House Rules

House Rules - Afterword

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

Ogawa's floor plan successfully transplants lessons from Mies van der Rohe's bucolic Farnsworth House into Japan's Onomichi City. Its long side walls extend into the outdoors to embrace a small court at each end. The courtyard walls provide privacy from nearby houses and block street level distraction. The design's minimalism gives the tiny courts a disproportionate impact, letting nature and atmospheric conditions set the tone of the house in a more dynamic and affecting way than any decorating scheme; not as pervasively as in a glass-box house but with much bigger bang for the pane. (Pivoting panels at either end of the service core can be closed to seal off the more private zone, at right above, or stand open to replicate the Farnsworth House's spatial loop.)

The idea for House Rules grew out of a conversation with a couple who asked for a critique of a plan they had found and liked in a book of house plans. From the perspective of an architect, the design was disappointing but it was hard to say why. Singling out shortcomings didn't sum up what was wrong with it and only seemed nitpicking. The problem wasn't so much with what the plan was, but all that it wasn't. A copy of James Ackerman's book on Palladio was within reach, and next we were looking at a plan of the Villa Foscari: "See how both the house and its individual rooms are all perfect shapes, as if they were designed at once, and nothing feels like leftover space?" What would be House Rule 3 was born. The rules presuppose small houses and reflect personal preferences, but a case can be made for their validity on both counts. Small houses make sense for sustainability and in response to America's soaring percentage of one- and two-person households, which are now the national norm. Houses designed for such small households are freed from substantial privacy and partitioning needs, and can pursue exciting spatial opportunities in their place, much as sports cars are freed from back seats and sensible hardtops. Small houses can also bring custom design into reach. Lending practices require more money to be spent up front on land acquisition and construction for self-built homes as opposed to purchase of ready-made development houses. Economic necessity funnels the vast majority of new home buyers into speculative tract houses that aren't based on what most of us want, but on marketing assumptions aimed at maximizing profits across the boards. Developers seem to take Frank Lloyd Wright's view of the American house - a box full of boxes with holes punched in it for windows – as a description of what Americans really want and a recipe for sales success rather than a complaint. If Americans were more willing to live in compact, affordable houses, many more would be in a position to finance custom designs. They'd be living in smaller but better-fitting homes, and the typical American house would look very little as it now does. The House Rules aim to encourage this alternative by optimizing the quality of space and experience in such houses, adding value through inexpensive or cost-free design decisions. Beyond economic considerations, whatever validity the House Rules may claim lies in the merit of the great houses from which they're derived. It became clear in assembling them that individual rules could not only be illustrated by the majority of iconic modern houses, but that most of the houses used as examples embodied most of the rules. The House Rules are an introduction to the possibilities that lie beyond developer housing. They aim to get more Americans into houses designed specifically for them by an architect. The rules aren't meant as a substitute for an architect, but a prelude to a conversation with one.

House Rules - Afterword

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

Ogawa's floor plan successfully transplants lessons from Mies van der Rohe's bucolic Farnsworth House into Japan's Onomichi City. Its long side walls extend into the outdoors to embrace a small court at each end. The courtyard walls provide privacy from nearby houses and block street level distraction. The design's minimalism gives the tiny courts a disproportionate impact, letting nature and atmospheric conditions set the tone of the house in a more dynamic and affecting way than any decorating scheme; not as pervasively as in a glass-box house but with much bigger bang for the pane. (Pivoting panels at either end of the service core can be closed to seal off the more private zone, at right above, or stand open to replicate the Farnsworth House's spatial loop.)

The idea for House Rules grew out of a conversation with a couple who asked for a critique of a plan they had found and liked in a book of house plans. From the perspective of an architect, the design was disappointing but it was hard to say why. Singling out shortcomings didn't sum up what was wrong with it and only seemed nitpicking. The problem wasn't so much with what the plan was, but all that it wasn't. A copy of James Ackerman's book on Palladio was within reach, and next we were looking at a plan of the Villa Foscari: "See how both the house and its individual rooms are all perfect shapes, as if they were designed at once, and nothing feels like leftover space?" What would be House Rule 3 was born. The rules presuppose small houses and reflect personal preferences, but a case can be made for their validity on both counts. Small houses make sense for sustainability and in response to America's soaring percentage of one- and two-person households, which are now the national norm. Houses designed for such small households are freed from substantial privacy and partitioning needs, and can pursue exciting spatial opportunities in their place, much as sports cars are freed from back seats and sensible hardtops. Small houses can also bring custom design into reach. Lending practices require more money to be spent up front on land acquisition and construction for self-built homes as opposed to purchase of ready-made development houses. Economic necessity funnels the vast majority of new home buyers into speculative tract houses that aren't based on what most of us want, but on marketing assumptions aimed at maximizing profits across the boards. Developers seem to take Frank Lloyd Wright's view of the American house - a box full of boxes with holes punched in it for windows – as a description of what Americans really want and a recipe for sales success rather than a complaint. If Americans were more willing to live in compact, affordable houses, many more would be in a position to finance custom designs. They'd be living in smaller but better-fitting homes, and the typical American house would look very little as it now does. The House Rules aim to encourage this alternative by optimizing the quality of space and experience in such houses, adding value through inexpensive or cost-free design decisions. Beyond economic considerations, whatever validity the House Rules may claim lies in the merit of the great houses from which they're derived. It became clear in assembling them that individual rules could not only be illustrated by the majority of iconic modern houses, but that most of the houses used as examples embodied most of the rules. The House Rules are an introduction to the possibilities that lie beyond developer housing. They aim to get more Americans into houses designed specifically for them by an architect. The rules aren't meant as a substitute for an architect, but a prelude to a conversation with one.

House Rule 10 - Embrace Inconvenience

“I'd rather live in the nave of Chartres Cathedral and go out of doors to the john,” Philip Johnson told his architecture students. His sentiment will resonate with anyone who's ever stood in a meadow, greenhouse, park pavilion, industrial ruin or other non-house and impulsively felt “I want to live here.” While such fantasies are soon quashed by practical priorities, they offer valid insights. Johnson took what he felt under Chartres' forest of branching columns and put something of it into his Glass House, which is visually contained not by its clear walls but the tree-vaulted outdoors. His house adds indoor plumbing but very little else in the way of conveniences, focusing instead on the undistracted enjoyment of space. This bargain served Johnson well, and the Glass House was a great source of joy for the rest of his long life. Johnson's wish to sleep in a cathedral recalls both Holly Golightly's free-spirited preference for breakfast at Tiffany's and Frank Lloyd Wright's heedless call, “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.” Wright in turn was watering down Dorothy Parker's version, by which he more closely lived: “Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.” The architectural grandaddy of such quotes belongs to Vitruvius, who said - via Sir Henry Wotton's translation - "Well-building hath three conditions: commoditie, firmeness and delight." Take away firmness (structural integrity) as a given, and you have commodity (practicality) vying for turf with delight. Or perhaps more often, responsiveness to practical needs standing in for the rarer resource of vision. The practicality-vs-pleasure rivalry is certainly about more than just buildings, suggesting as it does the Big Question, “what's it all about?” Anthony Burgess succinctly took the dichotomy into philosophical territory in his 1960 novel, The Doctor is Sick. Its hospitalized protagonist quotes a line of verse to an unappreciative radiologist who responds, “I don't go in much for poetry." When he asks whether she thinks it's better to be a radiologist than a poet, she replies, "Oh yes. . . . After all, we save lives, don't we?" He then asks, "What's the purpose of saving lives? What do you want people to live for?" Are we here to perpetuate the human race toward some unknown but presumably significant end? Or to enjoy it in the here and now, assuming our capacity to do so may just be that end? Should our houses be machines streamlined for raising the next generation, so it can raise the next, or are we better off seizing the day and building for pleasure? While Vitruvius' recipe calls for some of each, you'd never know it from the great majority of today's houses. They cram in convenience until there's no room left for delight. This can be blamed on the business of housebuilding, or homebuilding as it's always called by its ever market-vigilant practitioners. Comfort and convenience are easy to package: lots of bathrooms, a master bedroom suite with a walk-in closet, wrap-around kitchens entered from multi-car garages, and so on. Even appliance brands get billing in real estate ads, with marketing analysts advising on their selection. Alternative qualities that might make a house an exciting place for a particular type of person or a specific site are too hard to define. There's no reassuring track record of profits for anything but the equivalent of top-40 radio. Offering anything else entails the risk of failure to sell, and the developer-built houses occupied by most Americans are nothing if not fearful. As with people, the fear in such houses can be read in their conformity. The marketing shorthand of developer houses - "3,000 SF, 4 BR, 2-1/2 BA" - places quantity over quality and creates a self-perpetuating value system. Zoning ordinances then codify conventions, insisting on minimum square footages, attached garages, pitched roofs, front doors, full basements and so on. It's hard to tell whether these criteria show a greater fear of squatters' shacks or anything an imaginative architect would design. The canned ingredients left to the cook are like the railroading verbal cliches George Orwell deplored in his essay, "Politics and the English Language," which he saw as:

rushing in to do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose - not merely accept - the phrases that will best cover the meaning . . .

Pre-verbal and true to self, this fluid thought process corresponds to the intuitive design phase Louis Kahn championed to his students. As noted by David B. Brownlee (in Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, 1991), Kahn was taking a page from his own education: "His emphasis on what he had come to call 'form,' the inherent essence that an architect had to discern in an architectural program before it was contaminated by practical considerations, was related to the Beaux-Arts emphasis on the preliminary, instinctive esquisse ." The freedom, unpredictability and potential for wish-fulfillment of this phase is the opposite of the fear-based, known-quantity-clinging DNA of the typical American house. The best such a house can deliver in the way of fantasy is colonial or tudor dress. Glenn Murcutt's 1996-98 Fletcher-Page House has huge sliding glass doors that open to transform its living spaces into a porch. “I have a great desire to make a building which is just a big veranda,” Murcutt has said. Envisioning such a building as his house, he adds: “For myself, for my security at night, I would like to have one room which is like going into a mole hole, where I can go for the security of being in a womb.” (Touch This Earth Lightly, Glenn Murcutt & Philip Drew, 1999.) Rather than beginning his design process from living- or dining- or bed- or bathrooms, Murcutt lets his imagination roam free from veranda to mole hole. The playful self-indulgence of this fantasy phase survives through its practical resolution into a livable house and animates the finished work with joy. Koh Kitayama's 1994 F3 House uses a ready-made greenhouse to enclose a garage/party-space and a small elevated box that accommodates private living functions. The transparent greenhouse envelope might be seen as a variation on Glenn Murcutt's house-as-veranda, while its opaque interior box answers his wish for a secure one-room nocturnal retreat. The F3 House demonstrates what's possible when sensations replace established room types as generators of a house design. What Kitayama's F3 House sacrifices in conventional comfort and convenience, it makes up for in delight. The particular bargain it strikes may not suit everyone, but the bachelor who commissioned it probably wouldn't have a hard time finding a like-minded buyer if he chose to sell it. An interest and cars and parties might not even be required, given the broad appeal of a return to life under the sky's blue dome. If design fantasy is to lead to anything more than jacuzzis and home theaters, it has to go beyond comfort. It must trade such "commodity" for the true delight of reconnection with life's fundamentals and the joy that automatically comes of being reminded we're alive. As blandest suburbia proves, unchecked convenience chokes out life. It reminds us of Thoreau, turning his back on the comfort of town "to front only the essential facts of life," and of the ardent hearted Huck Finn's farewell: "I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." Huck wasn't going to stand for a life choreographed by room names. He'd take the primal joy of his most basic condition, as a free body in space. Rule 10 is to embrace inconvenience. Pay attention to any place that ignites passion and take home its fire. A house that's based only on practical decisions and fears of missteps will never be more than sensible and timid. Too much comfort and convenience insulate people from life and its greatest and simplest pleasures. Design a house not just to support life, but to make living worthwhile. Continue to House Rules Afterword

House Rule 10 - Embrace Inconvenience

“I'd rather live in the nave of Chartres Cathedral and go out of doors to the john,” Philip Johnson told his architecture students. His sentiment will resonate with anyone who's ever stood in a meadow, greenhouse, park pavilion, industrial ruin or other non-house and impulsively felt “I want to live here.” While such fantasies are soon quashed by practical priorities, they offer valid insights. Johnson took what he felt under Chartres' forest of branching columns and put something of it into his Glass House, which is visually contained not by its clear walls but the tree-vaulted outdoors. His house adds indoor plumbing but very little else in the way of conveniences, focusing instead on the undistracted enjoyment of space. This bargain served Johnson well, and the Glass House was a great source of joy for the rest of his long life. Johnson's wish to sleep in a cathedral recalls both Holly Golightly's free-spirited preference for breakfast at Tiffany's and Frank Lloyd Wright's heedless call, “Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.” Wright in turn was watering down Dorothy Parker's version, by which he more closely lived: “Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.” The architectural grandaddy of such quotes belongs to Vitruvius, who said - via Sir Henry Wotton's translation - "Well-building hath three conditions: commoditie, firmeness and delight." Take away firmness (structural integrity) as a given, and you have commodity (practicality) vying for turf with delight. Or perhaps more often, responsiveness to practical needs standing in for the rarer resource of vision. The practicality-vs-pleasure rivalry is certainly about more than just buildings, suggesting as it does the Big Question, “what's it all about?” Anthony Burgess succinctly took the dichotomy into philosophical territory in his 1960 novel, The Doctor is Sick. Its hospitalized protagonist quotes a line of verse to an unappreciative radiologist who responds, “I don't go in much for poetry." When he asks whether she thinks it's better to be a radiologist than a poet, she replies, "Oh yes. . . . After all, we save lives, don't we?" He then asks, "What's the purpose of saving lives? What do you want people to live for?" Are we here to perpetuate the human race toward some unknown but presumably significant end? Or to enjoy it in the here and now, assuming our capacity to do so may just be that end? Should our houses be machines streamlined for raising the next generation, so it can raise the next, or are we better off seizing the day and building for pleasure? While Vitruvius' recipe calls for some of each, you'd never know it from the great majority of today's houses. They cram in convenience until there's no room left for delight. This can be blamed on the business of housebuilding, or homebuilding as it's always called by its ever market-vigilant practitioners. Comfort and convenience are easy to package: lots of bathrooms, a master bedroom suite with a walk-in closet, wrap-around kitchens entered from multi-car garages, and so on. Even appliance brands get billing in real estate ads, with marketing analysts advising on their selection. Alternative qualities that might make a house an exciting place for a particular type of person or a specific site are too hard to define. There's no reassuring track record of profits for anything but the equivalent of top-40 radio. Offering anything else entails the risk of failure to sell, and the developer-built houses occupied by most Americans are nothing if not fearful. As with people, the fear in such houses can be read in their conformity. The marketing shorthand of developer houses - "3,000 SF, 4 BR, 2-1/2 BA" - places quantity over quality and creates a self-perpetuating value system. Zoning ordinances then codify conventions, insisting on minimum square footages, attached garages, pitched roofs, front doors, full basements and so on. It's hard to tell whether these criteria show a greater fear of squatters' shacks or anything an imaginative architect would design. The canned ingredients left to the cook are like the railroading verbal cliches George Orwell deplored in his essay, "Politics and the English Language," which he saw as:

rushing in to do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose - not merely accept - the phrases that will best cover the meaning . . .

Pre-verbal and true to self, this fluid thought process corresponds to the intuitive design phase Louis Kahn championed to his students. As noted by David B. Brownlee (in Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, 1991), Kahn was taking a page from his own education: "His emphasis on what he had come to call 'form,' the inherent essence that an architect had to discern in an architectural program before it was contaminated by practical considerations, was related to the Beaux-Arts emphasis on the preliminary, instinctive esquisse ." The freedom, unpredictability and potential for wish-fulfillment of this phase is the opposite of the fear-based, known-quantity-clinging DNA of the typical American house. The best such a house can deliver in the way of fantasy is colonial or tudor dress. Glenn Murcutt's 1996-98 Fletcher-Page House has huge sliding glass doors that open to transform its living spaces into a porch. “I have a great desire to make a building which is just a big veranda,” Murcutt has said. Envisioning such a building as his house, he adds: “For myself, for my security at night, I would like to have one room which is like going into a mole hole, where I can go for the security of being in a womb.” (Touch This Earth Lightly, Glenn Murcutt & Philip Drew, 1999.) Rather than beginning his design process from living- or dining- or bed- or bathrooms, Murcutt lets his imagination roam free from veranda to mole hole. The playful self-indulgence of this fantasy phase survives through its practical resolution into a livable house and animates the finished work with joy. Koh Kitayama's 1994 F3 House uses a ready-made greenhouse to enclose a garage/party-space and a small elevated box that accommodates private living functions. The transparent greenhouse envelope might be seen as a variation on Glenn Murcutt's house-as-veranda, while its opaque interior box answers his wish for a secure one-room nocturnal retreat. The F3 House demonstrates what's possible when sensations replace established room types as generators of a house design. What Kitayama's F3 House sacrifices in conventional comfort and convenience, it makes up for in delight. The particular bargain it strikes may not suit everyone, but the bachelor who commissioned it probably wouldn't have a hard time finding a like-minded buyer if he chose to sell it. An interest and cars and parties might not even be required, given the broad appeal of a return to life under the sky's blue dome. If design fantasy is to lead to anything more than jacuzzis and home theaters, it has to go beyond comfort. It must trade such "commodity" for the true delight of reconnection with life's fundamentals and the joy that automatically comes of being reminded we're alive. As blandest suburbia proves, unchecked convenience chokes out life. It reminds us of Thoreau, turning his back on the comfort of town "to front only the essential facts of life," and of the ardent hearted Huck Finn's farewell: "I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before." Huck wasn't going to stand for a life choreographed by room names. He'd take the primal joy of his most basic condition, as a free body in space. Rule 10 is to embrace inconvenience. Pay attention to any place that ignites passion and take home its fire. A house that's based only on practical decisions and fears of missteps will never be more than sensible and timid. Too much comfort and convenience insulate people from life and its greatest and simplest pleasures. Design a house not just to support life, but to make living worthwhile. Continue to House Rules Afterword

House Rule 9 - Build for Flexibility

While not the first great modern house, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is without doubt the most influential today. It embodies two especially pertinent ideas that support flexibility. Its standardized industrial components suggest a demountable and reusable kit-of-parts architecture which, sixty years since, is the concept behind today's explosive proliferation of prefabricated modular and recyclable housing solutions. The Farnsworth House is spatially adaptable as well. Its open plan reflects Mies's ideal of timeless "universal space," the usefulness of which might outlive ephemeral functional assignments. From the wheelchair of his later years, Mies would have appreciated a further merit of this open plan; its lack of physical barriers. Such a house has the potential to remain useful to an occupant whose own physical condition changes. Mies raised the Farnsworth House several feet off the ground to protect it from the flooding of an adjacent river, abandoning an on-grade alternative scheme might have made it truly accessible. Admittedly derived from the Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson's Glass House realizes the ground-resting condition of Mies's abandoned scheme. Now open to the public, the Glass House is readily made accessible to wheelchair users by way of the barely noticeable ramp shown in the photo above. Its open interior is likewise wheelchair-friendly. #21 in the canonical Case Study House series of model homes for post-war America, Pierre Koenig's 1958-60 Bailey House has a continuous circulation loop and system of pocket doors allow the entire house to be thrown open as a single bright space, giving the bedrooms a spatial vitality far surpassing their typical status as corridor-leg appendages. As noted in Rule 4's discussion of the house, this contributes to a one-room feel in the spirit of the Farnsworth House, but with greater practicality and privacy potential. Koenig's house has a pair of bed-and-bath suites, shown at right in the plan above. Although mirror images of each other and both labeled "BR," one is shown furnished as a study. Photos of the house taken over the years show that it has served both uses. The rooms contribute to the house's overall expansiveness even as their own openness and quality of space is elevated. Shaded in pink, the room shown as a study and its bathroom can be isolated from the rest of the house by pocket doors at either end of its grid-floored corridor segment. This area could be adapted to a private home office suitable for business visitors with the addition of an exterior door at the red arrow. While the house has only two bedrooms, it's sized to the typical American household of today, which consists of an individual or couple. Beyond the outsized spatial appeal Koenig leverages out of its modest size, the Bailey House's ready flexibility gives it an added dimension and a far greater resale appeal than the third or fourth bedrooms most Americans feel compelled to build with an eye toward the next buyer, and then pay to heat, cool and amortize while they stand empty for years. The Bailey House's single level, openness and looping circulation path all make it adaptable in a way few American houses are; it could be a supportive home to a wheelchair user. Renzo Piano's expansion of the Morgan Library was completed in 2006. Wheelchair users enter it without the stigma of segregation onto a diverging ramp, alongside companions on foot by means of the same sloped surface and separated only by an assisting rail. In the manner of their day, the architects of the original Morgan buildings physically and metaphorically elevated their main floors and created a sense of transition from the everyday sidewalk with gracious but discriminatory stairs. While it's still common for new entrance designs to provide a central stair and side-ramp, Piano's resourcefulness serves the dignity of his building and all its users at once, with arresting simplicity. The new Morgan entrance approaches the aim of Universal Design, "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people." An emerging and more integrated approach to "handicapped accessibility," Universal Design is especially pertinent to housing; it would not only allow American baby-boomers to age in place, but would make for a home that those with disabilities can visit or consider buying. Retrofitting a house to be accessible is expensive, but building a new house that's accessible costs very little more than building one that's not. The open spatial quality that makes a house accessible has entirely separate merits, compatible with several of the other House Rules. Glenn Murcutt's Marie Short House was built in 1974-75 and later bought and enlarged by the architect, in 1981-82. Murcutt often cites the Aboriginal proverb, "Touch this earth lightly," words taken by architectural historian Philip Drew as the title of his 1999 book on the architect. In it, Murcutt says of his design for the Marie Short House, "It was very important that the house could be modified and undergo major surgery and still retain its integrity. I came along, some years later . . . and altered it. . . . What was so exciting to me was that I was able to re-use the original veranda, the galvanized iron roof, every piece of it, including the louvre frame, gable end - the entire end came out and was unbolted. . . . If I wanted to, I could unbolt half the house and trundle it off into the forest and modify it minimally and have a complete house. I can put them together, pull them apart, change them, and they will retain an integrity, wherever I place them." They'll also retain vitality, thanks to their ability to respond to new demands. By contrast, the house that's built for the ages is a monument to a moment, but necessarily loses vitality with time. Detroit and other rust-belt cities are reminders that not just houses but entire neighborhoods outlive their usefulness. A house that's designed for recycling, if not re-use, acknowledges the transience of human life. A house that's designed for permanence flatters the owner's ego to his face while mocking his mortality behind his back. Murcutt is deeply influenced by Thoreau, who built his cabin at Walden Pond with "Refuse shingles . . . second-hand windows" and "one thousand old brick," demonstrating the affordability of a house built "for a lifetime," and by implication, no more. As he wrote in Walden: "Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only." Murcutt seems to elaborate in Touch This Earth Lightly: "We are part of this whole - we are not the whole. Our being here is really the most transitory aspect of the planet. It is trees, it is climate, it is the earth, the water, the rocks and the landscape which is real. When we fail to see ourselves belonging to and as a part of that we become unreal." The plan of Glenn Murcutt's Marie Short House in its original form, top, and as enlarged, bottom. The design lent itself to expansion in the re-usability of its components and in its extrudable form and longitudinal circulation axes. Mies's linear, modular Farnsworth House is an influence Murcutt has acknowledged. r128 Werner Sobek's glass houses, R128 was completed in 2000, in Stuttgart, Germany. Sobek holds the Mies van der Rohe visiting professorship at Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies was for many years head of the architecture school. Sobek's houses can be seen as an effort to render Mies's vision environmentally responsible. R128 is entirely energy self-sufficient. It uses triple glazing, geothermal heating and cooling, and horizontal rooftop solar panels to dispense with fossil fuels and emissions altogether. Flexibility is a further sustainable aspect of its design. Sobek's conviction that "it is unethical to throw things away" is reflected in his buildings' construction from modular elements that can be detached and re-used elsewhere, realizing the recyclability that the Farnsworth house only suggested. Its three-dimensional steel grid has easily removed floor, wall and roof panels that might be reconfigured into a new house. Rule 9 is to build for flexibility. Design for change. Provide areas of different spatial qualities and levels of intimacy or privacy that might serve a variety of purposes, not rooms dedicated to single or fixed roles. Save space by designing areas to serve more than one function. Place critical spaces on the first floor or make the entire house one-story for ease of access to people of different degrees of mobility, and to allow residents to age in place. If more space might eventually be needed, place the house on its site to leave room for an addition, give it a shape that's easily extended, and design circulation and services to support growth. Anticipate the end of the house's usefulness, and design for easy disassembly and recycling. Continue to House Rule 10

House Rule 9 - Build for Flexibility

While not the first great modern house, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is without doubt the most influential today. It embodies two especially pertinent ideas that support flexibility. Its standardized industrial components suggest a demountable and reusable kit-of-parts architecture which, sixty years since, is the concept behind today's explosive proliferation of prefabricated modular and recyclable housing solutions. The Farnsworth House is spatially adaptable as well. Its open plan reflects Mies's ideal of timeless "universal space," the usefulness of which might outlive ephemeral functional assignments. From the wheelchair of his later years, Mies would have appreciated a further merit of this open plan; its lack of physical barriers. Such a house has the potential to remain useful to an occupant whose own physical condition changes. Mies raised the Farnsworth House several feet off the ground to protect it from the flooding of an adjacent river, abandoning an on-grade alternative scheme might have made it truly accessible. Admittedly derived from the Farnsworth House, Philip Johnson's Glass House realizes the ground-resting condition of Mies's abandoned scheme. Now open to the public, the Glass House is readily made accessible to wheelchair users by way of the barely noticeable ramp shown in the photo above. Its open interior is likewise wheelchair-friendly. #21 in the canonical Case Study House series of model homes for post-war America, Pierre Koenig's 1958-60 Bailey House has a continuous circulation loop and system of pocket doors allow the entire house to be thrown open as a single bright space, giving the bedrooms a spatial vitality far surpassing their typical status as corridor-leg appendages. As noted in Rule 4's discussion of the house, this contributes to a one-room feel in the spirit of the Farnsworth House, but with greater practicality and privacy potential. Koenig's house has a pair of bed-and-bath suites, shown at right in the plan above. Although mirror images of each other and both labeled "BR," one is shown furnished as a study. Photos of the house taken over the years show that it has served both uses. The rooms contribute to the house's overall expansiveness even as their own openness and quality of space is elevated. Shaded in pink, the room shown as a study and its bathroom can be isolated from the rest of the house by pocket doors at either end of its grid-floored corridor segment. This area could be adapted to a private home office suitable for business visitors with the addition of an exterior door at the red arrow. While the house has only two bedrooms, it's sized to the typical American household of today, which consists of an individual or couple. Beyond the outsized spatial appeal Koenig leverages out of its modest size, the Bailey House's ready flexibility gives it an added dimension and a far greater resale appeal than the third or fourth bedrooms most Americans feel compelled to build with an eye toward the next buyer, and then pay to heat, cool and amortize while they stand empty for years. The Bailey House's single level, openness and looping circulation path all make it adaptable in a way few American houses are; it could be a supportive home to a wheelchair user. Renzo Piano's expansion of the Morgan Library was completed in 2006. Wheelchair users enter it without the stigma of segregation onto a diverging ramp, alongside companions on foot by means of the same sloped surface and separated only by an assisting rail. In the manner of their day, the architects of the original Morgan buildings physically and metaphorically elevated their main floors and created a sense of transition from the everyday sidewalk with gracious but discriminatory stairs. While it's still common for new entrance designs to provide a central stair and side-ramp, Piano's resourcefulness serves the dignity of his building and all its users at once, with arresting simplicity. The new Morgan entrance approaches the aim of Universal Design, "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people." An emerging and more integrated approach to "handicapped accessibility," Universal Design is especially pertinent to housing; it would not only allow American baby-boomers to age in place, but would make for a home that those with disabilities can visit or consider buying. Retrofitting a house to be accessible is expensive, but building a new house that's accessible costs very little more than building one that's not. The open spatial quality that makes a house accessible has entirely separate merits, compatible with several of the other House Rules. Glenn Murcutt's Marie Short House was built in 1974-75 and later bought and enlarged by the architect, in 1981-82. Murcutt often cites the Aboriginal proverb, "Touch this earth lightly," words taken by architectural historian Philip Drew as the title of his 1999 book on the architect. In it, Murcutt says of his design for the Marie Short House, "It was very important that the house could be modified and undergo major surgery and still retain its integrity. I came along, some years later . . . and altered it. . . . What was so exciting to me was that I was able to re-use the original veranda, the galvanized iron roof, every piece of it, including the louvre frame, gable end - the entire end came out and was unbolted. . . . If I wanted to, I could unbolt half the house and trundle it off into the forest and modify it minimally and have a complete house. I can put them together, pull them apart, change them, and they will retain an integrity, wherever I place them." They'll also retain vitality, thanks to their ability to respond to new demands. By contrast, the house that's built for the ages is a monument to a moment, but necessarily loses vitality with time. Detroit and other rust-belt cities are reminders that not just houses but entire neighborhoods outlive their usefulness. A house that's designed for recycling, if not re-use, acknowledges the transience of human life. A house that's designed for permanence flatters the owner's ego to his face while mocking his mortality behind his back. Murcutt is deeply influenced by Thoreau, who built his cabin at Walden Pond with "Refuse shingles . . . second-hand windows" and "one thousand old brick," demonstrating the affordability of a house built "for a lifetime," and by implication, no more. As he wrote in Walden: "Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only." Murcutt seems to elaborate in Touch This Earth Lightly: "We are part of this whole - we are not the whole. Our being here is really the most transitory aspect of the planet. It is trees, it is climate, it is the earth, the water, the rocks and the landscape which is real. When we fail to see ourselves belonging to and as a part of that we become unreal." The plan of Glenn Murcutt's Marie Short House in its original form, top, and as enlarged, bottom. The design lent itself to expansion in the re-usability of its components and in its extrudable form and longitudinal circulation axes. Mies's linear, modular Farnsworth House is an influence Murcutt has acknowledged. r128 Werner Sobek's glass houses, R128 was completed in 2000, in Stuttgart, Germany. Sobek holds the Mies van der Rohe visiting professorship at Illinois Institute of Technology, where Mies was for many years head of the architecture school. Sobek's houses can be seen as an effort to render Mies's vision environmentally responsible. R128 is entirely energy self-sufficient. It uses triple glazing, geothermal heating and cooling, and horizontal rooftop solar panels to dispense with fossil fuels and emissions altogether. Flexibility is a further sustainable aspect of its design. Sobek's conviction that "it is unethical to throw things away" is reflected in his buildings' construction from modular elements that can be detached and re-used elsewhere, realizing the recyclability that the Farnsworth house only suggested. Its three-dimensional steel grid has easily removed floor, wall and roof panels that might be reconfigured into a new house. Rule 9 is to build for flexibility. Design for change. Provide areas of different spatial qualities and levels of intimacy or privacy that might serve a variety of purposes, not rooms dedicated to single or fixed roles. Save space by designing areas to serve more than one function. Place critical spaces on the first floor or make the entire house one-story for ease of access to people of different degrees of mobility, and to allow residents to age in place. If more space might eventually be needed, place the house on its site to leave room for an addition, give it a shape that's easily extended, and design circulation and services to support growth. Anticipate the end of the house's usefulness, and design for easy disassembly and recycling. Continue to House Rule 10

House Rule 8 - Use Trees

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?" Theodore Roethke asked in his 1953 poem, "The Waking." Trees have been our natural environment since before we came down from them, and they hold a deeply embedded place in the human psyche. Their generations of leaves are an intuitive metaphor for death and renewal. In a poem that contemplates mortality, did Roethke want his listeners to unconsciously hear "blight takes the tree?" Or just recall the redemptive wonder we feel on seeing a tree mysteriously transformed by sunlight? Beyond a metaphysical import, every tree has specific qualities that might influence its selection as an intermediary between artificial shelter and nature. The poplar pictured above, for example, has brittle leaves that make the wind audible as a gentle clapping. Philip Johnson called his Glass House a "pavilion for viewing nature," and referred to its lush setting as "expensive wallpaper." A year after the house's completion, Johnson explained its formal influences in the September, 1950, issue of Architectural Review. The uncaptioned photo above accompanied his article, a goes-without-saying nod to his design's source in the landscape. The image also highlights the incidental but pervasive and integral effect of trees as animating sources of shadow and reflection. Caspar David Friedrich's 1822 painting, "Noon," captures the fundamental allure of a stand of trees. In his 1963 book, Ecology, Eugene Odum wrote: "Human civilization has so far reached its greatest development in what was originally forest and grassland in temperate regions. . . . Man, in fact, tends to combine features of both grasslands and forests into a habitat for himself that might be called forest edge. . . . in grassland regions he plants trees around his homes, towns, and farms. . . . when man settles in the forest he replaces most of it with grasslands and croplands, but leaves patches of the original forest on farms and around residential areas. . . . man depends on grasslands for food, but likes to live and play in the shelter of the forest." An admirer of Caspar David Friedrich, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel painted "Landscape with Gothic Arcades" in 1811. The romantic appeal of Schinkel's architectural vision is closely related to the natural pull of Friedrich's grove in "Noon." The architect Robert Geddes' 1982 essay in Architectural Design, "The Forest Edge," quotes the passage above from Eugene Odum's Ecology, and takes its title from his name for man's prefered environment. The forest edge, Geddes wrote, "can be seen both as man's ideal habitat and as a mythical image. Consequently, just as man has enjoyed the forest at the edge of the clearing which has offered him both shelter and openness, so today we enjoy being in architecture which recreates similar spatial conditions: arcades and colonnades, loggias and porches, thresholds, cloisters, courtyards and peristyles - all of which resemble clearings at the edge of the forest." A convention of Japanese woodblock prints creates spatial depth by framing distant views in a foreground of trees or branches. Kawase Hasui's 1922 view of a scene in Katsusa, Hizen Province, goes further by picturing an entire tree-defined foreground space, and placing the viewer within its protection. Trees placed around a house can give its exterior views a similar spatial depth and sense of shelter, without the expense or artifice of a colonnade or porch. Frank Lloyd Wright's rendering makes his 1905 Glasner House seem to peer out from the woods into a clearing. The double-height stair space of Richard Neutra's 1927-29 Lovell Health House lets natural light and the moving shadows of trees deep inside. Charles and Ray Eames' 1949 Case Study House #8, better known as the Eames House, has a planted forest-edge colonnade of Eucalyptus trees between its façade and the meadow and ocean vista it overlooks. The trees not only frame the open view, but provide a play of shadows and reflections across the contrasting industrial surfaces and interior of the house. Their animation is indispensible to the design's vitality, as demonstrated in countless frames from the Eames' film, "House after five years of living." Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House was completed in 1951. Despite its 360-degree views, the house very much has a front and back. Its living spaces and terrace overlook the nearby Fox River to the south. A venerable sugar maple mediates this view, while providing much needed summer shade. The ailing tree is now guy-wired together to preserve the integrity of Mies's vision. Rule 8 is to use trees. Trees can bring nature to affordable sites far from the shore or landscape vistas. If a building lot offers no existing trees to exploit, new ones should be included in a house's budget, and chosen and placed for maximum effect. As well as providing shade and privacy, trees capture the mystery of changing light, give voice and visibility to the wind, mark the passage of the day with the sweep of their shadows, inform the seasons with their changing leaves and, in their slow growth, echo the accumulation of the years of memories that give a place personal meaning. Use trees for these rewards and to extend a house's sense of shelter and give a foreground to its exterior views. Let the moving shadows of branches and leaves animate the surface of the house and fall inside to vitalize its interior and keep nature near. Continue to House Rule 9

House Rule 8 - Use Trees

"Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?" Theodore Roethke asked in his 1953 poem, "The Waking." Trees have been our natural environment since before we came down from them, and they hold a deeply embedded place in the human psyche. Their generations of leaves are an intuitive metaphor for death and renewal. In a poem that contemplates mortality, did Roethke want his listeners to unconsciously hear "blight takes the tree?" Or just recall the redemptive wonder we feel on seeing a tree mysteriously transformed by sunlight? Beyond a metaphysical import, every tree has specific qualities that might influence its selection as an intermediary between artificial shelter and nature. The poplar pictured above, for example, has brittle leaves that make the wind audible as a gentle clapping. Philip Johnson called his Glass House a "pavilion for viewing nature," and referred to its lush setting as "expensive wallpaper." A year after the house's completion, Johnson explained its formal influences in the September, 1950, issue of Architectural Review. The uncaptioned photo above accompanied his article, a goes-without-saying nod to his design's source in the landscape. The image also highlights the incidental but pervasive and integral effect of trees as animating sources of shadow and reflection. Caspar David Friedrich's 1822 painting, "Noon," captures the fundamental allure of a stand of trees. In his 1963 book, Ecology, Eugene Odum wrote: "Human civilization has so far reached its greatest development in what was originally forest and grassland in temperate regions. . . . Man, in fact, tends to combine features of both grasslands and forests into a habitat for himself that might be called forest edge. . . . in grassland regions he plants trees around his homes, towns, and farms. . . . when man settles in the forest he replaces most of it with grasslands and croplands, but leaves patches of the original forest on farms and around residential areas. . . . man depends on grasslands for food, but likes to live and play in the shelter of the forest." An admirer of Caspar David Friedrich, the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel painted "Landscape with Gothic Arcades" in 1811. The romantic appeal of Schinkel's architectural vision is closely related to the natural pull of Friedrich's grove in "Noon." The architect Robert Geddes' 1982 essay in Architectural Design, "The Forest Edge," quotes the passage above from Eugene Odum's Ecology, and takes its title from his name for man's prefered environment. The forest edge, Geddes wrote, "can be seen both as man's ideal habitat and as a mythical image. Consequently, just as man has enjoyed the forest at the edge of the clearing which has offered him both shelter and openness, so today we enjoy being in architecture which recreates similar spatial conditions: arcades and colonnades, loggias and porches, thresholds, cloisters, courtyards and peristyles - all of which resemble clearings at the edge of the forest." A convention of Japanese woodblock prints creates spatial depth by framing distant views in a foreground of trees or branches. Kawase Hasui's 1922 view of a scene in Katsusa, Hizen Province, goes further by picturing an entire tree-defined foreground space, and placing the viewer within its protection. Trees placed around a house can give its exterior views a similar spatial depth and sense of shelter, without the expense or artifice of a colonnade or porch. Frank Lloyd Wright's rendering makes his 1905 Glasner House seem to peer out from the woods into a clearing. The double-height stair space of Richard Neutra's 1927-29 Lovell Health House lets natural light and the moving shadows of trees deep inside. Charles and Ray Eames' 1949 Case Study House #8, better known as the Eames House, has a planted forest-edge colonnade of Eucalyptus trees between its façade and the meadow and ocean vista it overlooks. The trees not only frame the open view, but provide a play of shadows and reflections across the contrasting industrial surfaces and interior of the house. Their animation is indispensible to the design's vitality, as demonstrated in countless frames from the Eames' film, "House after five years of living." Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House was completed in 1951. Despite its 360-degree views, the house very much has a front and back. Its living spaces and terrace overlook the nearby Fox River to the south. A venerable sugar maple mediates this view, while providing much needed summer shade. The ailing tree is now guy-wired together to preserve the integrity of Mies's vision. Rule 8 is to use trees. Trees can bring nature to affordable sites far from the shore or landscape vistas. If a building lot offers no existing trees to exploit, new ones should be included in a house's budget, and chosen and placed for maximum effect. As well as providing shade and privacy, trees capture the mystery of changing light, give voice and visibility to the wind, mark the passage of the day with the sweep of their shadows, inform the seasons with their changing leaves and, in their slow growth, echo the accumulation of the years of memories that give a place personal meaning. Use trees for these rewards and to extend a house's sense of shelter and give a foreground to its exterior views. Let the moving shadows of branches and leaves animate the surface of the house and fall inside to vitalize its interior and keep nature near. Continue to House Rule 9

House Rule 7 - Optimize Natural Light

Johannes Vermeer's The Music Lesson was painted in the early 1660s. As in most of Vermeer's thirty-odd paintings, light enters from the left, spreading itself across a rear wall. The situation is modeled on his studio, where a window and wall intersected to create just such a wash of illumination. While light can be visibly suspended in the thick air of haze or smoke, it typically manifests itself on the surfaces it strikes. Vermeer portrayed this presence so strongly that light is said to be a character in his paintings. Edward Hopper painted Rooms by the Sea in 1951. Recalling Vermeer in both light and convenience of inspiration, the scene is based on the artist's studio. Hopper's light takes on added mystery in its juxtaposition to a surrealistically immediate sea. An alternate title, The Jumping Off Place, was abandoned because of its perceived "malign overtones." This title would have emphasized the interior-exterior dynamic that distinguishes Hopper's painting from a Vermeer. With its minimal frame, the opening to the sea is less like a hole in a wall than the mouth of a chute, implying outward projection and stating the spatial complement to the lighting effect of Vermeer's window. Painters' sensitivity to light allows them to recognize its transforming effect wherever they find it. Some architects share this sensitivity and have created powerful examples of what can be achieved with light's deliberate staging. A tiny window admits disproportionate light in Jorn Utzon's house, Can Lis. (See Rule 6.) The oblique incidence of sunlight here highlights the texture of stone quarried on-site, reinforcing the relationship of the house to its immediate setting. The moving shaft of light acts as a sundial, engaging the greater context of the solar system. The 1924 plan of a Brick Country House by Mies van der Rohe is often compared to an abstract De Stijl painting. Radical for its time, the plan replaces traditional box-like rooms with flowing space. Walls project out into the landscape, suggesting the further flow of interior space into the outdoors. With only two exceptions, exterior corners are formed by a brick wall intersecting glass, thus recalling Vermeer's window. These corners would at once recreate his characteristic wash of light and invite the eye of the occupant to follow the opaque walls' real (in some cases) or imagined projection into exterior space. The house would not only have admitted light like no other of its time, but would have created an unprecedented sense of spatial release. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Freeman House dates from the same year as Mies's Brick Country House. Extending from floor to ceiling, Wright's glazed corners look less like conventional punched windows than gaps in exterior walls. Interior space slides between the floor and ceiling planes and outside without interruption. Wright rebelled against Palladio's assertion that corners should not be opened because they are a building's strongest support. He wrote in his Autobiography: "I soon realized that the corners of the box were not the economical or vital bearing points of structure. The main load of the usual building I saw was on the walls and so best supported at points some distance back from the corner. The spans were then reduced by cantileverage. So I took the corners out, put in glass instead . . ." Wright turned what had been the darkest part of a house into the brightest. He also struck one of his greatest blows against the tyranny of The Box, and shelter's ancient baggage of confinement. Louis I. Kahn used a keyhole window of his own invention in the design of the 1959-61 Esherick House. (See Rule 3.) While respecting privacy, the street-facing window allows a maximum of natural light to enter at the top of a double-height living room, insuring that it will fall deep into the house. Kahn placed its frame tight against the ceiling and walls, exploiting them in the manner of Vermeer and using their light-washed surfaces to soften the contrast between bright outdoors and shaded interior. The narrow windows below, reminiscent of castle architecture that captivated Kahn, have shutters that can be closed for greater privacy. Built-in shelves on either side make a sun-shielded place for books and a deep window recess. Kahn reduced contrast and glare by fully glazing the more private opposite side of the space, balancing natural light throughout. Kahn's 1959-69 First Unitarian Church in Rochester, NY, rebukes the entire history of stained glass. Four center-facing light scoops rise from the corners of its sanctuary, cardinal point apertures that track the sun's transit and lock the space into a celestial context. Raw, glare-free light is captured on the humblest concrete surfaces. The stark lack of artifice distills light to its essence, allowing it to manifest itself to the viewer as if for the first time and re-ignite wonder. The space is a reminder that other worlds are no competition for the forgotten mystery of immediate reality, once distractions are removed and our attention is brought back to it. Luis Barragan's 1947 House and Studio uses light not just for illumination, but to modulate space with brightness, shadow, attraction and mood. For the devoutly Catholic Barragan, light clearly had a spiritual dimension as well. The main living space in Barragan's house has a framelessly glazed end wall. The eye is led smoothly into the landscape even as leaf-dappled light washes over interior surfaces, bringing trees and their wind stirred movement indoors. (See Rule 8.) Tadao Ando's 2001-03 4x4 House, a tower by the sea, showcases two basic window types. The small one above the table classically frames a view within an opaque plane. As is typical with such punched openings, the eye's tendency to restore the wall plane's unpunctured gestalt competes with whatever sense of spatial flow into the distance might be suggested by the window. The constrained visual dynamic is the opposite of Barragan's frameless window pictured above. Ando's placement of a TV screen next to the small window seems a wry commentary on its spatial superficiality. The frameless glass wall at right presents no such hurdle. Its "jumping off" sense of outward extension and dramatic wash of sunlight recall Hopper's Rooms By the Sea. The small window serves as its counterpoint, but also provides orientation and integrates the house with the dining table, to which it is aligned and scaled. (See Rule 6.) Rule 7 is to optimize natural light. Make the most of natural light. Provide large windows at living areas and economically supplement these with strategically placed smaller windows to balance interior light. Place windows at corners to allow light to splay across adjacent surfaces and to break the corners' sense of confinement. Use tall windows to allow light to fall deep into interior spaces. Conceive of the house as a means of modulating natural light and choreographing the sun's movement. Continue to House Rule 8

House Rule 7 - Optimize Natural Light

Johannes Vermeer's The Music Lesson was painted in the early 1660s. As in most of Vermeer's thirty-odd paintings, light enters from the left, spreading itself across a rear wall. The situation is modeled on his studio, where a window and wall intersected to create just such a wash of illumination. While light can be visibly suspended in the thick air of haze or smoke, it typically manifests itself on the surfaces it strikes. Vermeer portrayed this presence so strongly that light is said to be a character in his paintings. Edward Hopper painted Rooms by the Sea in 1951. Recalling Vermeer in both light and convenience of inspiration, the scene is based on the artist's studio. Hopper's light takes on added mystery in its juxtaposition to a surrealistically immediate sea. An alternate title, The Jumping Off Place, was abandoned because of its perceived "malign overtones." This title would have emphasized the interior-exterior dynamic that distinguishes Hopper's painting from a Vermeer. With its minimal frame, the opening to the sea is less like a hole in a wall than the mouth of a chute, implying outward projection and stating the spatial complement to the lighting effect of Vermeer's window. Painters' sensitivity to light allows them to recognize its transforming effect wherever they find it. Some architects share this sensitivity and have created powerful examples of what can be achieved with light's deliberate staging. A tiny window admits disproportionate light in Jorn Utzon's house, Can Lis. (See Rule 6.) The oblique incidence of sunlight here highlights the texture of stone quarried on-site, reinforcing the relationship of the house to its immediate setting. The moving shaft of light acts as a sundial, engaging the greater context of the solar system. The 1924 plan of a Brick Country House by Mies van der Rohe is often compared to an abstract De Stijl painting. Radical for its time, the plan replaces traditional box-like rooms with flowing space. Walls project out into the landscape, suggesting the further flow of interior space into the outdoors. With only two exceptions, exterior corners are formed by a brick wall intersecting glass, thus recalling Vermeer's window. These corners would at once recreate his characteristic wash of light and invite the eye of the occupant to follow the opaque walls' real (in some cases) or imagined projection into exterior space. The house would not only have admitted light like no other of its time, but would have created an unprecedented sense of spatial release. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Freeman House dates from the same year as Mies's Brick Country House. Extending from floor to ceiling, Wright's glazed corners look less like conventional punched windows than gaps in exterior walls. Interior space slides between the floor and ceiling planes and outside without interruption. Wright rebelled against Palladio's assertion that corners should not be opened because they are a building's strongest support. He wrote in his Autobiography: "I soon realized that the corners of the box were not the economical or vital bearing points of structure. The main load of the usual building I saw was on the walls and so best supported at points some distance back from the corner. The spans were then reduced by cantileverage. So I took the corners out, put in glass instead . . ." Wright turned what had been the darkest part of a house into the brightest. He also struck one of his greatest blows against the tyranny of The Box, and shelter's ancient baggage of confinement. Louis I. Kahn used a keyhole window of his own invention in the design of the 1959-61 Esherick House. (See Rule 3.) While respecting privacy, the street-facing window allows a maximum of natural light to enter at the top of a double-height living room, insuring that it will fall deep into the house. Kahn placed its frame tight against the ceiling and walls, exploiting them in the manner of Vermeer and using their light-washed surfaces to soften the contrast between bright outdoors and shaded interior. The narrow windows below, reminiscent of castle architecture that captivated Kahn, have shutters that can be closed for greater privacy. Built-in shelves on either side make a sun-shielded place for books and a deep window recess. Kahn reduced contrast and glare by fully glazing the more private opposite side of the space, balancing natural light throughout. Kahn's 1959-69 First Unitarian Church in Rochester, NY, rebukes the entire history of stained glass. Four center-facing light scoops rise from the corners of its sanctuary, cardinal point apertures that track the sun's transit and lock the space into a celestial context. Raw, glare-free light is captured on the humblest concrete surfaces. The stark lack of artifice distills light to its essence, allowing it to manifest itself to the viewer as if for the first time and re-ignite wonder. The space is a reminder that other worlds are no competition for the forgotten mystery of immediate reality, once distractions are removed and our attention is brought back to it. Luis Barragan's 1947 House and Studio uses light not just for illumination, but to modulate space with brightness, shadow, attraction and mood. For the devoutly Catholic Barragan, light clearly had a spiritual dimension as well. The main living space in Barragan's house has a framelessly glazed end wall. The eye is led smoothly into the landscape even as leaf-dappled light washes over interior surfaces, bringing trees and their wind stirred movement indoors. (See Rule 8.) Tadao Ando's 2001-03 4x4 House, a tower by the sea, showcases two basic window types. The small one above the table classically frames a view within an opaque plane. As is typical with such punched openings, the eye's tendency to restore the wall plane's unpunctured gestalt competes with whatever sense of spatial flow into the distance might be suggested by the window. The constrained visual dynamic is the opposite of Barragan's frameless window pictured above. Ando's placement of a TV screen next to the small window seems a wry commentary on its spatial superficiality. The frameless glass wall at right presents no such hurdle. Its "jumping off" sense of outward extension and dramatic wash of sunlight recall Hopper's Rooms By the Sea. The small window serves as its counterpoint, but also provides orientation and integrates the house with the dining table, to which it is aligned and scaled. (See Rule 6.) Rule 7 is to optimize natural light. Make the most of natural light. Provide large windows at living areas and economically supplement these with strategically placed smaller windows to balance interior light. Place windows at corners to allow light to splay across adjacent surfaces and to break the corners' sense of confinement. Use tall windows to allow light to fall deep into interior spaces. Conceive of the house as a means of modulating natural light and choreographing the sun's movement. Continue to House Rule 8

House Rule 6 - Integrate Furniture

Architect Jørn Utzon's home, Can Lis, was completed in 1972. Composed of individual structures and courtyards, it stands on a cliff overlooking the sea in Majorca, Spain. A one-room building at its center contains a built-in crescent seat facing the vista through deep openings, with a fireplace on one side. A primitive sketch by Utzon shows the house's central pavilion and its curved seat in isolation, suggesting they were the germ of the entire house. Can Lis was partly inspired by a cave Utzon found on the site, which informs the house's site-quarried stone walls and tunneled windows, their concealed frames suggesting unglazed openings. The central structure's seating evokes a campfire circle, adding to the primal appeal. A vision of relaxed family and friends enjoying each other and the scene would have made human experience the starting point of the house's design. As Thoreau wrote in Walden: "What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, - out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life." Utzon's centerpiece recalls the more succinct Thoreau who asked, "What is a house but a seat?" Most people admit to spending the majority of their waking hours at home in one or two pieces of furniture. Given the favorite chair's outsized role as life's cockpit, the selection and arrangement of furniture warrants primary consideration in the design of a house. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1939 Goetsch-Winckler House is typical of his Usonian houses in its use of built-in furniture, here including a fireplace seat, two tables, a bar, a desk and bookcases. Only the central living room furniture is left to the owner's discretion. Integrating furniture from the house's conception, Wright unified the immediate accommodation and experience of the dweller to the overall dwelling. The built-in furniture also makes efficient use of space, allowing a compact house to generously serve multiple functions, and gave Wright a high level of control; for costlier houses he might design all of the furnishings down to the napkin rings. Wright once visited Graycliff, the summer house he had designed for Darwin D. Martin and his wife Isabelle, shortly after its completion. Finding no one at home, he let himself in and discovered that furniture had been moved from the locations he had laid out. The Martins later returned to find it pushed back into Wright's preferred arrangement, and fresh flowers on the dining table. The story doesn't just portray Wright's ego; it tells how fully he viewed furniture as an integral part of his architecture. Furniture as architecture: using raw space as a backdrop, a Design Within Reach catalogue photo demonstrates the power of furniture alone to create a domestic sphere and set a tone. Animating even an unoccupied room, it suggests human presence, social interaction and lifestyle. (Eero Saarinen's 1948 Womb Chair, at right in the photo, was designed in response to a request by Florence Knoll's for "a chair she could curl up in.") A huge share of classic twentieth century furniture, more popular now than ever, was designed by architects like Saarinen, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, and Arne Jacobsen. In place of traditional partitioned rooms, furniture groupings define various living functions in Philip Johnson's Glass House. Johnson's use of furniture designed by Mies van der Rohe acknowledges the inspiration of his Farnsworth House. Mies pioneered not only the glass house, but the use of furniture to mark different activity areas within open and flexible space. The Barcelona Chair Johnson incorporated was designed by Mies for his German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, as seating for the King and Queen of Spain to oversee opening ceremonies. Created for a specific couple and building, the chair has long since become a lumbar-oblivious cliché of corporate lobbies. It's thought to be inspired by folding curule seats used by Roman aristocracy, an appropriate provenance. Mies also made the chair extra wide, turning the height of a throne on its side to suit both traditional prestige and the radically modern horizontality of his pavilion. A bridge between body and building, the Barcelona Chair is a quintessential reminder that furniture is architecture. Rule 6 is to incorporate furniture. Design for furniture. A house might be said to consist of furniture groupings and the paths among them. Base the size, shape and orientation of spaces on optimal furniture arrangements, especially as they relate to light, views and circulation paths. The final assessment of a house is made from the vantage of its sofas and chairs. Starting with the view from these will insure a satisfying end. Furniture itself is architecture, and its design has as much bearing on quality of space as do walls and finishes. Include its cost in the budget for a house and, before scrimping, weigh its impact against other costs. Consider that a person can be only one place at a time, and will spend the great majority of time in one or two preferred seats. Match furniture to the character of its users and setting. Continue to House Rule 7

House Rule 6 - Integrate Furniture

Architect Jørn Utzon's home, Can Lis, was completed in 1972. Composed of individual structures and courtyards, it stands on a cliff overlooking the sea in Majorca, Spain. A one-room building at its center contains a built-in crescent seat facing the vista through deep openings, with a fireplace on one side. A primitive sketch by Utzon shows the house's central pavilion and its curved seat in isolation, suggesting they were the germ of the entire house. Can Lis was partly inspired by a cave Utzon found on the site, which informs the house's site-quarried stone walls and tunneled windows, their concealed frames suggesting unglazed openings. The central structure's seating evokes a campfire circle, adding to the primal appeal. A vision of relaxed family and friends enjoying each other and the scene would have made human experience the starting point of the house's design. As Thoreau wrote in Walden: "What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder, - out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life." Utzon's centerpiece recalls the more succinct Thoreau who asked, "What is a house but a seat?" Most people admit to spending the majority of their waking hours at home in one or two pieces of furniture. Given the favorite chair's outsized role as life's cockpit, the selection and arrangement of furniture warrants primary consideration in the design of a house. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1939 Goetsch-Winckler House is typical of his Usonian houses in its use of built-in furniture, here including a fireplace seat, two tables, a bar, a desk and bookcases. Only the central living room furniture is left to the owner's discretion. Integrating furniture from the house's conception, Wright unified the immediate accommodation and experience of the dweller to the overall dwelling. The built-in furniture also makes efficient use of space, allowing a compact house to generously serve multiple functions, and gave Wright a high level of control; for costlier houses he might design all of the furnishings down to the napkin rings. Wright once visited Graycliff, the summer house he had designed for Darwin D. Martin and his wife Isabelle, shortly after its completion. Finding no one at home, he let himself in and discovered that furniture had been moved from the locations he had laid out. The Martins later returned to find it pushed back into Wright's preferred arrangement, and fresh flowers on the dining table. The story doesn't just portray Wright's ego; it tells how fully he viewed furniture as an integral part of his architecture. Furniture as architecture: using raw space as a backdrop, a Design Within Reach catalogue photo demonstrates the power of furniture alone to create a domestic sphere and set a tone. Animating even an unoccupied room, it suggests human presence, social interaction and lifestyle. (Eero Saarinen's 1948 Womb Chair, at right in the photo, was designed in response to a request by Florence Knoll's for "a chair she could curl up in.") A huge share of classic twentieth century furniture, more popular now than ever, was designed by architects like Saarinen, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Charles and Ray Eames, and Arne Jacobsen. In place of traditional partitioned rooms, furniture groupings define various living functions in Philip Johnson's Glass House. Johnson's use of furniture designed by Mies van der Rohe acknowledges the inspiration of his Farnsworth House. Mies pioneered not only the glass house, but the use of furniture to mark different activity areas within open and flexible space. The Barcelona Chair Johnson incorporated was designed by Mies for his German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, as seating for the King and Queen of Spain to oversee opening ceremonies. Created for a specific couple and building, the chair has long since become a lumbar-oblivious cliché of corporate lobbies. It's thought to be inspired by folding curule seats used by Roman aristocracy, an appropriate provenance. Mies also made the chair extra wide, turning the height of a throne on its side to suit both traditional prestige and the radically modern horizontality of his pavilion. A bridge between body and building, the Barcelona Chair is a quintessential reminder that furniture is architecture. Rule 6 is to incorporate furniture. Design for furniture. A house might be said to consist of furniture groupings and the paths among them. Base the size, shape and orientation of spaces on optimal furniture arrangements, especially as they relate to light, views and circulation paths. The final assessment of a house is made from the vantage of its sofas and chairs. Starting with the view from these will insure a satisfying end. Furniture itself is architecture, and its design has as much bearing on quality of space as do walls and finishes. Include its cost in the budget for a house and, before scrimping, weigh its impact against other costs. Consider that a person can be only one place at a time, and will spend the great majority of time in one or two preferred seats. Match furniture to the character of its users and setting. Continue to House Rule 7