“Not a single sustainable house in the lot. Not a single house without acres of land. Not a single house in an urban setting. This is not a contribution to our ‘modern’ world.”
This was a comment we received about last year’s issue of Record Houses. And we will be likely to receive similar comments with this year’s selection of private residences.
But the design of houses has historically been an opportunity for architects to experiment, to give form to sometimes incredible ideas and upend convention.
Consider the awe-inspiring dwellings of John Lautner, particularly Chemosphere—that flying saucer–like concoction for aerospace engineer Leonard Malin, perched on a steep hillside site in Los Angeles that was considered unbuildable. Think of the material and structural innovations that came with early glass houses by Richard Neutra and Mies van der Rohe, or the testing of new concepts, such as the free plan and facade by the likes of Le Corbusier, which began with smaller-scale villas and later found a way into larger buildings and even urban schemes.
The majority of the houses in this annual celebration of domestic design are primary residences; only the two in Mexico are weekend homes. And as contributing writer Michael Snyder, who visited both of them, points out, “The only truly sustainable second house, after all, is the one that goes unbuilt.” That said, each of the Record Houses—this year and last—incorporates sustainable, and resilient, design measures, through solar arrays, site and passive strategies, and more. How could they not? Few exceptional designs today ignore those considerations.
In nearly 50 years of practice, John Patkau has designed surprisingly few dwellings. In his latest, the innovative roof enclosure is a culmination of years of research, and a new way of working, as his firm chronicled in the 2017 book Material Operations. At Arbour House, this is manifested in a ceiling assembly of intertwining wood members that brings daylight into the interior in a stunning way. “This new outlook is both a return to our architectural roots and a provocation to expand our approach to design,” he says.
On the other hand, Fernanda Canales wins her third Record House with Casa 720, featured on the cover. With all of her Record Houses—each radically different, from a cluster of black rectangular volumes and a house for herself defined by a series of barrel vaults to her latest, a circular abode 130 feet in diameter—she plays with form and defies expectation. (Both Patkau and Canales will present their work at RECORD’s Innovation Conference on October 1.)
Perhaps the clearest difference between the houses in this issue and those early- to mid-20th-century experiments is the clients. While, back then, a sophisticated or adventurous middle class could afford to engage a pioneering designer, today that has increasingly become the purview of the super-rich alone. This is indeed not a “contribution” to our modern world but, sadly, a condition of it.
Maybe these material and formal investigations, when applied to houses, can only be appreciated by a few, not the many, but they are nonetheless important, with implications for the discipline writ large. Such design innovations that go unheralded are easily overlooked or, worse, demolished, destroying with them a rich building heritage. As Suzanne Stephens, former longtime editor of Record Houses, writes in this month’s Forum, the Modernist Spaeth House by George Nelson and Gordon Chadwick fell victim to the wrecker’s ball, despite recognition over the years of its design, inspired by McKim, Mead & White’s Low House, also razed. The Spaeth House will be replaced by a new structure possibly five times its size—another “condition” of modern life at the hands of the super-rich.
