometries such as the torus, the more complex Mdbius strip (fig. 22),
and the related Klein bottle (fig. 23) and projective plane.157
The Ost/Kuttner Apartment and the more recent Raybould House addition (figs. 24, 25), also by Kolatan and Mac Donald, might serve as examples
of the architectonic possibilities of such a topological approach. In both, various spaces are defined to satisfy programmatic needs without interrupting
the continuous flow of surfaces. The use of the computer for generating the
forms as well as fabricating their fiberglass shells is remarkable in several
regards. First, technologies that were previously only available for very large
and expensive projects are more accessible, even to relatively small architectural practices; this accessibility is certainly driving much of the interest in
complex geometries. Secondly, the physical characteristics of fiberglass make
it particularly suitable to the fabrication of complicated, curving shapes. The
liquid state of the material during the casting process assures that the resultant surfaces warp and bend as called for in the design and that the final
surface is extremely smooth, conveying little sense of texture or scale. The
result, as can be seen in Kolatan's and Mac Donald's projects, is an environment of liquid spatiality; the Raybould House in particular becomes what
architect and critic Jeffrey Kipnis has called a "meditation on the architecture
of the structural skin."6"
A number of their peers, such as Greg Lynn and Alejandro Zaera-Polo,
are perhaps more closely associated with these investigations into complex
geometry through their well-known designs for, respectively, the Korean
Presbyterian Church of New York in Sunnyside, Queens (1995-98; with
Douglas Garofalo and Michael Mclnturf) and the Yokohama International
Port Terminal (competition proposal 1995, projected completion 2002). Nonetheless, if history is a guide, it should be no surprise that among the most
advanced realizations of the complex, seamless geometries that had until
recently been largely theoretical are Kolatan's and Mac Donald's relatively
modest apartment and their house addition.
Many questions, of course, remain as to how these new technologies will
be deployed, particularly on a larger scale. Yet the most important questions
are not technical but philosophical. What is it about topology that has captured

FIGURE 2 6 : Stephen Perrella with Rebecca

Carpenter, Hypersurface Systems, Inc.
MObius House. Project, 1998. Site di

FIGURE 27: Alejandro Zaera-Polo,

Foreign Office Architects. Virtual House.
Project, 1997. Exterior perspective.
Computer-generated

image

FIGURE 2 8 : Waro Kishi. House in Shimogamo,

Kyoto. 1994

FIGURE 2 9 : Sean Godsell. Kew House,

Melbourne, Australia. 1997

the imagination of so many architects who have created so many projects

that simply could not have existed a decade ago? In the case of private
houses, Cohen's Torus House, van Berkel's Mobius House, Stephen Perrella's
and Rebecca Carpenter's Mobius House (fig. 26), and Zaera-Polo's Virtual
House (fig. 27) all take their primary form, and in three of the four cases even
their names, from topological geometries. Yet in each of these works, the
scale of the organizational problem underlying the private house can hardly
justify the use of such complex geometries.
Their appeal is, it must be acknowledged, in part aesthetic and in part
technological. There is a novelty to these new forms and the means of creating them that is compelling as well as beautiful and marvelous. Nonetheless,
the real interest in using these geometries on a domestic scale lies in the
connections that can be drawn between them and broader cultural issues. If,
as we have seen, the "un-private house" has challenged many of the dialectics that had calcified around the concept of the private house during the
nineteenth centurypublic/private, male/female, nature/culture, and so
ontopology takes the challenge further in that it is inherently disposed to
creating spatial interconnections rather than making spatial distinctions. In
other words, the Mobius strip, which has neither inside nor outside, seems to
bear little relationship to the world described in La Maison de Kant, a world
that was defined by dialectical differences. However, Haraway's cyborg might
easily be imagined to be ensconced in Zaera-Polo's Virtual House, which
shifts "constantly between a lining and a wrapping condition,"'19 a quality that
seems suited to the cyborg's "partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity!'
If the philosophical attitude underlying the use of single-surface geometries can be described as nondialectical, the distinctions between architectural interior and exterior stand to be diminished as much as any other
opposition. The idea that the interior of an architectural object might be
continuous with its exterior has opened up enormous possibilities for contemporary design. In the site plans for Kolatan's and Mac Donald's Raybould
House, the amorphous forms of the house are part of a landscape of equally
amorphous shapes. In a somewhat different strategy, the BV House lies close
to the earth, its horizontally configured forms appearing to mimic tectonic
plates. De Geytefs House in Brasschaat and van Berkel's Villa Wilbrink
(Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 1994), among others, narrow the difference
between landscape and architecture by treating the surfaces of the latter as
part of the former.
Behind every "blob" is the figure of August Mobius, the German mathematician who first published the single-sided figure named after him in 1865.
It can also be argued that the "box" has its own paternity. It is difficult to dissociate the term, however obvious it may sound, from the pivotal work of
Mies van der Rohe. The relatively unheralded reemergence of the influence of
Mies at the end of the twentieth century deserves note. Despite the incredible
breadth of his production, conservative architectural critics such as Vincent
Scully dubbed him the author of what they derisively and reductively referred
to as the "glass box." Far from being a pariah today, the "glass box" has reappeared in such diverse and far-flung residential projects as Group's Leisure
Studio in Espoo, Finland (1992), Waro Kishi's House in Shimogamo (fig. 28),
Sean Godsell's Kew House (fig. 29), and Bell's Glass House @ 20. In more
complex and fragmentary ways, other projects considered here, including

FIGURE 50: Stanley Tigerman.

The Titanic 7978. Photomontage,
77X>xl4'A"(28.1x35.7cm). TheArt
Institute oj Chicago, Gift of Stanley
Tigerman

FIGURE 51: Rem Koolhaas, Office for

Metropolitan Architecture. Two Patio
Villas (also known as House for Two
Friends), Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
1984-88, Bathroom

FIGURE 52: Georg Kolbe's Morning (1925)

in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona
Pavilion (1929)

Maltzan's Hergott Shepard Residence, de Geytefis House in Brasschaat, and

Sejima's and Nishizawa's M House, similarly echo, or at least refer to, Mies's
seminal steel-and-glass works.
The fin-de-siecle reappearance of Mies is as dramatic as it is unexpected.
Twenty years ago, Mies's ideas, and modernism in general, were considered
a spent force, a judgment summed up rather neatly by Stanley Tigerman's
collage depicting Mies's 1950-56 Crown Hall sinking, Titanic-like, into the
waters of Lake Michigan (fig. 30). Mies's reemergence is not, it should be
noted, due to revived cadres of adherents revving up the old war cries like
"less is more" and "God is in the details." The evidence suggests that the pervasiveness of Mies's influence today is precisely due to the extent to which it
has finally escaped the rhetorical sloganeering with which it had become
encrusted. If a great number of younger architects have found Mies's legacy
to be so fertile, it may be because they no longer need the master's or his
disciples' permission to use it. They are no more "Miesian" than Andrea Palladio was "Albertian"; they have simply absorbed this century's great architectural lessons without letting the architect absorb them.
Some of the greatest revisions in our perception of Mies's work and,
hence, its ability to influence contemporary architecture have been wrought
by the near endless quotation and repositioning of the architect's work by
Koolhaas and his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. The first
chapter of his magnum opus, 5, M, L, XL, presents fantastic histories of
Mies's KroIler-MiHler House project for The Hague (1912) and the Barcelona
Pavilion (1929), which precede photographic essays on his own designs: Two
Patio Villas (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1984-88), Nexus World Housing
(Fukuoka, Japan, 1991), and the Villa Dall'Ava (St. Cloud, Paris, 1985-91). In
this seminal chapter, Koolhaas's revisionist interpretation of the Barcelona
Pavilion, the most modern of architectural icons, is complete, presenting a
vision of Mies that is no longer pure, classical, and sober, but queer (or "bent,"
as he says), Hollywood, and delirious. No longer an object trapped in a distant, unreachable, or perfectible past, the Barcelona Pavilion has been
reworked for current consumption; the image of a buff athlete showering in
Koolhaas's Two Patio Villas (fig. 31) is what would be called in the film industry a "remake" of Georg Kolbe's cast-bronze maiden captured within the
Pavilion's courtyard reflecting pool (fig. 32).
Koolhaas's repositioning of Mies within a postmodern context is not

FIGURE 35: Rem Koolhaas, Office for

Metropolitan Architecture. Maison a
Bordeaux, France. 7998

> >

' $

FIGURE 34: Ludwig Mies van der Robe.

Riehl House, Potsdam.

1907

simply a literary project. The Maison a Bordeaux is an example of the Office

for Metropolitan Architecture's appropriation of numerous Miesian devices
in its built work. As with many of Koolhaas's projects, the conceptual starting point is a socle, the platform or plinth that Mies used to elevate to lesser
or greater degrees his structures above the eartha tactic he inherited from
the Neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Another example might be
seen in the first view of the building one has from the driveway (fig. 33),
which reprises the famous garden view of Mies's earliest house, the Riehl
House (fig. 34). In addition, the rear facade (fig. 35) clearly echoes the profile
of Mies's cantilevered Glass House on Hillside project of 1934 (fig. 36).
The work of Herzog and de Meuron has also contributed enormously to
the revitalization of interest in Mies's work. Projects such as their Koechlin
House (fig. 37) remind us that, above all, architectonics is a visual and ultimately sensual discipline; only secondarily is it a technical one. In this sense,
the detailing of the flush plaster, glass, and metal surfaces in the Koechlin
House is emblematic of the technical rigor required to execute such a building, yet it is only fully appreciated on a visual level. The absolute juxtaposition of the materials, held tautly in plane, heightens our awareness of them,
their physical differences and their unexpected similarities. Although Mies's
work, as his reputation retreated after his death, came to be widely derided as
austere and culturally errant, the product of determfnist forces, this project
and others show us how for the same reasons Miesian can also mean sensuous,
subjective, and replete with specifically local conditions.
While Herzog and de Meuron and Koolhaas have managed to get us to
look at the architect's work differently, other events have helped us to see
Mies's work on his own terms. Two of his most important built works, the
Barcelona Pavilion, which was demolished in 1930, and the Tugendhat
House in Brno, Czech Republic (1928-30), which was damaged and severely
altered during and after World War II and then became virtually inaccessible during the Cold War, are accessible again. The pavilion was rebuilt in
1986, and the villa was partially restored in recent years. Both are open to
the public and have come alive for an entire generation of architects who
have only known them through the historical chasm that black-and-white
photography can suggest. San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz's description of his visit to the rebuilt pavilion suffices to describe the profundity of
experiencing this previously lost masterwork of Mies's early career: "Visiting

FIGURE 55: Rem Koolhaas, Office for

Metropolitan Architecture. Maison d
Bordeaux, France. 1998

FIGURE 3 6 : Ludwig Mies von der Rohe.

Glass House on Hillside. Project, 1934.
Elevation sketch. Ink on paper, 4% x 8"
(10.7x20.3

cm). The Museum of Modern

Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive

Koechlin House, Basel. 1994

FIGURE 5 8 : Bernard Tschumi. Glass Video Gallery,

Groningen, The Netherlands.

1990

the Pavilion, I realize what space is, and experience what a fish may when it
first grasps that it lives in water..,. Being inside makes me float, and I take
huge breaths, filling my lungs with air"71
The point to be made here is not that the Maison a Bordeaux, or any of
the other houses discussed here, is simply a sum total of a number of Miesian
references. In Herzog's and de Meuron's Kramlich Residence, for example, the
overall form of the work is clearly indebted to Mies; the hovering roof sheltering a glass enclosure is part Barcelona Pavilion, part Famsworth House. Yet
the interior configuration and the programmatic elements are something
altogether different. When completed, the lower level of the house will provide space for semipermanent video installations, and the undulating, semitransparent walls of the living quarters will be rendered immaterial by the
flickering presence of digital images.
It might be argued that the revived interest in the glass house and its
spatial conditions is, paradoxically, an indication of how much culture has
changed since Mies's time. Conceived as a heroically contemplative place,
the Famsworth House met with great public resistance for the simple fact
that it was assumed one could see in as easily as see out. This visual accessibility flew in the face of accepted notions of privacy at the time. At the end
of the twentieth century, it might even be said that the "interactive" aspect
that was so objectionable previously is now its greatest allure, and that the
reflexive gaze of the electronic media has become a metaphor grafted onto
the glass box. The shift from machine to media, or perhaps even Mies to
Microsoft, can be traced through such projects as Tschumi's Glass Video
Gallery (fig. 38), Dillehs and Scofidio's Slow House, and Joel Sanders's Kyle
Residence project intended for Houston (1993). The Glass Video Gallery,
while not an actual house, is a deconstruction and reformulation of the
archetypal glass house. While Mies's Famsworth House came to be called a
glass house, it is actually, as Tschumi reminds us, a steel house with a glass
skin and is as much a study in the verities of structure as anything else.
Tschumi's Glass Video Gallery not only is skewed out of plane, undermining
any notion of stability, but the building's columns and beams are structural
glass, blurring the distinction between support and surface. A further blurring can be seen in the reflections of the video monitors, ricocheting about
the space on various glass surfaces and rendering the architecture as less
material and more media.
The reformulation of high European modernism under way today in
Europeled by Herzog and de Meuron, Koolhaas, and Tschumi and their
former employees, students, and collaborators such as de Geyter, Annette
Gigon and Mike Guyer, and Maasis certainly not its first major revision.
This reevaluation, of which Mies plays so critical a part, owes a large debt to
those transformations of prewar modernism initially engendered by Richard
Neutra and later Charles and Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, and the other architects selected by John Entenza for the Case Study Program houses, begun
after 1945 and built in Southern California (figs. 59, 40). In these years, Los
Angeles became a crucible for the definition of a postwar culture of modernity that blended the original impulses of European modernism with the
divergent strands of Yankee pragmatism and California sensuality.
The work of a number of younger California architects who have
recently established practices, among them Michael Maltzan Architecture,

FIGURE 39: Charles and Ray Eames.

Eames.House, Pacific Palisades,
California.

1945-49

Guthrie + Buresh Architects, and Daly Genikalthough each of these studios traces its lineage through Frank O. Gehry's officeshows the ongoing
influence of the architects of the Case Study houses. The same could be said
of other Los Angeles-based practices, such as Angelil/Graham, Central Office
of Architecture, Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Thorn Mayne, and Michael
Rotondi, as well as offices further afield. Even so, the ongoing reinterpretations of California modernism evident in the work of these architects is not
taking place within a closed circle. Herzog and de Meuron, Koolhaas, and
Coop Himmelb(I)au, all of whom are active in California, continue to contribute a European view of America's new Edenas did their predecessors
Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Albert Freyeven as they draw from its
unique blend of contemporary and historical sources.
A similar assessment might be made of the process by which European
modernism metamorphosed within a Japanese cultural context. In the work
of Toyo Ito, Kishi, Sejima, and many others, it is possible to see a parallel
recasting of Mies and other Western modernists as less formal, more tactile,
and more transient in a way that cannot be fully explained by modernism's
European roots. Many ideological purists once considered these crosscultural hybridsCalifornia, to the east of the Pacific Rim, and Japan, to the
westa dilution of the original manifestos of the early twentieth century. Yet
they represent today one of the greatest resources for the ongoing transformation of modern architecture.
THE UN-PRIVATE HOUSE

FIGURE 4 0 : Pierre Koenig. Case Study

House 22, Los Angeles. 1959

Certain conclusions can be drawn about the status of the private house at
the end of the century, both as a cultural invention and as a product of the
autonomous discipline of architecture. All the houses examined in this book
depart substantially from the patterns established by the traditional private
house. Furthermore, it is interesting to note their many similarities to the
medieval hall, the traditional private house's antecedent. For example, large,
open spaces, rather than cellular divisions of rooms, characterize both the
"big houses" and contemporary lofts or loftlike houses. As such, the main
spaces in both frequently have had multiple functions. One of the most
important of these functions in the medieval house would have been the
performance of work and business activities. The contemporary loftlike living space is similarly associated with work, given its emergence as an alternative home in the 1970s for artists wanting spaces in which to live and work.
In the instance of the big house, the strong presence of the public world in
the home was a physical one; in the case of what might be called the "unprivate house," it is often a digital presence.
It would be overreaching to suppose that the popularity of the traditional private house is now on the wane, and that eventually it will be
bracketed historically by the medieval big house and the contemporary "unprivate house." Indeed, one of the things that has made the private house
such an institution has been its applicability and desirability to a large class
of people. That class of people still exists and will, no doubt, guarantee a
market for private houses that are more traditional than otherwise.
Nonetheless, it is manifestly evident that the private house developed for a
fairly static nuclear family is not necessarily applicable to all householders
or even a majority of them.

FIGURE 41: Ben von Berkel,

UN Studio/Van Berkel & Bos, in
collaboration with Cecil Balmond,
Ove Arup & Partners. "Octopus"
conceptual model for Hausfur Musik
und Musiktheater, Graz, Austria.
Design 1998, projected completion 2002

Various scenarios for the future might be considered. If the housing

industry responds to the changing conditions discussed herein as they have
already responded to the needs of the growing elderly population throughout most of the industrialized world, it is possible that in the future the market will offer an increased number of housing types. Or a strategy could easily be adopted by both architects and the building industry to make a more
rigorous distinction between structural and programmatic elements in the
planning and construction of houses, which would allow for a transformation of houses over time as owners' situations change. It may also be that
various technologies currently being developed to tailor consumer goods to
buyers' individual needs will be applied to the home-building industry. Just
as Herman Miller's Aeron office chair (1992) comes, like a piece of clothing,
in small, medium, and large sizes, a "custom" house might be made available to a broader segment of society.
The dynamics of the real-estate market and the building industry will
also, no doubt, experience great changes as a significant number of people
no longer have separate work and living places. The impact of this shift is
not clear. Perhaps members of the middle class will have more money to
spend on their single places of work and living. Or will other patterns
emerge? Could it be that it will become more common for people to spend
less on their homes-workplaces and save their earnings to buy weekend
houses, thereby reintegrating solitude into an otherwise wired world?
These changes in themselves will not automatically generate an appropriate architecture. Rather it will be, as it has been for centuries, the role of
the architect to interpret these changes into built form. While the adherents
of "boxes" as well as those who support "blobs" can claim a vision of the
future, neither strategyif these approaches can be called thatwill have a
significant impact upon the course of architectural development if it is
defined in formal terms alone. The current debate between those who are
investigating either the ongoing possibilities for prismatic architecture or
the newer, more complex geometries calls to mind Leonardo da Vinci's High
Renaissance writings in which he speculated on the nature of form. By his
reasoning, there were two types of visible bodies; "The first is without shape
or any distinct or definite extremities.... The second kind... is that of which
the surface defines and distinguishes the shape."72
The computer has, of course, made the absolute distinctions that Leonardo
saw between simpler and more complex geometries unsustainable. Simple,
rectilinear geometries and curving topologies (with the exception of certain
"nonorientable" geometries) are now more accurately seen as points on a
sliding scale of complexity rather than as fundamentally different types of
forms. In designs such as van Berkel's and Cecil Balmond's Haus fur Musik
und Musiktheater (fig. 41), Cohen's Torus House, and Kolatan and Mac Donald's
Ost/Kuttner Apartment, newly accessible geometries and more familiar ones
are fused within continua of form.
If simpler and more complex geometries can be understood as more
similar than dissimilar, then we can also see that attempts to judge one or
the other superior on a formal basis alone are not supportable. These
attempts simply maintain the misunderstanding that Leonardo and his contemporaries shared. In the instance of the Torus House, the fusion of the
normative glass box and the torus forces a suspension of all the associations

imputed to one form or the other. The compressed horizontality of its space
recalls the Cartesian infinitude ascribed to Mies's work; the remnants of the
torus form at its center suggest its own, internalized kind of endlessness. The
fusion of the two, although generated from dissimilar mathematical models,
creates a tandem sense of the boundless, both from without and within.
In a similar way. Glass House @ 1 forces us to rethink standard formalistic histories. Bell's design, with its obvious references to Mies's work, is a
prismatic volume that is slightly and intentionally distorted, as if it had been
pinched. In a strictly formalist reading, one might be tempted to conclude
that because it is distorted it therefore can no longer be considered Miesian.
But the opposite is true: the essential Miesian characteristic that defines the
project, its sense of boundlessness, cannot be accurately and completely
defined solely by form.
This is not to say that form is irrelevant or that all geometries are alike.
Rather, it is crucial to note that dissimilar forms are not necessarily ideologically oppositional and that formal distinctions in architecture are not the
most important ones. For example, as we go forward into an era of great cultural and technological change, the conception of the architectural surface as
a skin in which information is imbedded, as in the Kramlich Residence, The
Digital House, and the Hyper House Pavilion 5, is a much more intriguing and
critical point of departure than their obvious differences in geometric form.
The cultural definition of the private house is undergoing great change, a
transformation that, in itself, can generate significant architectural invention.
This change is taking place at a time when architecture is being fueled by
enormous new technical and material resources. The private houses discussed here, and the architects who designed them, can thus be seen as not
only reconfiguring the domestic landscape but laying the groundwork for
the first architectural debates of the twenty-first century. In the cultural
imagination and in the mind of the architect, the landscape of the built environment remains linked to what Helion called "the problem of the house."

NOTES

1 Jean HeUon, Termes do vie, termes d'espace,"

Colliers d'art 10, nos. 7-10 (1955), p. 268.
2 For a more thorough history of the origins
and development of the private house, see
Matthew Johnson, Houston Culture: Traditional
Treto'Iecture in an English Landscape (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993);
Amos Rapoport, House form and Culture
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J,: Prentice-Hall, 1969);
and VVitold Rybczynski, Home: A Short Histor)'
of an Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
3 From the first definition in /vlerriiiui-Wcitfler's
CbiJeoitoe DiefioHory, 10th ed. (Springfield,
Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1995), p. 927.
4 Quoted in Michelle Perrot, "At Home," in
Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 4,
From the Fires of Revolution to the Great
War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap
Press, 1990), p. 542. From Bernard Edelman,
La Maison de Kant (Paris: Payor, 1984), pp. 25-26.
5 Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Baron
Geismar, Sept. 6,1785, in Albert Ellery Bergh,
ed., Vie Writings of Vwtnas Jefferson, vol. 5
(Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Association of the United States,
1907), pp. 128-29.
6 While not a comprehensive survey, a cursory
look into national databases confirms this. In
Sweden, Switzerland, and France, for
example, private houses account for fortysix, fifty-four, and fifty-six percent of the
housing stock, respectively. See Statistiska
centralbyriin (Statistics Sweden), "Housing:
Dwellings by Type" (http://wivw.scb.se/
scbeng/svsiffror/svsiffrorbostadeng.htm);
Swiss Federal Statistical Office (Neuchatel),
"9 Construction and I-iousing: Features of
Housing 1990" (http://www.admin.ch/bfs/
stat_ch/bero9/euo903.htm); and National
Institute of Statistics and Economic
Studies (INSEE; France), "Living Standard:
Automobiles, Housing" (http://www.insec.fr/
va/keyfigur/fboo8_a.htm). All World Wide
Web sources cited in this essay were
accessible in April 1999.
7 U.S. Census Bureau, "Housing Starts and
Building Permits in July 1998," BiiiHiiin Online:
US. Census Bureau Housing Starts, released
Aug. 19,1998 (http://www.bui Idingonline.
com/housings tarts.htm).

! 1 Quoted in Michelle Facos, 'The Ideal

Swedish Home: Carl Larsson's Lilla Hyltnas,"
in Christopher Reed, ed.. Not at Home: Vie
Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and
Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson,
1996), pp. 81-91.

within the family between husband and

wife, and among friends.... One form in
which they [those desires! were expressed
was a growing reluctance to mingle
indiscriminately with neighbors and to
accept their restrictions on individual
behavior? Perrot, "At Home," p. 355.

!2 Martin Heidegger, The Thing," in Heidegger,

Poetry, Language, Vwught, trans. Albert
Hofstadter(i97i;softcover, New York: Harper
& Row, 1975), p. 166. (From essay in German
published 1954.)

5 William Safire, "Nobody's Business," The New

York Times ou the Web, Jan. 8,1998, Editorial
Desk sec.

13 "Results of the Shinkenchiku Residential

Design Competition 1991,"]A:TheJapan
Architect 5, no. 1 (winter 1992), issue titled
Rrsulls: /toother Class House, 1991 Annual, p. 50.

7 Elizabeth Gordon, The Threat to the Next

America," House Beautiful 95, no. 4 (April 1953),
p. 127.

14 Martin Heidegger, Being and Tune, trans. John

Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1962), p. 140.
(From the seventh German edition; first
published 1927.)
15 Diller+ Scofidio, unpublished project
description, 1990.
16 Beatriz Colomina, The Exhibitionist House,"
in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years
of Architecture (Los Angeles: The Museum of
Contemporary Art; New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1998), p. 138. Colomina's text focuses
on exhibition houses, which were designed
primarily for display at museums, expositions,
or other settings rather than for actual
inhabitation.

6 Gershenfeld, WlienTlmigs Start to Viink, p. 100.

8 Ibid., p. 129.
9 Quoted in Joseph A. Barry, "Report on the
American Battle between Good and Bad
Modern Houses," House Beautiful 95. no. 5
(May 1955), p. 270.
0 Quoted in Gordon Kipping G-TECTS, Ordinary
Dtanroms, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Public Access
Press at the Southern California Institute of
Architecture, 1997). sec. 3.2.
1 Luis Moreno Mansilla and Emilio Tunon,
"El espacio del optimismo: Una conversacion
con Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs y Nathalie
de Vries/The Space of Optimism: A
Conversation with Winy Maas, Jacob van
Rijs and Nathalie de Vries," EI eroepiis 4, no. 86
(1997), issue devoted to MVRDV, p. 15.

17 Neil Gershenfeld, JVhen ViingsStart to Tnmk (New

York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), p. 7.

2 The project has been built, but not as

designed.

18 Michael Trudgeon, "Hyper House,"

unpublished project description, 1998.

5 Bernard Tschumi, unpublished project

description, 1992.

19 Donna Haraway "A Manifesto for Cyborgs:

Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism
in the 1980s," Socinlisl Review 15 (no. 2), no. 80
(March-April 1985), p. 67.

4 Taeg Nishimoto, "Just What Is It That Makes

Today's House So Different, So Appealing?
Now," unpublished project description, 1991.

20 Hannah Arendt, Tlie Human Condition (Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 28.
21 Ibid., p. 30.
22 Nancy Franklin, "Show and Tell," The New
Yorker 74, no. 25 (Aug. 24 and 31,1998), p. 11.
25 Frank Lloyd Wright, "A Home in a Prairie
Town," Lodies'Homr/ourunJ, Feb. 1901, p. 17.

24 Frank Lloyd Wright, "Studies and Executed

Buildings," in Ausgefuhrte Baulcn und Enlwiirfe
von Frank Lloyd Wright (Berlin: Verlag Ernst
8 Statistics Canada, "Households by Dwelling
Wasmuth, (1910)), n.p. Reprinted in Bruce
Characteristics" (http://www.statcan.ca/
Brooks Pfeiffer, ed., Frank Lloyd Wright: Collected
engl i s h/ Pgd b/ Peop 1 e/ Fa m i 1 ies/fa mil09.htm).
Writings (New York: Rizzoli; Scottsdale, Ariz.:
9 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture: Settings
The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, 1992),
and Rituals (New York: Oxford University
p. 108. The identification of privacy, and
Press, 1985), p. 561. See also chapter 2,
hence the private house, with individual
"Intimacy and Privacy," in Rybczynski, Home.
liberty has particular resonance in American
culture. Nonetheless, the same associations
10 Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
were made, Perrot argues, at the end of the
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund
nineteenth century in Europe: "People at all
Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
levels of society desired greater intimacy
Schocken Books, 1978), p. 154.

5 Kipping, G-TECTS, Ordinary Diagrams, sec. 3.5.

6 Jeroen van Bergeijk, "Public Viewing of a
Private Life," Wired News (http://www.wired,
co m/nei vs/n ei vs/cu 11 ure/s to ry/1628 o. h t m I).
Alex van Es's Web site is at wivw.icepick.com.
7 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. David
Magarshack (New York: The New American
Library, 1961), p. 17.
3 Quoted in Catherine Hall, The Sweet
Delights of Home," in Michelle Perrot, ed.,
/I History 0/Private Lr/e, vol. 4, From the Fires of
Revolution to the Great War, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, Belknap Press, 1990), p. 74.
From General Report, Census of Great Britain,
1851 (1852), 1, p. xxxvi.
9 Hall, The Sweet Delights of Home," p. 55.
0 Rybczynski, Home, p. 59.
1 Witold Rybczynski, The Biggest Small
Buildings," Ardiifrehire 87, no. 12 (Dec. 1998),
P-59-

371

42 U.S. Census Bureau, "Historical Census [1990I

of Housing Tables: Living Alone" (http//
www.cens us.gov/hhes/www/h ousing/census/
historic/livalone.html). A cursory search of
databases from other industrialized countries
indicates similar demographics. In Germany
and Switzerland, thirty-five and thirty-two
percent of households, respectively, consist
of a single occupant. In the United Kingdom,
the percentage of one-person households,
now twelve percent, has increased by fifty
percent since 1974. In Japan, the number of
single-person households is also growing
rapidly. Twenty-six percent of all households
have a single person, a twenty-percent
increase in five years. See Statistisches
Bundesamt Deutschland (Federal Statistical
Office Germany), "Households and
Population Development (http://www.
statistik-bund. de/bas is/e/p opo3-htm);Swiss
Federal Statistical Office (Neuchatel),
"1 Population: Households" (http://www.
admin.ch/bfs/statLCJVberoi/euoio5.htm);
Government Statistical Service (United
Kingdom), The UK in Figures: Population
and Vital Statistics" (http://www.statistics.
gov.uk/stats/ukinfigs/pop-htm); and Statistics
Bureau and Statistics Center, Management
and Coordination Agency of Japan,
"Households and Household Members"
(http://www.staLgo.Jp/1602.htm#jfo2-06).
45 Ken Bryson and Lynne M. Casper, U.S.
Department of Commerce, Economics, and
Statistics Administration, "Household and
Family Characteristics: March 1997," Table B,
[U.S.) Census Bureau, P20-509, issued April
1998 (http://www.census.gov/population/
www/socdemo/hh-fam.html).
44 Joseph Giovannini, "Design Notebook: A
House Where Rooms Are a State of Mind,"
VteNew YorkTunes, Aug. 6,1998, p. Fi.
45 In describing many of the characteristics of
the private houses recently designed and
constructed, the terms loft and loftlike
seem to be indispensable. Yet it has to be
acknowledged that the adjective loftlike as a
description of so many recent houses is as
unsatisfactory as the terms one-, two-, or
three-bedroom are for describing traditional
houses.
46 Karen D. Stein, "Mack Scogin and Merrill
Elam," Areltilaliiral Record 186, no. 4 (April
1998), p. 138.
47 Jose Oubrerie, "Jose Oubrerie/Atelier WyldeOubrerie: Miller House," GA Houses 35
(July 1992), p. 10.
48 Administration on Aging (a U.S. federal
agency), "Living Arrangements of Persons
60+, by Age and Sex: 1990" (http://www.aoa.
dhhs.gov/aoa/stats/pophous/tableio.html).
From U.S. Census Bureau, "1990 Census of
Population and Housing: Special Tabulation
on Aging," STP 14, tables P32 and P54.
49 For more on this subject, see chapter 4,
"People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith
Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, and
Philip Johnson," in Alice T. Friedman, Women
and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and

Archilwliiral History (New York: Harry N.

Abrams, 1998), pp. 126-59.

65 Rybczynski, Home, p. 160.

64
50 John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman,
Intimate Alatlers: A History of Sexuality in America
65
(New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988),
p. 16.

Quoted in Perrot, "At Home," p. 342. From

Edelman, La Mabon de Kant, pp. 25-26.
Quoted in Edie Cohen, The Shorthand
House," Interior Design 9, no. 8 (Oct. 1998),
p. 129.

51 Sanders, "Re-Viewing" the Bachelor Pad,"

unpublished project description, 1998.

66 For example, in the United States, young

wage earners can expect to change jobs
almost nine times before they reach midcareer. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.
Department of Labor, Table 1: Number of
Jobs Held by Individuals Aged 18 to 32 in
1978-95: Individuals Aged 31 to 58 in
1995 by Educational Attainment, Sex, Race,
Hispanic Origin, and Age," National
53 Sanders, "Re-'viewing' the Bachelor Pad."
Longitudinal Surveys, last modified June 25,1998
(http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/nlsoy.toi.
54 Jim Shahin, "'Working' at Home," American
htm). Also, of the 322,300 marriages in the
Way 32, no. 5 (March 1,1999), p. 44.
United Kingdom in 1995, forty percent of
55 Winka Dubbeldam, unpublished project
them were second marriages for one or both
description, 1997.
parties. See Government Statistical Service
(United Kingdom), "The UK in Figures:
56 Alexandra Richie, Faust's Metropolis: A Hbtory of
Population and Vital Statistics" (http://www.
Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,
statistics.gov.uk/stats/ukinfigs/pop.htm).
1998), pp. 116-1752 Roger-Henri Guerrand, "Private Spaces," in
Michelle Perrot, ed., A History of Private Life,
vol. 4, From the Fires of Revolution to the
Great War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
Belknap Press, 1990), p. 568.

57 Rybczynski, Home, pp. 70-71.

58 For more on the subject of domesticity, see
Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution:
A Hbtory of Feminist Designsfor American Homes,
Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1981); Beatriz Colomina, ed.,
Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992); and Reed, ed.,
Not a! Home.
59 Quoted in Perrot, "At Home," p. 346.
60 In a recent telephone interview with the
author, the clients revealed that they have
altered the bedroom because they felt it did
not accurately represent their relationship.
61 Herbert Muschamp, "Living Boldly on the
Event Horizon," Die New York Tunes, Nov. 19,
1998, p. F7.

67 Topology explores certain basic properties of

geometric objects that do not change when
they are stretched, twisted, or bent, such as
the number of edges (or boundaries) and
holes. For more information, see Stephen
Barr, Experiments in Topology (1964; reprint, New
York: Dover Publications, 1989); Bernard
Cache, Earlli Moves: The Furnishing of Territories,
trans. Anne Boyman, ed. Michael Speaks
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995);
Gilles Deleuze, Foiifaull, trans, and ed. Sean
Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988); and Darcy Wentworth
Thompson, On Growth and Form, ed. John Tyler
Bonner, abridged ed. (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1961).
68 Jeffrey Kipnis, conversation with the author,
Dec. 21,1998,

69 Alejandro Zaera [-Polo), "La reformulacidn

62 Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of
del suelo/Reformulating the Ground,"
Labor, Table A-i: Employment Status of the
Quaderns, no. 220 (1998), issue titled Topografias
Civilian Population by Sex and Age: Women,
operalivas/OperaliveTopographies, p. 40.
20 Years and Over," Labor Force Statblicsfrom the
Curat 1 Population Survey, last modified Feb. 1,
70 Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem
1999 (http://stats.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/
Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, 5, M, I, XL, ed.
cpsatabi.htm). Similar statistics can be found
Jennifer Sigler (New York: The Monacelli
in other areas of the industrialized world.
Press, 1995), p. 49.
Forty-five percent of the United Kingdom's
71 Stanley Saitowitz, correspondence with the
work force is made up of women; in France,
author, June 1986.
the figure is forty-four percent; in Germany,
sixty-three percent of women from the age
72 Leonardo da Vinci, TJir Notebooks of Leonardo da
of fifteen to sixty-five are in the work force
Vinci, ed. and trans. Edward MacCurdy (New
or seeking employment. See, respectively,
York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939), pp. 986-87.
Government Statistical Service (United
Kingdom), The UK in Figures: Employment"
(http:// w ww.sta tistics.gov.uk/stats/ukinfigs/
employ.htm); National Institute of Statistics
and Economic Studies (INSEE; France)
"Employment and Earnings: Employment"
(hltp/Avwiv.insee.fr/vaAeyfigur/fboi2_a.htm);
and Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland
(Federal Statistical Office Germany),
"E m ploy ment" (http V/www.s tatistik-bund.de/
basis/e/beos.htm).