House Rules

House Rule 5 - Engage the Outdoors

An illustration from William A. Bruette's 1934 book, Log Camps & Cabins, shows an example of a cabin open at one end like a cave. Outside, a campfire extends the domestic realm into nature. The composition is the barest refinement of primitive man's cave with banked fire outside. The book's epigraph reads: "The cabin in the forest, on the banks of a quiet lake or buried in the wilderness back of beyond, is an expression of man's desire to escape the exactions of civilization and secure rest and seclusion by a return to the primitive." Or in Huck Finn's words, "The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied." Few humans would prefer any kind of architecture to the pleasure and freedom of being outdoors in comfortable weather. Even without retreating "back of beyond," houses can make the most of their devil's bargain between shelter and space. The plan of Frank Lloyd Wright's 1901 Henderson House is a near mirror-image of his Hickox House of 1900 (see House Rule 2) and very similar to his proposal for "A Home in a Prairie Town," published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1901. Each of these combines living functions into a single long but articulated space; dining area and library on either side of a living room with hearth. In each house, the living room spills out onto a terrace that matches its width and axial relationship to the hearth; living room and terrace can be read as a single space incidentally divided by French doors. In the drawing above, the living room's ceiling beams - shown in dashed lines - extend through the exterior wall and over the open terrace, further claiming its outdoor space as an extension of the interior.

Wright's 1905 Darwin Martin House Complex weaves together indoor and outdoor space. The main house is a more complex development of the Hickox and Henderson House plans Wright had earlier seen fit to repeat. Their terraces are here replaced by a covered porch, the floor of which is finished in the same one-inch square floor tiles as the living area. Above and below, the porch is a more committed relationship of interior to exterior. A crescent of planting gives the porch privacy and defines an extended domain for the established grouping of library, living and dining room.

The enclosed space of Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion projects itself into open air by the suggestive effects of continuous flooring, interpenetrating walls and an overhanging roof. Mies acknowledged Wright's impact from the time of the 1910 German Wasmuth Portfolio of his work.

Graham Phillips' 2001 Skywood House adapts the exterior-claiming strategies of the Barcelona Pavilion to a home. Pushing the limits of minimalism, it comes full circle to the image of a cave facing a clearing. A drawing detail of Sir Edward Brantwood Maufe's 1912 Kelling Hall shows a wing ending in a concave wall that seems to draw in outdoor space. Maufe reverses the usual projecting bow-window in favor of an implied exterior room, blurring the transition from enclosed interior space to nature. The primitive cave and its threshold are refined into a cut-stone concavity and terrace. Future Systems' cave-like 1998 House in Wales is bermed into the ground at the top of a cliff. It looks out over the sea through an elliptical wall of glass, like an eye. Describing it, Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems said: "There is only the grass and the glass. Nothing else, no architecture." The floor plan of the House in Wales shows earth mounded up on either side and around the back, except for a narrow gap for the main entry door, centered on the curved rear wall. The earth falls away more broadly at the straight section of wall, which is entirely glass where exposed, allowing an expansive view over the sea. At the center of the house, a curved sofa focuses on a suspended fireplace, re-enacting the campfire circle of our cave-dwelling forebears and heightening the design's contrast of primitive to futuristic. Symmetrical teardrop-shaped cores contain bathrooms, utilities and the kitchen counter. Their shape creates both a fluid transition between rooms and a sense of space expanding into nature. The curved back wall embraces the vista, drawing the outdoors into the greater circle it implies. Without any exterior effort to claim outdoor space, the house is made entirely one with it, and infinitely amplified. Tezuka Architects' 2005 Floating Roof House has banks of sliding doors on either side. When they are fully retracted, the interior becomes an open-air pavilion protected only by a narrow roof. Rather than spilling out to the exterior, the interior is itself transformed into outdoors. The strategy, a hallmark of Tezuka's work, was pioneered by Mies van der Rohe in his 1930 Tugendhat House, with its glazed living room wall that disappears down a slot into the basement. Barton Myers' 1999 House and Studio at Toro Canyon makes interior convertible to exterior with walls of glazed garage doors. The house is a high-design response to the impulse of American suburbanites who in warm weather relax on lawn chairs in their garages, the door drawn up overhead, sipping beer from cans and paying unconscious homage to the threshold-dwelling ambivalence of our caveman forebears. Rule 5 is to engage the outdoors.

Conceive of the living space of a house as part of a greater whole that includes exterior space. Minimize the barrier between the indoor and outdoor components of this whole and unite them with a common material, breadth or boundary, or by inflecting the inside of the house to address its surroundings. The interior will gain a sense of release, its perceived boundary expanding into the outdoors.

Continue to House Rule 6

House Rule 4 - Pursue a One-Room Ideal

A cutaway drawing of the Temple of Diana Propylaea at Eleusis illustrates Auguste Choisy's 1899 Histoire de L'Architecture. From tepees to temples to iconic mid-century glass houses, one-room buildings derive a primitive power from their simple integration of interior and exterior. Frank Gehry's Winton Guest House of 1983-86 is a maximalist response to the call of the one-room building, with each of its several rooms a building unto itself. Gehry said of his work from the period, "I thought that by minimizing the issue of function, by creating one-room buildings, we could resolve the most difficult problems in architecture. Think of the power of one-room buildings and the fact that historically, the best buildings ever built are one-room buildings." Gehry's approach exceeds the budget of the typical American family, but his appreciation of one-room power is universally applicable. For those who would tap into it, there are minimalist prototypes that suggest how to put multiple functions into what feels like a one-room house. The plan of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House of 1945-51 is shown above that of Philip Johnson's Glass House of 1945-49. Johnson said: "The idea of a glass house comes from Mies van der Rohe. Mies had mentioned to me as early as 1945 how easy it would be to to build a house entirely of large sheets of glass. . . . I pointed out to him that it was impossible because you had to have rooms, and that meant solid walls up against the glass, which ruined the whole point; Mies said, ‘I think it can be done’.” Mies's solution was to eliminate partitions and create a one-room house. In doing so, he didn't just find a way to make a pristine enclosure, but satisfied an inherited human impulse. Arthur Drexler referred to this when he wrote that "Mies' most original buildings are one-story structures, and the greatest of these consist of one room. In this sense Mies has designed nothing but temples, which is to say that he has revealed the irrational mainspring of our technological culture." It's no wonder that when Philip Johnson followed Mies's lead, he found the requisite unpartitioned interior "less a defect than a boon," according to his biographer, Franz Schulze. Both houses in fact have more than one room, but disguise service spaces as freestanding objects. The success of this strategy proves that there are effective ways to give a house of multiple spaces the sense of one room. A floor plan of Comlongon Castle, a 15th century Scottish tower house, shows subsidiary rooms and a stair contained within the thick walls of a single central room. The main room is so dominant, clearly defined and undisturbed by its surrounding support spaces that the castle retains the sense of a one room building. Louis I. Kahn saw in it a way to provide services without compromising the integrity of primary spaces. He wrote: "The Scottish Castle. Thick, thick walls. Little openings to the enemy. Splayed inwardly to the occupant. A place to read, a place to sew. . . . Places for the bed, for the stair. . . . Sunlight. Fairy tale." This inspiration is most literally applied in the thickened wall that contains services in his Esherick House, illustrated in Rule 3. An early version floor plan of Kahn's 1957-61 Richards Medical Center at the University of Pennsylvania shows three square laboratory spaces clustered around a central service core. Like the central room at Comlongon Castle, each laboratory is a pure shape surrounded by support functions - stair, ventilation shaft and columns - clearly illustrating Kahn's idea of an architecture of served and servant spaces. As at the castle, these would be stacked into towers. A sketch of Alison and Peter Smithson's 1959 "Retirement House" project for Alison's parents owes a clear debt to the Richards Medical Research building by Kahn. Here the surrounding "servant" appendages are bathroom, kitchen and storage and the central "served" space is a one-room house. A more developed plan of the Smithson's Retirement House turns the earlier version inside out, bringing Kahn's servant spaces indoors as multiple offspring of the Farnsworth House core. These are held away from the exterior walls, even though a glass perimeter isn't at issue here. The inviolate perimeter does, however, create much the same one-room effect as the Farnsworth House, with a simple shell enclosing a single flowing space. A sense of freedom and endlessness is produced by the absence of dead ends or space-trapping corners; even the necessary inside angles of the outer box are each glazed on one side, suggesting continuation of interior space to the exterior, and flooding what would otherwise be dark corners with light. The loose arrangement of the service cores creates separate areas for different functions which flow into each other, rather than the usual bento box of contained rooms. Benthem Crouwel's Benthem House is a high-tech, lightweight update on the one-room house. Its services occupy a thickened wall in the manner of Kahn. The strip of cabana-like rooms at right contains kitchen, bath, mechanical equipment and two small bedrooms. What the house gives up in the 360 degree outlook of its Farnsworth House ancestor, it makes up in livability. The opaque service bar of such a solution might also provide privacy on a less remote and more affordable site than the Farnsworth House's. Thomas Phifer's Salt Point House, completed in 2007, has an island service core on its first floor that creates privacy between its entry area, at right, and living area, at left. The plan adopts the Farnsworth House's model of a single room with a freestanding core, but affords privacy in a way that might be useful to any house on a narrow lot. Pierre Koenig's Bailey House of 1958-60, also known as Case Study House #21, uses both island-core and thickened-wall strategies. The upper rectangle shows the house's enclosed envelope, framed by opaque walls on each side and encircled by a moat that is occasionally bridged by brick-paved patios. The living space is at left. Its gridded floor encircles a core of two bathrooms flanking a tiny open-roofed court. This claims the space all around the core as part of the living area, extending its domain right up to the bedroom and offiice at the extreme right. These are defined not by partitions but only a change in flooring, and might be read as part of a thickened wall even though they are spatially open to the gridded floor associated with the living area. They can be sealed off from each other by sliding doors, and from the living functions by pocket doors on either end of the bathroom core, aligned with the house's centerline. Closing these can convert the entire right half of the house into a thickened wall containing private support spaces. With this design, Koenig takes Mies's ideal of the one-room house into impressively practical territory. By day, with its sliding doors open, the house can feel nearly as open as the Farnsworth House, all its spaces contributing to a building-sized expanse. What might be constrained corridors in another architect's hands here contribute to the house's open area. By night, its more private spaces have the option of being closed off. The house was designed for a childless couple but might serve a small family as well, thanks to its easy flexibility. The study is immediately convertible to a bedroom but meanwhile has a welcome openness not usually found in a spare bedroom. The Bailey House is an open and flexible model particularly well scaled to the typical American family of today. House Rule 4 is to pursue a one-room ideal. Pursue the clarity and simplicity of a one-room house. Give priority to a single continuous interior space, and treat services that must be enclosed, like bathrooms, closets and utility rooms, either as islands within this space or as part of thickened exterior walls enclosing it. Minimize dead ends, interior corners and containment in favor of a sense of uninterrupted space. Continue to House Rule 5

House Rule 3 - Design from a Diagram

"A Lake or River Villa for a Picturesque Site" illustrates A.J. Downing's 1850 book, The Architecture of Country Houses. Its orderly cruciform plan of perfectly shaped rooms is undisturbed by the messy supporting business of kitchen, laundry and storage hidden out back. Unprepared for the encroachment of modern equipment, the villa's designer simply tacks on a perfunctory service wing that drifts off the page while he focuses on the familiar building blocks of room and stair. Today's house designer has even more services to integrate, with bathrooms, wrap-around kitchens, utility rooms and attached garages. He seems just as ill prepared to integrate these, and often puts up a dummy house-front of formal rooms to simplify composition of the street façade and to serve as an uninhabited buffer zone shielding the private family spaces and their services in back. As with Downing's example, the rear face of today's house is a secondary concern. The accidental backs to be glimpsed across rear yards of housing tracts attest to this. Modern house-plan fare visibly strains to juggle curb appeal, integrity of rooms, and integrated services. Downing's example drops the ball on incorporation of services in favor of whole rooms and a picturesque face. Rudolph Wittkower's influential 1949 book, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, is illustrated with "Schematized plans of eleven of Palladio's Villas." Wittkower identifies the grid pattern at lower right as the basis for all of these. By stretching its zones slightly and selectively omitting line segments, Palladio used this diagram to define all of a villa's spaces at once. The simultaneity and comprehensiveness of this method allowed rooms of varying shapes, sizes and orientations to mesh perfectly within a simple container. The approach contrasts with that of the designer who plants rooms sequentially across a house, one decision limiting the next, and each additional room more awkwardly forced into whatever space remains. This hapless approach is evident in the gerrymandered outline of the combined living spaces in so many of today's houses, shapes no one would ever intentionally set out to make but could only have backed into. Wittkower's pattern is here overlaid on Palladio's Villa Foscari, "La Malcontenta," of 1558-60. Working from this pattern, Palladio not only insured perfectly formed rooms that would fit together with the precision of puzzle pieces, but pre-loaded the building faces with a classical rhythm. As the walls were all load-bearing, the pattern also automatically gave his villas a workable system of structural bays. The vaulted ceiling at the center of La Malcontenta illustrates his method's marriage of structure and form. The pattern's "tartan" alternation of wide and narrow zones would be adopted by later architects to integrate modern services, as foreshadowed by its unintrusive accommodation of stairs in Palladio's villas. Frank Lloyd Wright's 1894 Winslow House compactly internalizes services like kitchen and pantry (upper left), stairs, driveway entrance and storage without compromising the shape or organization of its living spaces. Above, Palladio's grid pattern is laid over the Winslow House plan, demonstrating its adaptability to the machine age. A geometric pattern allowed Wright to absorb services into a coherent plan. While most often recognized as history's most influential architect for his classical vocabulary, Palladio's way with order has extended his impact into modern architecture. Louis Kahn's 1959-61 Esherick House applies a simple abab rhythm of narrow (service) and wide (living) zones to a one-bedroom house for a single woman. Kahn was fascinated by Wittkower's illustration of Palladio's villa pattern, which contributed to his conception of buildings composed of served and servant spaces. He saw in the narrow bands of the tartan grid an opportunity to assimilate a building's smaller support functions without disrupting its primary spaces or overall order. The Esherick House echos the wide-narrow-wide pattern of the traditional center-hall house but adds another narrow zone on one side, containing the modern service machinery of kitchen, toilet and laundry downstairs and the master bath and closets upstairs. This zone is effectively a closed but permeable "servant" block placed functionally between the driveway and the open "served" living space, the upper and lower levels of which are united by a double-height living room. Sliding partitions allow the single upstairs bedroom, above the dining room, to open onto the two-story living area, making the entire house except for the service block into a single uncomplicated space for Kahn to treat as a laboratory of natural lighting. The service block can be read as a thickened wall out of which the small support rooms have been carved, bookending the house with the nearly blank fireplace wall at its opposite end, each providing privacy from side neighbors. In its response to context, Kahn's diagram not only results in an internally coherent house, but one which is optimized to its site. The organization of the Esherick House is legible in its rear façade. From left to right are the double-height living room, stair hall, bedroom-over-dining room, and service block. Rule 3 is to design from a diagram. Design from a diagram. Begin with the spaces and functions the house must contain, and an analysis of its site. Rather than starting with individual rooms, think in terms of a few ordered zones of spaces related by size and function, and array them to exploit the site characteristics and serve an overriding design direction. A comprehensive diagram for a small house can be very simple, but will yield a purposeful design made up of simultaneously conceived spaces that are all deliberate and whole. The resulting clarity of plan will not only be economical to build, but will minimize the material and psychological clutter that a house can place between its dwellers and their simple enjoyment of life. Continue to House Rule 4

House Rule 2 - Combine Living Spaces

Frank Lloyd Wright's Hickox House of 1900 opens its dining room, living room and library onto each other, combining them into a single expansive living space that runs the full length of the house. The glazed ends of this space imply its infinite exterior projection, even as the doors leading from its center onto a terrace allow the living room to spill outside. "Vista without and vista within," were Wright's words for the effect. The outward thrust of the living space is countered by its focal hearth. Wright attuned his houses to the ingrained daily rhythm by which our forebears faced outward to hunt and gather in the landscape by day and returned to the fire at night, tapping into the primitive brain with the calculation of a movie about alien predators. In its human insight, its simultaneous appropriation of exterior space and indoor simulation of outdoor scale, and its diagrammatic clarity - pure living pavilion on one side and unintruding support functions on the other - the Hickox House is a particularly compact illustration of Wright's multilevel genius. It was a radical dwelling in its time. In his 1954 book, The Natural House, Wright described how he had broken the box of the American house a half-century earlier:

"Dwellings of that period were cut up, advisedly and completely, with the grim determination that should go with any cutting process. The interiors consisted of boxes beside boxes or inside boxes, called rooms. All boxes were inside a complicated outside boxing. Each domestic function was properly box to box. I could see little sense in this inhibition, in this cellular sequestration that implied ancestors familiar with penal institutions, except for the privacy of bedrooms on the upper floor. They were perhaps all right as sleeping boxes. So I declared the whole lower floor as one room, cutting off the kitchen as a laboratory . . . Then I screened various portions of the big room for certain domestic purposes like dining and reading. There were no plans in existence like these at the time. . . . The house became more free as space and more livable too. Interior spaciousness began to dawn."

The lived-in rear of today's typical American house, with its combined kitchen, informal dining area and family room, owes its existence to Wright's pioneering vision, even as today's self-contained, under-used and obligatory formal living and dining rooms are over a century behind him.

Rule 2 is to combine living spaces.

Who has more?

Combine living, dining and other activity areas to partake of each other's space. Create a single generous area rather than several smaller constrained rooms. If private activity areas are needed, incorporate them in bedrooms or circulation space, so these do double-duty. Most homeowners spend the great majority of their at-home waking time not only in a favorite room, but on one or two favorite pieces of furniture, and even the richest mansion owner can experience only one room at a time. Redirect resources from unnecessary partitions and redundant spaces into the best of all possible - and always used - living spaces.

Continue to House Rule 3

House Rule 1 - Build a Small and Simple Shell

Cape Cod, saltbox, colonial, barn; American vernacular prototypes have simple rectangular plans, and shapes that are mere extrusions of their end walls. These plain and practical forms represent the oldest and arguably most authentic stream of American domestic architecture. A.J. Downing's hugely influential 1850 book, The Architecture of Country Houses, is the prototypical rule book for designing an American house, and a key to understanding its direction ever since. Downing championed houses designed in picturesque historical European styles, largely abandoning the unadorned foursquare early American tradition. Pictured above, "A Villa in the Norman Style," described by Downing as the work of architect W. Russell West, "is highly picturesque, and, in a suitable locality, would have a very striking and spirited effect. Such a locality, of course, would hardly be found in a flat country, but amid wild scenery and hills, whose pointed tops are in harmony with the strength of the heavenward-pointing round-tower. Of course, this is not a house to please a practical, commonsense man. It is not a rational house, in the same manner that the classical villa, full of logical, straight lines, is rational - for there is here hardly a single continuous, unbroken line - every opening is arched, and all tendency is toward the pyramid or the curve." The design's meandering perimeter, arched windows and piled up gables and peaks are hallmarks of today's tract mansion, even as Downing's format of seductive rendering above floor plan is now the standard of every house plan book and housing development brochure. To Downing, a landscape architect, a house was only as good as its resonance with its natural setting. He certainly wouldn't approve of today's suburban mansions on flat tracts, co-opting his naturalistic roof peaks to vie with each other as mountains of conspicuous consumption while betraying their owners' egos and insecurities. The examples in Downing's book were designed by accomplished architects of his day including the great Alexander Jackson Davis. The uninspired designs in today's house plan books and suburban developments are less likely to be by registered architects than members of the self-serving American Institute of Building Design. ("Use your AIBD affiliation to enhance your credibility.")

"A Laborer's Cottage" is the first and simplest example in The Architecture of Country Houses, which has sections on cottages, farm houses and villas. The book's farm house and villa illustrations prefigure modern suburban house forms, while its modest cottages are actually more suited to the small households of today and make better models for a people carrying unprecedented levels of personal debt. Downing wrote: "In each of the three classes of country houses, there is a predominant character, to which all other expressions . . . should be referred. In cottages, this predominant character is simplicity." (Four years later, Thoreau would declaim in Walden, "Our life is frittered away by detail . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Even as Downing cautioned against spending beyond the owner's means, Thoreau lamented those who are "needlessly poor all their lives because they think they must have such a as their neighbors have," homeowners who "have become the tools of their tools.") Downing idealized cottage dwellers as "industrious and intelligent mechanics and working men, the bone and sinew of the land," but the seductiveness of his book's romantic villas and the national promise of upward mobility made the humble cottage an unlikely American ideal. In naming the simplest example in his book "A Laborer's Cottage," Downing stigmatized the simplicity he espoused for cottages as the mark of a working class that was also viewed as lower class. (When an immigrating woman was screened for mental competence at Ellis Island with the question, "How do you wash stairs, from the top or bottom?" she replied, "I don't come to America to wash stairs.") The elaborate European house models Downing imported spread like invasive species in the soil of an American class consciousness that had only wishfully been defeated with the British. The lasting and anxious lesson developers have taken from The Architecture of Country Houses is that complicated houses project success and higher class. How much better today's houses would be if - like both his examples shown here - they instead followed just one of Downing's practical rules: "The principal entrance or front door should never open directly into an apartment of any kind, but always into a porch, lobby, or entry of some kind. Such a passage not only protects the apartment against sudden draughts of air, but it also protects the privacy and dignity of the inmates."

An American icon, the Airstream trailer was originally designed in 1935 by Hawley Bowlus, chief designer of Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis. (Photo courtesy Airstream). At once an advanced industrial product and a self-contained dwelling unit - with bed, table, seats, kitchen and bathroom - it indicts both the technological backwardness and material excess of the standard American house. Only the mobile home segment of the housing industry has followed its lead, with less mobile results, and without the grace needed to overcome the class stigma enshrined in the words "trailer trash." Beyond freedom and mobility, theAirstream promises a chance to trade the burden of all one's possessions for a single object as smooth and unitary as a river stone. Motivated by aerodynamics, its single surface is the opposite of one of A.J. Davis's spiky villas while answering like nothing else Thoreau's call for simplicity. The Airstream brings out the subversive Thoreau in each of us, secretly craving liberation from our belongings. It points to where the appeal of a new American house might lie. Rule 1 is to build a small and simple shell. Build as small and simple an enclosure as possible. (Don't be tempted to add bedrooms or a basement you don't need just for resale purposes. The next buyer is just like you. Most American households are an individual or a couple.) For a small house, a pure rectangle will almost always make the most sense. Construction costs will be reduced by minimizing material and labor, while life cycle costs will be kept down by a compact envelope that's both energy efficient and easy to maintain. If conventional, modular construction materials are to be used, base the dimensions of the house on a 2-foot module to reduce waste and labor. If a garage is to be attached, try to include it within an overall simple enclosure, and locate the main entry to the house near the garage, close to the driveway by which guests will arrive. Place the door leading from the garage to the house - often used informally by guests - near the main entry door, so both doors can share a transitional entrance area within the house, screened from private living spaces. Continue to House Rule 2

House Rules - Introduction

A 1958 Corvette, one of the last models designed by the line's visionary creator, Harley Earl. No design product is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette. Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air. It is as much about the experience it promises (and delivers) as about its material allure. The two-seater's reductiveness is arguably far more American than the prevailing national tendency toward bigness. Today's ubiquitous SUVs hold only an empty promise of off-road driving. They are parked outside equally pointless and oversized houses full of formal spaces and bedrooms that are never used, "empty guest chambers for empty guests," as Thoreau observed of the typical American house over a century and a half ago in Walden. The American house has doubled in size since the first Corvette was launched in the 1950s, even as households have become smaller. According to the 2000 census, less than a third of American households are families with children under 18 at home, and over a quarter are individuals living alone. American life needs a new vehicle. American literature offers the introduction to the rules of its design. 1841 A 1919 drawing by Harry Clarke illustrates "A Descent into the Maelstrom," first published in 1841. Edgar Allan Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelström," is narrated by a man whose schooner is drawn into the funnel of a giant storm-whipped whirlpool. As his brother clings desperately to the boat's deck in terror, the narrator accepts the certainty of death: "Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. . . . I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God's power. . . . After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was about to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see." His calm allows him to observe how the boat and other large pieces of spinning debris that have been pulled into the whirlpool descend quickly, while smaller objects of specific shapes are drawn downward more slowly. He sees a chance of survival in abandoning the boat. Unable to pry his brother's attention or hands from the deck bolt to which he clings, the narrator lashes himself to a barrel from the boat and throws himself overboard. The schooner is pulled under while the narrator descends slowly enough for the storm and whirlpool to abate, allowing his survival. Poe's story illustrates a basic psychological paradox. As Ekhart Tolle argues in The Power of Now, fear of what might happen in the future robs us of the only place we can ever truly live, the now. As with the doomed brother, fear of death takes our lives. Releasing our death grip on the ego and turning outward to observe the present moment is our only hope of life. In the course of trading fear for wonder, Poe's narrator also lightens his physical load, trading boat for barrel. This exchange of material weight for life, and the theme of salvation through in-the-moment atunement to nature, anticipate central themes of Walden, published 13 years later. 1854 The framing of Thoreau's one-room, 10' by 15' cabin at Walden Pond was researched and documented in this drawing by Roland Wells Robbins. As noted by Theodore M. Brown, Thoreau's construction was needlessly heavy, the balloon frame having been recently developed. Had he been aware of it, Thoreau would certainly have opted for the new, less substantial envelope. "I went into the woods," Thoreau explains in Walden, "because I wished to live deliberately, to front only on the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau saw possessions and domestic architecture in particular as barriers to true living, not only as physical obstructions between man and nature, but as sources of debt, drudgery and worry about the future inimical to enjoyment of the present: "In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line." After listing the material luxuries of a civilized house, he asks: "But how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not, is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real advance in the condition of man . . . it must be shown that it has produced better dwellings without making them more costly; and the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Thoreau notes that "Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually and needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have." He charts the path from man's first shelter-seeking domestic impulse to his final divorce from nature: "We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race, some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter. Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the interest with which when young he looked at shelving rocks, or any approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what it is in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more senses than we think. From the hearth to the field is a great distance. It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof . . . However, if one designs to construct a dwelling house, it behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clew, a museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead. Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary." 1885

One of E.W. Kemble's illustrations for the original 1885 publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. "We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft." Early in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Huck and the runaway slave Jim encounter each other on an island in the Mississippi to which they have separately fled. Jim soon predicts rain on the evidence of birds flying a yard or two at a time before lighting. He and Huck make camp in the shelter of a riverbank cave. As Huck narrates: "The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a good place to build a fire on. So we built it there and cooked dinner. We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there. We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten; so the birds was right about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest - fst! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a glimpse of treetops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down-stairs - where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know. 'Jim, this is nice,' I says. 'I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here.' " Huck's acute observations show him to be intensely in the moment. The birds' awareness of the oncoming storm and Jim's reading of their behavior draw a picture of man, creatures and environment as parts of a single nature. Huck and Jim haven't moved beyond the stage of Thoreau's cave-fascinated child. The perfection of this condition is endorsed by Huck's statement of contentment. 1977

A high dynamic range photo by Josh Derr shows color and light in a way that is close to firsthand visual experience. The technique is especially effective at capturing atmospheric effects. Applying it to gritty urban settings, as Derr often does, shows the potential of the everyday to be transformed by the alchemy of light. This too is nature and, if not of the Walden Pond kind, can impart wonder. Our resonance with light reminds us how fundamentally we belong to something larger. It regularly provides opportunities to - like the narrator of "A Descent into the Maelström" - release the weight of the ego and rise to a higher level. In Anthony Hecht's childhood-evoking poem, "Apprehensions," an experience referred to as a "gift" recalls Huck's ringside seat on a summer storm from an island cave. In Hecht's version, Manhattan is the island, an apartment window the cave mouth, and he himself the boy watching. Hecht's polished words contrast with Huck's rough poetry, but the arresting effect of the storm is the same; the sharpened perception and deep satisfaction of being purely in the moment. The world isn't the ego's adversary at such a moment, but rather just as it should be. Hecht may nod to Twain in the shape of his lightning:

"We were living at this time in New York City

On the sixth floor of an apartment house On Lexington, which still had streetcar tracks. It was an afternoon in the late summer; The windows open; wrought-iron window guards Meant to keep pets and children from falling out. I, at the window, studiously watching A marvelous transformation of the sky; A storm was coming up by dark gradations. But what was curious about this was That as the sky seemed to be taking on An ashy blankness, behind which there lay Tonalities of lilac and dusty rose Tarnishing now to something more than dusk, Crepuscular and funerary greys, The streets became more luminous, the world Glinted and shone with an uncanny freshness. The brickwork of the house across the street (A grim, run-down Victorian chateau) Became distinct and legible; the air, Full of excited imminence, stood still. The streetcar tracks gleamed like the path of snails. And all of this made me superbly happy, But most of all a yellow Checker Cab Parked at the corner. Something in the light Was making this the yellowest thing on earth. It was as if Adam, having completed Naming the animals, had started in On colors, and had found his primary pigment Here, in a taxi cab, on Eighty-ninth Street. It was the absolute, parental yellow. Trash littered the gutter, the chipped paint Of the lamppost was still chipped, but everything Seemed meant to be as it was, seemed so designed, As if the world had just then been created, Not as a garden, but as a rather soiled, Loud, urban intersection, by God's will. And then a chart of the Mississippi River, With all her tributaries, flashed in the sky. Thunder, beginning softly and far away, Rolled down our avenue toward an explosion That started with the sound of ripping cloth And ended with a crash that made all crashes Feeble, inadequate preliminaries. And it began to rain. Someone or other Called me away from there, and closed the window." Hecht's light-induced awakening is echoed in Eckhart Tolle's spiritual rebirth as described in The Power of Now: "The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence." In "Apprehensions," Hecht bypasses the woods and waters of garden variety nature, and relies instead on that most fundamental fact of nature, light. "Something in the light" is enough to spark transcendence. Shelter in the poem is just a viewing platform on the outside world. The best it can do is stay out of the way. Barbara Lamprecht's monograph on Richard Neutra quotes his client for Case Study House #20: "The thing I like about this house," said Dr. Bailey recently, nodding to the trees beyond the glass walls, "is that there is no house."

The All American Un-house Reyner Banham (multiplied and, yes, portrayed as naked - his head is pasted over his collaborator's body) occupies an un-house. This illustration by Francois Dallegret show's Banham's Environment Bubble, a "transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output." At its center is a Transportable Standard of Living Package that provides all mechanical services, entertainment, etc. The drawing accompanies Banham's 1965 essay, "A Home is not a House," which begins, "When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters - when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?" "Left to their own devices," Reyner Banham wrote in the 1965 essay, A Home is not a House, "Americans do not monumentalize or make architecture. . . . America's monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors - the porch, the terrace, Whitman's rail-traced plains, Kerouac's infinite road . . ." He goes on to distinguish American architecture from European, citing the former's relatively thin shells, less compartmentalized interiors, emphasis on hygiene, and more advanced plumbing and environmental controls. These distinctions lead to an epiphany: "Somewhere among these clustering concepts - cleanliness, the lightweight shell, the mechanical services, the informality and indifference to monumental architectural values, the passion for the outdoors - there always seemed to me to lurk some elusive master concept that would never quite come into focus. It finally became clear and legible to me in June 1964, in the most highly appropriate and circumstantial circumstances. I was standing up to my chest-hair in water, making home movies at the campus beach at Southern Illinois. This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner - scenically, it is the ole swimmin' hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames chairs on poles in the water) and it's chlorinated too. From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller's experimental domes. And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control (sex left in, streptococci taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether. Bucky Fuller, of course, is very big on this proposition: his famous non-rhetorical question, 'Madam, do you know what your house weighs?' articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental. This suspicion is inadvertently shared by the untold thousands of Americans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes which, though they may never actually be moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ground-anchored structures costing at least three times more." Banham's essay carries these observations into visionary territory. He caricatures the American emphasis on service machinery and disregard for permanent structure into what he calls the "un-house," which might be a mere inflated plastic bag containing a centralized package of mechanical systems. As he explains: "Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a camp-fire, which, in more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion. Unlike the living space trapped with our forebears under a rock or roof, the space around a camp-fire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability." Just when he seems least serious, Banham points to an actual example of an American un-house; Philip Johnson's Glass House. Recalling "the visual image of a burned-out New England township, the insubstantial shells of the houses consumed by the fire, leaving the brick floor slabs and standing chimneys," Johnson's house "consists essentially of just these two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit which is a chimney/fireplace on one side and a bathroom on the other." Describing its glazed "insubstantial shell," Banham notes that "the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter physically and operationally so in summer when when the four doors are open. The 'house' is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There." Philip Johnson's Glass House was completed in 1949, two years ahead of the Farnsworth House, but influenced by the Farnsworth's earlier conception. Johnson called his house a "pavilion for viewing nature." Proclaiming it an un-house, Reyner Banham saw it as the answer to America's deepest domestic impulse, to get rid of the house altogether. Much of Huckleberry Finn was written while Mark Twain and his family summered on his wife Olivia's family farm outside Elmira, New York. His in-laws built him a detached studio in which to write, their generosity tempered by a distaste for his cigar smoke. Twain wrote to William Dean Howells that it was "octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window, . . . perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cozy nest and just room in it for a sofa, table, and three or four chairs, and when the storms sweep down the remote valley and the lightning flashes behind the hills beyond and the rain beats upon the roof over my head - imagine the luxury of it." Comprised of a fireplace and a largely transparent shell, it is the ur-un-house, perfectly matching Banham's description of Philip Johnson's Glass House as "a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There." Johnson's House may have seemed a better example of an un-house to Banham than its comparable precedent, Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, because it has no exterior porch, isn't lifted off the ground, and has a smaller service core that does a better job of passing for a chimney. Or maybe just because Johnson was easier to talk to than Mies, and Banham could have fun kicking the idea around with him. (Johnson didn't buy it, having already endured from a visiting Frank Lloyd Wright: "Philip, should I take my hat off or leave it on? Am I indoors or am I out?") The fine points of Banham's un-house notwithstanding, it's the Farnsworth House that really gave form to the distinctly American impulse Banham puts his finger on. As Arthur Drexler noted in his 1960 monograph on Mies, "It is often said that Mies could have realized his ideas only in the United States, and that only Europe could have produced him. But Mies has seemed more American than the Americans: the Puritan tradition and the transcendental philosophers of nineteenth century New England must seem sentimental beside Mies himself . . ." American literature, and much of American cultural history, supports Banham's view of the way Americans would live, "left to their own devices." A strong case can be made that only market forces and limited choices prevent them from living this way. When he published "A House Is Not a House" in 1965, it must have seemed perverse to suggest the country house of a gay connoisseur as a model for the middle-American home. Even Mies's glass house was built for a then-exceptional client, a wealthy, single, female doctor. Just after the completion of the Farnsworth House in 1951, though, Mies designed a prototype glass house meant for a family that might have children. Despite this major distinction, it is - like the Farnsworth House and Johnson's Glass House - a one-room building. Its substantial 50-foot square plan would in theory allow for distance between the occupants and flexible layouts by means of screening elements. For Mies, the interior spatial potential of an undivided container trumped practical considerations. Maximizing interior space was an invaluable way of simulating outdoor space. Mies van der Rohe's 50 x 50 House Project proposed a glass-walled one-room house for mass production. In his 1960 monograph on Mies, Arthur Drexler wrote that his "most original buildings are one-story structures, and the greatest of these consist of one room." The 50 x 50 House was designed as a prototype for industrial production. "Designing and building houses individually is an old fashioned idea . . . much too expensive and time-consuming in the age of the assembly line," Mies said. The concept prefigured today's obsession with prefabricated houses, many of which also take Mies's spatial priorities to heart. Resting on the ground and without a porch, 50 x 50 takes the Farnsworth House two steps closer to Philip Johnson's Glass House, and Banham's un-house. The 50 x 50 House embodies both the appeal of undivided interior space together with minimized separation from nature. It is more pertinent than ever. At 2500 square feet, it would have been gigantic in its day, but the size of the average American House now stands at 2349. Meanwhile, the American household has shrunk and is typically without children at home, making the one-room model more practical, even at a much smaller scale. Gay sophisticates and single professional women are now everyday Americans. The last decade has seen a burgeoning response, in modular and prefab concepts, to Mies's call for an industrialized house. Following his lead, these typically have a single open living space with extensive glazing. It's tempting to see their popularity mainly as a result of these characteristics rather than prefabrication. It's also tempting to set aside the concerns of industrialization and focus on these design qualities and how they can be applied to affordable, practical houses. In each of ten posts, ArchiTakes will present a new rule for the design of a house that honors the truest American instincts, favoring quality of experience over quantity or richness of material. When this is done, a new site will be launched, providing dimensioned plans and 3D computer models of prototype houses designed by these rules. Intended as points of departure, they will be free to download. Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House is elevated in response to its location within the flood plane of the nearby Fox River. With its open plan and 360 degree views, the house has very much the character of a raft even when its site isn't flooded. Huck Finn would approve. So would Thoreau, according to Theodore M. Brown's 1965 essay, Thoreau's Prophetic Architectural Program: "Mies van der Rohe's dictum, 'Less is More,' is a capsule formulation of Thoreau's position and a cornerstone of contemporary architecture." Lord Peter Palumbo, the second owner of the Farnsworth House, wrote that "the man-made environment and the natural environment are here permitted to respond to, and to interact with each other. While this may derive from the dogma of Rousseau or the writings of Thoreau, the effect is essentially the same: that of being at one with Nature, in its broadest sense, and with oneself." The ZenKaya is one of many current prefabricated houses clearly inspired by Mies. "What is a house but a sedes, a seat?" Thoreau asked in Walden. ZenKaya seems to have learned its Zen from him. Beyond its promise of technological advantage, much of prefab housing answers his complaint that "We no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven." Continue to House Rule 1