One of those days?
If you’ve the figure for it, wear this.
Again, the Telegraph UK delivers all the new graduating class designs. This is Essex.
14 comments June 5th, 2007
Archive for June 5th, 2007
Another triumph for classic modern design
The first time I saw a photograph of this house, I thought, “Well, yes, of course.” It seemed perfect. The only enclosed place was the bathroom, which seemed correct to me. It was never built to be the one and only house in which you did everything that makes part of your life. Here you do the things anybody might see, because they can.
It doesn’t even now so many decades later have a huge future, because it must be built in acreage. Otherwise it would be like living with a webcam permanently registering your life at home– or like living in Great Britain, where there are apparently CCTV watching you and now even talking to you if it doesn’t like what you’re doing.
Enormous acreage can’t be our future, unless you are willing to farm it all right up to your patio.
Think on this: this house was designed in 1949. It encompasses a purity that has hardly ever been matched since and certainly not before, unless we drag Brancusi’s sculptures into architectural discourse. It is exactly what it must be and not one thing more. You live in nature. Nature can come up to your wall and press it’s moist noise against it and stare at you doing whatever it is you do. Nature could use it’s muddy paws to leave a frieze along the bottom of your walls.
From the inside, if you cook steamy and greasy foods you will obscure the view. The job of keeping those glass walls sparkling could both improve your diet and make you hate nature.
All that considered, I still love this house and the purist view of living that it requires. I so disliked Johnson’s Chippendale frilled ATT building of the latter 20th century
that it seems impossible that the same man was responsible for both buildings. How can anything be post-modern? Are we not, even those most tradition bound of us, modern by default?
The images are linked from IHT.com and http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/att/ which are both sites worth exploring.
8 comments June 5th, 2007
