Pleasure Principle

The cave. The primitive hut. The house as machine. Mankind has been on a frustrating quest for the ideal shelter for millennia. But it was in the 20th century that the house first became a place of radical experimentation, and that willingness to tinker with the way we live remains a central tenet of our era.

At the beginning of the modern age, man’s most essential need, to locate a place for warmth and shelter, was joined by a new desire: to obliterate the past and shape a new way of life--to build Utopia. For the Modernist architects who dominated the first half of the century, architecture was a tool that could not only mirror social structures but transform them. The lightness of the new industrial materials--steel, glass and concrete--would allow architects to break apart the dark, stuffy living spaces of the medieval city. Life would fill up with light, air and nature. The Modernists believed the house would become a therapeutic instrument--one that would not only make life more livable, but that would heal us both physically and psychologically.

That faith produced some of the world’s most exquisite architectural works. The urban metropolis--Chicago, Paris and Berlin--became the laboratory for new forms of shelter, from mass housing to bourgeois villas. But it was Los Angeles that perhaps best summed up the ethos of freedom and experimentation that defined the modern single-family house. Here, amid the openness of the desert landscape, fostered by the cult of the individual, architects were free to experiment with an abandon that was highly personal.

Nonetheless, by the ‘50s, the Modernist revolution was beginning to sputter. By the ‘70s, it had collapsed altogether. Today, even the most radical contemporary architects shy away from polemical arguments and the writing of manifestos. There seem to be no more universal answers. But if the house continues to be a central place of architectural experimentation, architects now focus on the little details of human existence--the inner psychology of the client, the social structure of the family. “It is no longer possible today to deal with the general first,” says the visionary Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. “Right now, one can only proceed with the hyper-specific. You start at the other end.”

The high-end, architect-designed house today increasingly reflects our deepest psychological impulses, both good and bad--how we live, who we are, our fantasies and desires. It has become a mirror of our vanity, one that reveals our celebrity-obsessed culture’s craving to put life constantly on display, and a place for the exploration of a more open, democratic way of life, no longer bound by conventional norms. Before Utopia, inner peace.

As the French critic Jean-Louis Cohen puts it: “The hedonistic component has become very important. It is about restoring a sense of pleasure to architecture--physical pleasure, visual pleasure. Modern architecture was about teaching lessons through the home. Now there is more of an acceptance that the house is a place to be enjoyed.”

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Let’s slip back for a moment into the mind of the early Modernist. The movement began as a response to the decaying world of the 19th century bourgeoisie. To the early Modernists, it was a world of clutter and inefficiency. Its inhabitants lived in labyrinthine houses with cramped little rooms decorated with overwrought ornamentation. Thick load-bearing walls, small cut-out windows, formal symmetrical facades--these elements all served to obscure the realities of life inside. They symbolized disease and darkness, a culture out of touch with the ethos of the new machine age.

By the turn of the century, that world was already under attack. The architects of the Arts and Crafts movement began the work of breaking open the dark little rooms. But it was Frank Lloyd Wright, as a young, precocious architect working in the sedate suburbs of Chicago, who fused these ideas into a new vision of domestic life.

“The story starts with the emergence of the middle class in America,” Cohen says. “There you begin to have model homes in women’s magazines. It is the beginning of the reorganization of the kitchen. That is really when domestic culture is structured, and it crystalized in Wright’s work.”

Wright’s Robie House, completed in 1909, was the perfect model of that vision. Set in a stuffy residential enclave of Chicago, its composition of long horizontal planes and large corner windows draws the eye out toward the landscape, breaking apart the boundaries between inside and out. Space flows freely between rooms. The familiar walls--once simple barriers with doors punched through them--become a series of overlapping planes that allow for a remarkable freedom of movement, all anchored around the symbolic hearth of the fireplace. To Wright, these projects symbolized both a new relationship between man and the landscape and the liberation of the family from the oppressive social conventions of Middle America.

Wright’s designs were presented in Europe for the first time in 1910, and an emerging group of European architects pushed those ideals to their logical extreme. There the notion of a more open, democratic architecture was fused with an emerging fascination with the mythology of the machine, the transparency of glass, the structural lightness of steel, the plastic qualities of concrete. These elements would become tools for the creation of a technologically based architecture--one whose pure forms would evoke the clean, structural honesty of industrial monuments. Airplanes, ocean liners and grain silos all became models for a revolutionary new way of life.

These visions were mapped out in blunt polemical manifestos. In “Vers une architecture,” the Swiss Modernist architect Le Corbusier’s 1923 homage to the machine, the free plan, the horizontal band windows and the roof garden all became items in a house that could be mass-produced for the common man. The house would perform with the same efficiency as a steamship or an airplane.

“We really believed, in a quasi-religious sense, in the perfectibility of human nature, in the role of architecture as a weapon of social reform, in simplicity as a cure-all,” architect and curator Philip Johnson wrote years later. “If something was useful, then a sort of halo descended upon it.”

Those beliefs had broad social implications. Modern architects saw their houses as models for a new society, one in which a variety of new prototypes--from elaborate villas to low-cost single-family homes and mass-housing schemes--would fuse together to form a new metropolis, a perfectly balanced communal organism.

Alongside the notion of existence minimum--the idea that the scale of the house or apartment should reflect the most basic needs of the human body--many of Modernism’s great works were built for the haut bourgeoisie they attacked. And it is these houses, of course, that seem to most intrigue the contemporary sensibility. At a time when the concept of mass housing looks to be a distant ideal--especially in America--Utopia, it appears, is only possible for the culturally refined, individual client. Among the most photographed and admired of the early modern villas, for example, Le Corbusier’s Villa at Garches, completed in 1927, was designed for relatives of Gertrude Stein and the former wife of a wealthy French minister. Garches is a remarkable contradiction--both a luxurious, streamlined machine and the model for a new universal ideal. The house’s main facade acts as a blank screen, which visitors approach along a long central axis. A long band of windows stretches across the upper floor, adding to its delicate sense of abstraction. Inside, Le Corbusier’s ingenious structural system of thin concrete columns allowed him to create a completely open, free-flowing space. Walls no longer support the building; their purpose is to shape space. Terraces are carved out of the upper floors in back. Curved partitions direct you through the living room and enclose the stairs, bathrooms and boudoirs, which become elegant sculptural objects. It is an exquisite composition of concrete and glass.

A year later, in his design for the Villa Savoye in Poissy, France, Le Corbusier pushed that image of machine-like apparition in a peaceful landscape even further. The main body of the house is a near-perfect square, elevated on slender columns, so that the car can slip under the house and spin around to the garage, while a ramp bisects the house’s interior, leading up through the main living spaces to a rooftop terrace. Here you no longer move from discrete room to discrete room; you glide from floor to floor. There is the sense of floating blissfully detached from the surrounding lanscape, as if you were wandering around the deck of a ship.

It is the houses of the brooding German rationalist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, however, that best sum up the image of high Modernist luxury in the popular imagination. Mies Van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House exemplifies the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk--the total work of art. Built on a steeply sloping hill in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the house’s first floor echoes the exquisite refinement and free-flowing plan of his Barcelona Pavilion. Interior walls are reduced to horizontal planes of onyx and curved ebony veneer partitions. The entire garden facade--an enormous glass window--drops down into the basement to open the house to the landscape. Furniture functioned as part of the composition, rigorously defining space. Not surprisingly, the Tugendhat house was quickly attacked by Czech architects as an indulgence for the rich, a rejection of Modernism’s more universal aims.

As social organisms, furthermore, these houses were often ambiguous about the conventional ideas of family life they sought to challenge. The Villa at Garches--in part due to its narrow site--retains a formal entry, with a symmetrical blank facade and the more open spaces to the back. There are two entries: one for the upper-class family, the other for the lower-class servants. Both the Villa at Garches and the Villa Savoye, in fact, include all of the conventional spaces of the typical bourgeois house: the ladies’ boudoir, the servants’ and chauffeur’s quarters. And in the Tugendhat House, the upper floor is a traditional enfilade of little rooms.

“Despite the apparent radicality of the architecture, these upper-middle-class mores remain,” says Kenneth Frampton, a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at Columbia University and the author of “Modern Architecture.” “It’s a sort of reduction of what used to be the grand bourgeois style. In [Le Corbusier’s] Maison Cook, for example, although it is a tiny house, there is still a room for a maid. So I think this is sort of slightly strange.”

Nor were the patrons always willing to leap into the future. “At Garches, the clients were incredibly committed to the idea of modern architecture,” Koolhaas says. “Yet if you look at the way they inhabited the house, their [Renaissance] furniture, it becomes incomprehensible that those same people supported that architecture.”

Despite the efforts of those who sought to classify all of early Modernism under the pat term “International Style,” Modernism was never a cohesive movement. Architect Bruno Taut was obsessed with the spiritual properties of glass; Erich Mendelsohn produced organic, expressionistic forms; and Konstantin Melnikov increasingly turned toward the mystical. These architects rejected the doctrine of “less is more”--the idea that efficiency was 20th century architecture’s guiding principle. They devised their own strategy for getting to the new Utopia.

In the Netherlands, for instance, the 1924 Schroder House, designed by Gerrit Rietveld for his lover, Truus Schroder, was a cubist composition of sliding panels that allowed for a remarkable range of private and communal spaces for work and living. On the house’s upper floor, the bedrooms and bath--clustered on one floor around a spiral stair--opened up to create one large, loft-like room, or could be closed off for sleep and work.

Others who challenged mainstream Modernism’s obsession with efficiency included Eileen Gray, who ranks among the few great female architects that the era produced. Gray, who was born to an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family in rural Southern Ireland, never trusted the movement’s rationalist aims. During the ‘30s, at the height of the Modernist era, she sought to create spaces that combined a clean, abstract aesthetic with an almost neurasthenic sensitivity to the subtly shifting moods of everyday human existence. “I want to develop [these] formulas and push them to the point where they reestablish contact with life,” she said at the time, “I want to enrich them, make some reality penetrate their abstraction.”

Gray’s E.1027 house, set on the steep, lush banks of Cap Martin, France, did just that. The house was a model of the Gesamtkunstwerk; each piece of furniture reinforced Gray’s overall vision. But the house was also designed to constantly adjust to the needs of its inhabitants. When the weather turned gloomy, the sweeping vista of the Mediterranean could be shut off with giant shutters and the view turned to a calming interior garden of lemon trees. Canvas panels could be removed to let in the warmth of the sun. The bathroom--designed with pivoting mirrors and bucolic views--became a place of hedonistic pleasures. The idea was to create a living machine, which could be delicately adapted to the shifting moods and psychological needs of its inhabitants.

But it was Los Angeles that became the great laboratory of modern domestic architecture. Driven by the cult of the individual, devoid of a civic commitment, the city is marked by singular triumphs, false starts and fragmented visions that reflect an ideal of experimental living removed from the historical baggage of Europe.

Completed several years before Le Corbusier’s great early masterworks, Rudolf Schindler’s house on Kings Road in West Hollywood, built in the middle of a former bean field, was in many ways already more radical than anything the European Modernists would produce. The house, organized in a vaguely h-shaped plan, was designed for two couples, with a shared communal space at the center and private rooms for each inhabitant set at the far corners. But the house also encouraged a complex symbiosis of the inside and outside. The wings frame exterior rooms with fireplaces that draw the inhabitants out into the open, as do rooftop sleeping porches.

The idea was to create a Bohemian ideal of communal living, rooted in the natural landscape. And even the house’s low, sprawling structure--of concrete planks, Japanese screens and canvas walls--reinforced that openness of spirit. It was a vision that was hard to sustain. One bedroom wing was eventually transformed into architectural studios. By the end of their tumultuous marriage, the Schindlers were communicating by note from opposite ends of the house. Nonetheless, few houses in the history of architecture have covered so much ground: social relations, structural systems, man’s place in the landscape. It remains among the most idealistic of houses.

It was Schindler who also lured Richard Neutra to Los Angeles from Berlin, and together they became the twin pillars of California Modernism. In projects such as the Lovell Health House, Neutra blended notions of machine-like efficiency that marked the work of his European contemporaries with the therapeutic qualities of the local California landscape.

And there were others: the elegant Arts and Crafts style of Greene and Greene, the subdued monumentality of Irving Gill’s mission style, the delicate metal structures of Charles and Ray Eames.

These Utopian aspirations collapsed in a heap 30-odd years ago. By then, Modernism’s early aspirations had been corrupted. Budget-minded developers had transformed the Modernist program of the flat roof, open plan and vast expanses of glass into thin, shoddily crafted boxes no better than their precedents. The Modernist’s shimmering glass-and-steel towers had evolved into the heavy, grotesque housing projects of the ‘60s.

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By the ‘70s, the so-called Postmodernists had tossed Modernism aside, mining classical precedents for the design of contemporary houses. Architects such as Robert Venturi and Charles Moore designed residences that explore the symbolic meaning of architecture and elicit more traditional images of safety and comfort. In America, Postmodernism soon succumbed to a saccharine nostalgia for a pre-industrial past, with nuclear families rooted in an America of Main Streets and homogenous suburban bliss. As architecture, it produced little of merit: ironic reproductions of classical homes best summed up in the manufactured enclave of Seaside, Fla., with its pitched roofs and rigid aesthetic codes.

“There was clearly a loss of confidence in the idea of the new,” says professor and author Frampton. “One still uses all of the modern gadgetry that is available. One drives cars, uses telephones, computers, God knows what. But it is all housed in a reactionary environment, as if modernity is something to be feared. It is a kind of compensation for the speed of technological change.”

Whatever the cause, the collapse of Modernism led to deeper explorations of how to create an architecture for a post-industrial age by those intent on picking through the failures and accomplishments of an earlier generation. Architects such as Portugal’s Alvaro Siza were quietly designing houses whose clean, abstract forms were twisted and bent to reflect the forces of context and time. In Japan, Kazuo Shinohara subtly blended traditional Japanese notions of space and tranquility with powerful concrete structural systems--as if the effort to maintain one’s stability in a new age took Herculean efforts.

And in Los Angeles, Frank Gehry was pulling the house apart into discrete blocks, using raw, unfinished materials such as plywood, tar-paper shingles and chain-link fencing to evoke the realities of everyday experience as an antidote to the sleek abstraction of earlier Modernist structures.

These architects offered an alternative to the neo-historical pastiches of Postmodernism. They also succeeded in liberating architecture from late Modernism’s suffocating ideological constraints. Where the early Modernists once firmly clung to a set of commonly held beliefs, these architects were drawn to the chaos and instability of life. As Philip Johnson succinctly put it: “There are no rules, only facts. There are no imperatives, only choice.”

Today that sense of freedom is increasingly coupled with an obsession with the inner workings of the mind, with the melting of the boundary between inner personality and outer image. Those themes, in turn, have been deeply effected by the increasing fragmentation of the family. At last count, fewer than half of Americans live in a conventional family household. One in three families is headed by a single parent, and 3.8 million children live in a family headed by a grandparent. Another 3 million are believed being raised in gay households, and 25 million Americans live alone. Many work at home, connected to their offices through telephone wires and computer screens.

The erosion of a common system of beliefs and the desire of the individual to shape his or her future has forced architects to rethink the social fabric of the family. If the Modernist task was to create models for a united Utopian society, today each house potentially reflects a radically different set of human values, and each must be increasingly fine-tuned to the particular psychological and social needs of its inhabitants.

An extreme example is Rem Koolhaas’ recent design for a house in Bordeaux, France. The client, paralyzed in a car accident, is the father of three children. Koolhaas’ design is both a diagram of public and private interaction and a mechanized tool for soothing the psyche. The house’s communal spaces--the glass-enclosed living room and outdoor terrace--are left completely exposed to the surrounding landscape. Above, the bedrooms are contained within a massive concrete slab, punctured by a series of small portholes, that seems to press down on the shared space below. The house’s structure echoes that sense of a social organism in a constant state of compression. The upper floor is precariously balanced at each end, with an enormous steel beam spanning the roof to keep it from tilting over. Here, structure evokes unease and instability.

But Koolhaas’ design also reconfigures the balance of power in the family, putting the father firmly at the center again. A large, mechanized platform rises up through the center of the house, giving the father access to all floors. The library--a three-story-tall wall of books--can only be reached from this central platform. When the platform rises, a big hole is left below, cutting off the kitchen from the wine cellar. The children, meanwhile, enter their bedrooms via an independent stair tower set at the center of the open-air terrace. The mother has her own stairway and a private study at the back of the house. By dividing movement through the house into distinct routes--one for the mother, another for the father, a third for the children--Koolhaas is able to expose the inherent tensions that exist between the dual needs for solitude and social interaction.

Koolhaas explored similar themes for a couple in suburban Rotterdam, but with different results. The Rotterdam house resembles a crumpled, translucent ball. A large, rectangular slot is carved out of its core, connecting living and dining rooms directly with the outdoors. In a witty take on sexual politics, the husband and wife’s private rooms are set on either side of this internal space, segregated into “feminine” and “masculine” zones. The two join above in the master bedroom, completing the cycle of solitude and intimacy.

The list goes on. The Kramlich residence in Napa Valley, designed by the team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and not yet under construction, is a similar exploration of technology’s ability to regulate man’s inner world. In this case, the clients are a couple with an important collection of contemporary video art. Herzog and De Meuron conceived the house as three distinct elements. The main living space is composed of four undulating glass walls that intersect to form a series of eye-shaped rooms at the house’s center. The video gallery is buried underground, a windowless black box divided by blank screens. Above, an enormous cantilevered roof--like the faceted wing of a stealth bomber--shields the entire structure.

The idea is to destroy the boundaries between art, life and nature. Viewed through these glass surfaces, the three are spliced together into a composition of various realities. Artistic productions, views to the oak tree-dotted landscape, and the banality of everyday life all intertwine in a series of overlapping images. The real and the unreal, surface and image, become almost indistinguishable.

To a younger generation, raised on the psychoanalyst’s couch, fluent in the jargon of the computer age and at ease with new technological gadgetry, the notion of such a fluid world seems almost obvious. Van Berkel & Bos’ 1998 Mobius House, located outside Amsterdam, is an attempt to create a completely interconnected internal universe, to meld together all the cycles of contemporary life. Composed of jagged glass and concrete forms, it is a continual loop of work, play and sleep. The dining room serves the double function of eating place and conference room. The clients, who also work in the house, move from the privacy of their bedrooms through the work studios and living areas and back again to the bedrooms in a never-ending cycle.

On the other side of the globe, Guthrie + Buresh use a similar strategy in the design of their 1997 Los Angeles WorkHouse. The house’s boxy form is intentionally less slick. Its use of raw materials--plywood and corrugated plastic--evoke the cruder materials of everyday life first used to full effect by Gehry. But inside, the house’s various functions interlock via a central stair that switches back and forth between the living and dining room, the bedrooms and the office studio. In both houses, the idea is to create a perfect balance between the dual needs of privacy and social interaction, where the intimacy of the bedroom, the tranquility of work and the social frictions of communal life all intertwine.

In houses such as these, fragmented forms and translucent materials become metaphors for a more ephemeral, global culture. The boundaries between the private and the communal, between inner life and public persona, have become more elastic, less rigid.

This collapse of the boundary that separates public and private life can be gleaned in even a relatively conventional-looking contemporary house. At the end of a cul-de-sac on a hilltop in Beverly Hills, for instance, the 1999 Hergott/Shepard House at first appears to be a familiar composition of block-like forms. Yet the clients conceived of their house as a semi-public space for displaying their cutting-edge contemporary art collection. Designed by Michael Maltzan, the house is entered through two overlapping walls into what is essentially a large, cube-shaped gallery, with diagonal views into a secondary gallery and the sweep of the city below. These are the house’s most monumental spaces. Art takes symbolic precedence over life.

Yet despite the soothing proportions of the rooms, the design is tinged with an overt eroticism. A gym, sheathed in mirrors, overlooks the pool and the main outdoor space for entertaining visitors. The upstairs bathroom is split into two spaces that are mirror images, with toilets that face each other, albeit through a frosted glass wall, and twin showers that join at the center. Sex and hedonism are recurring themes. The intimate, inner world is constantly on display.

The danger in the design of houses today, of course, is that architecture has wandered too far in a new direction--that in its fear of universal statements, its penchant for fragmentation, its obsession with the inner psyche, it has forfeited its ability to bind us into a larger community. Architects now look inward. Their clients are often wealthy, intent on preserving their autonomy, and distrustful of Utopian notions of social harmony. Utopia, it seems, has become a completely personal quest.

“I think now you are also dealing with the realm of the fashionable, of the spectacular,” Cohen, the French critic, says. “For many people houses are now part of the structure of public relations. These are buildings that are meant to be on display. These are clients that want to be visible, even while they want to be at the source of some sort of innovative architecture. Architecture has become another form of media.”

In the ‘20s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed the first of his Usonian houses, a low-cost prototype for the Middle American family. The houses are full of now familiar Wrightian tricks: flowing spaces and overhanging roofs, everything anchored around the ubiquitous fireplace--Wright’s symbol of family stability. But Wright’s scheme was also part of a broader social mission. The Usonian houses were meant to mesh through beckoning gardens and communal spaces. The idea was to create an entirely new experience based on shared values and a hierarchy of public and private spaces.

Architects today rarely have the opportunity--or the gumption--to design such sweeping visions. Even the most visionary work more often than not is limited to elaborate one-of-a-kind objects that have little connection to a broader social context. One can imagine a future where the house dissolves into a completely flexible form. Space will become temporary, radically free of boundaries, something that can be reconfigured to fit the desires of the individual. In essence, houses may well become complex psychological tools that bend to our shifting needs and desires. The forgotten question is how these futuristic organisms will fuse into a greater social whole. That may be a project for the next generation.