Last week in Melbourne I was lucky enough to see the Walsh Street home of the late Robin Boyd (1917-1971), one of Australia’s most famous modern architects and critics. He ran Australia’s Small Homes Service (stock plans by architects) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, designed a wide variety of structures, and wrote several influential books including Australia’s Home: Its Origins, Builders, and Occupiers (1952), The Australian Ugliness (1960), and The Puzzle of Architecture (1965). He was what I would call a “flexible modernist,” especially adept at finding innovative solutions for particular site conditions. The home, built in 1957 and now owned by the Robin Boyd Foundation, is one of his most ingenious — maximizing indoor-outdoor living space on a narrow urban lot — with many lessons for today.

The model, from Museum Victoria (by Paul Couch, Carter Couch Architects, 1989) shows how the house is divided into two sections book-ending a central glass-walled courtyard: entry, living-dining area, kitchen, and master bedroom at one end; childrens’ bedrooms and Robin’s office above the garage at the other. The courtyard is the leafy, sun-filled heart of the house: a private, spacious, wind-protected outdoor living room.

This view is toward the living room. The wings are tied together by an upswept roof of planks supported on cables, like a suspension bridge, as shown in this section view, below,

(courtesy Robin Boyd: A Life by Geoffrey Serle, 1995). Famous examples like the Menai Straits Bridge (1825)  in North Wales (courtesy Wales Directory)

with its cables slung over stone towers, or Kane’s Bridge (1929) over the Yarra River in Melbourne’s own Studley Park

(courtesy Bushwalkingblog.blogspot.com) spring to mind — Boyd would have known many such prototypes. The following ceiling detail

shows the cables supporting the boards of the roof.

At the top of Boyd’s catenary curve is the master bedroom (shown below)  over the living-dining area and kitchen. One of the clever twists here is that the main entrance from the street is through this space (called a bed-sitting room on the plan), which is treated as a floating indoor-outdoor platform overlooking the courtyard.

That’s why it doesn’t look like a master bedroom. Boyd Foundation executive director Tony Lee, who gave my wife Mary and me the insightful and inspirational tour, said that the Boyds always entertained guests in this space and then took everyone downstairs for dinner. (I guess they were very fastidious and always made their bed — it certainly sounds like something only an architect would do). Also the railings are mostly metaphorical (except  for the couch) so as not to interrupt views and spatial flow…or gravity, for that matter. Architects just love to levitate!

The living-dining area on the lower level extends into the courtyard through a wall of glass.

The kitchen is behind the stair and partially open to the living area — also note how the lighting is deftly tucked between the overhead beams. The plan (also from Serle’s book) shows how courtyard and house are extensions of each other,

making structure and site one supremely efficient unit. The key lesson here is that house is not a separate block plopped onto the lot; it becomes the lot. Every inch of the site is part of the plan; this is still an excellent way to design for tight urban sites. Precedents for such a patio-centric layout go all the way back to the Roman atrium

as in the plan for the so-called House of the Surgeon at Pompeii (courtesy AD 79). As a worldly modernist — who knew Walter Gropius, and in 1956 held a visiting professorship at MIT during which he met Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen, among others  — Boyd might also have known the Eames House and Studio at Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles, of 1949.

It also brackets a courtyard (house on left, studio on right, plan courtesy Key Houses of the Twentieth Century by Colin Davies, 2006) ) though the site is very different and the structure faces a meadow across the long boardwalk. Robin Boyd seemed to absorb ideas like a sponge while addressing each architectural problem from a fresh point of view. His was a highly cultured yet agile imagination, firmly grounded and flexible at the same time. It was a delight to meet that mind at home.

Design collecting takes many forms. I recently attended a workshop on the mid-century modern design photographer Maynard Parker at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and met Charles Phoenix, resplendent in a vintage Hawaiian shirt, who is one of the great collectors of 50s and 60s modern Americana, a frequent guest on NPR and Martha Stewart and author of Americana The Beautiful: Mid-Century Modern Culture in Kodachrome (Angel City Press, 2006)

His enthusiasm for popular culture — from high style to kitsch — is infectious and his frequent slide lectures

– showing a vast collection of Kodachromes like the one above — are famous. He calls thrift shops “museums of merchandise” that are “the perfect place to study the underbelly of our mass consumerism culture.” I agree and think a lot can be learned about our culture by studying everyday life in any decade — just think how the phrase “better living through chemistry,” which became synonymous with the 1950s and derived from a Dupont slogan adopted in 1935 (according to Wikipedia), has now acquired an ironic edge. And don’t forget the “one word” that Mr. McGuire said to Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman)  in The Graduate (1967) : “Plastics.”

Charles’ interest in ordinary mid-century life made me think about the parallel universe of high style retro modern imagery — also called classic  modern –  that’s visible in current paper goods like these eye-catching note cards by Annacote (6 cards and envelopes for $12), available at Esty.

The famous diamond-pattern metal chair designed by Harry Bertoia, originally produced by Knoll, makes a vivid design, as do the even more  famous

Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe — designed in the late 1920s but coming to embody a corporate American look in the 1950s — and the

bent plywood chair by Charles and Ray Eames. These sleek and elegant forms remain powerfully seductive. Perhaps a Happy belated Valentine to the designer in your life!

Vintage modern plans are seductive too — browse our Historic Plan Collection, for example. The Stock plan exhibit mentioned in a previous post has made me review my own collecting habit.  I am fond of ranch house plan brochures like this

one from 1946. And in doing my research for Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House (Rizzoli, 2008 — Shameless Self-Promotion Department!) I found this brochure

from the early 1950s for May’s tract ranch houses in Denver. With some updates — kitchens and bathrooms always need adjustment for today’s living patterns, and low-e glass, and higher grade insulation are essential — such a plan would work for today. Robert Nebolon’s updated Eichler (Plan 438-1), shown below in floor plan and elevation,

is comparable — and he’s already done all the upgrade work! For similar plans see our Ranch House Collection.

Plan books  go way back, as the exhibit Stock Options: Houses for Everyone,

which just opened at U. C. Berkeley, vividly demonstrates. Curator and College of Environmental Design Head Librarian Elizabeth Byrne traces the history of the western home through the profusion of pattern books and brochures published by building companies since the nineteenth century.

This is where most of the designs for the houses that shape our cities and towns come from.

The New York firm of Palliser & Palliser was one of the early plan companies. As the economy and the middle class expanded, home building grew apace, especially in the early 20th century, when

bungalows, promoted by builders and magazines alike, took the country by storm and became identified with California and the good life. Truly the model T of home design in that era, the bungalow — like the automobile — overran towns like Pasadena, California, where there’s even a neighborhood

called “Bungalow Heaven.” And by the way, garage plans suddenly became important. The pent-up demand for housing produced by the Depression and then World War II resulted in a huge building boom at mid century

when plan books flooded the market. For example,  prominent Los Angeles architect Paul Williams published two books of plans in 1945 and 1946.  Plans like “The Ulster” shown below, with its efficient central courtyard arrangement

appeared in The Book of Small Houses, also in 1946. (The books themselves are shown in a photo at the top of this post). Ranch houses became the post-war equivalent of the bungalow, only more open to the yard, as this Cliff May plan from Sunset Western Ranch Houses of 1946

shows. Note the headline, which rings even more true today, when scarce land for building makes every inch count. To continue the auto metaphor, you could say the ranch house became the Ford Mustang of home design in the 1960s, especially as it metamorphosed into Eichler tract houses and other contemporary designs. The exhibit brings us down to the present by showing recent prefab work by Michelle Kaufmann and online home plans like our very own Flexahouse. For an  exhaustive scholarly history of the pattern book see Houses From Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture: 1738-1950: A History and Guide, by Daniel D. Reiff (Penn State Press, 2000).

Our Newest Exclusive

I’m excited to present work by our latest exclusive architect, Bud Dietrich. It vividly continues the stock plan story into the future.

This elegant house combines a traditional outline with modern indoor-outdoor living in a crisp orderly plan.

Spatial surprises abound, from the home office/den in its own window bay to the

barrel vault in the living room and the daylit basement

play room opening to a broad stair up to the garden. I like Bud’s design philosophy: “We should create right-sized homes that are gentle on us and our resources. Rather than getting distracted by questions of architectural style let’s use our own wisdom and common sense to create homes that are appropriate for their time and place.” His beautiful multifunctional design shows just how far the stock plan has come.

On the surface, Avatar, the new blockbuster bailout of a movie by James Cameron, has nothing to do with home design but everything to do with a fevered and fertile visual imagination.

You probably know the sci-fi plot (see the excellent Wikipedia summation) about colonists mining “unobtanium,” an elusive rock to be sure, on the planet Pandora (diagram of the miners’ control room above), who have created avatars that let them mingle with the indigenous Na ‘ve population in order to get them out of the way.  It’s not so much a movie as a fabulous computerized “dark ride” through a lush jungle world

where nature is nurtured into a frenzied confrontation (image courtesy avatarplanet)

between Pocahontas and the Air Force (image courtesy Wired).

When I saw it with my younger daughter Martha, who contributed the Pocohontas analogy, we could only get seats in the second  row and thanks to our 3-D glasses I kept swatting at or dodging the ferns, branches, flying beasts, and other hyper-realistic computer-captured characters that whipped or whizzed past. Exhausting but fun. My older daughter Eliza, an art photographer, views the film in a very different light at Photophilanthropy.com — the family definitely helped with my research for this post!

So my point is? Home is the ultimate avatar, whether machine or forest. It represents us to the world and is our refuge and second skin. Architectural sociologist Clare Cooper-Marcus’ groundbreaking book House As A Mirror of Self (Nicolas-Hays, 2006) details this phenomenon through her case study research with more than 60 individuals. As she states: “At the base of this study is a very simple yet frequently overlooked premise. As we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close, affective ties with a number of physical environments, beginning in childhood.”

This is true in my own experience: when I was teaching architectural history at Carnegie-Mellon University, I asked my students to write a short essay about their college living environments. Some described their dorm rooms as a kind of refuge; others as a public meeting place. In effect, each room became a reflection of psychological need, an avatar if you will. The trick is to understand your “inner home” (the Na ‘ve people’s Hometree and Tree of Souls? Unobtainium?) without launching rockets at it — or getting a divorce.

Associations Are Important

Another new film actually uses a house to tell part of the story. In Nancy Myers’ It’s Complicated the home of amicably divorced baker and restaurant owner Jane Adler, played by Meryl Steep, is a beautiful tile roofed adobe, supposedly in Santa Barbara

though actually in Thousand Oaks (photo courtesy Cote de Texas blog), and resembles a spiffed up version of classic adobe style houses

from the 1920s and early 1930s, like the Donald Dickey guest house in Ojai by architect Palmer Sabin, or

the E. L. Doheny Ranch at Santa Paula Canyon by architect Wallace Neff. And because the owner is a chef

it has a great kitchen with dazzling light and a seductive Carrara marble-topped island (photo courtesy Design 59 blog). The house as presented by set decorator Beth Rubino is warm, comfortably contemporary, and richly historical all at the same time. In other words, it’s a house with a past and an air of contentment about the present. And it represents an ideal of modern-day, food-and-garden-centric Southern California. It’s like living inside a large tile-roofed croissant. Adobe bricks and terra cotta tiles, are, after all — baked.

The Adler character’s momentary fling with her ex-husband drives the movie but in the end doesn’t affect the character of the home. In fact, it seems fitting that she ultimately falls in love with the architect who is designing her new kitchen addition. The home and the character are “moving on” to the next stage of their lives. For more on the rationale behind the set design see the film’s Production Notes and a brief interview with the director at Santa Barbara Visitors Bureau. Our homes — whether sci-fi trees or adobe ranch houses — are yeasty metaphors indeed.

With the many boxes of architecture books in our basement you could say that they’re helping to support our house, and with all the architecture books on our shelves you could also say that they’re helping to weigh it down. But at least it’s balanced — though some folks in my family could say we have reached a tipping point, literally. In any case, the obsession must be fed, so here’s a quick round-up of design books that have recently caught my eye — good for last minute gifts or your first reading list of the new year.

In the decades following World War II, a number of small communities across the country built modern, architect-designed houses, such as Snake Hill in Belmont, Massachusetts, and Six Moon Hill at Lexington in the same state. Living Modern, by Waverly Lowell (William Stout, publisher), chronicles the planning and building of such an enclave, called Greenwood Common, in the Berkeley Hills above the University of California campus in 1952.

It was developed by architect William Wurster, dean of Berkeley’s architecture school and later founder of the College of Environmental Design. His idea was to create a modern but regionally responsive, outdoor- and community-oriented neighborhood of houses by a diverse array of contemporary architects. (Full disclosure:  Wurster bought the land from my grandmother, who was very interested in modern architecture. My father used to tell us children about playing softball on what his family called “The Front Lot,” where eight houses now stand.) Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin designed the setting

including the common green facing a view of the Bay, and several of the individual gardens many years before he became famous for his city parks and water gardens around the country. The book vividly describes how clients and architects worked together to create very progressive living environments and includes conceptual sketches like this series by architect Donald Olsen,

which shows his interest in International Style geometries.

Casa Del Herrero, by Robert Sweeney (Rizzoli, publisher) is the story of a meticulously preserved Spanish Colonial Revival style house in Santa Barbara from the 1920s.

The name means house of the blacksmith and the edifice was built as the winter home for the family of St. Louis industrialist George Steedman, who enjoyed such hobbies as metal working (hence the name), wood working, and wine making.  For Steedman, according to Sweeney, “the shop was the holy land.” And his shop is indeed a marvel: the large room is densely packed and highly organized, with a vast array of tools occupying every surface.

He must have been a challenging client because he was constantly tinkering with every detail, from handrails to glassware. Spanish tile and wrought iron embellish every room.  You can visit the house by contacting the Casa Del Herrero Foundation.

Energy Free Homes for a Small Planet by Ann Edminster (Green Building Press) is an essential reference for anyone planning to build a home that uses as little energy as possible.

The author is an architect who helped develop our national green standards. She  explains what a net zero energy home is and shows how to develop your own plan for building such a house. The chapters address her concept of integrated design and how to minimize the energy your house needs, how to minimize the energy the house’s occupants need, and explain the options for appliances and fixtures. It’s a comprehensive guide to the greenest green.

What do architects read? I am always interested in this question because I want to know where architects get their design ideas. Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books by Jo Steffens (Yale University Press) looks at the book collections of ten contemporary New York-area architects.

Interviews with each architect explains what they read, and what their top ten books are. Robert Venturi’s seminal Complexity & Contradition in Modern Architecture — a book published in 1966 that championed the role of ambiguity in architectural form — is on several lists. There’s a voyeuristic aspect to the photos of sample shelves from each library…I confess I’m always looking for a copy of my book Cliff May and the Modern Ranch House! (must be the egg nog from our holiday party just now finished: it’s a truth serum). Billie Tsien and Tod Williams talk about their love of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica both for its lucid writing and for its tactile leather binding. Most of these libraries are organized by subject or architect so the juxtapositions aren’t unusual. But it’s an intriguing idea for a book and just makes me want to know more about the sources of architectural imagination.

These volumes can be found at the usual Internet sources but bookstores that specialize in design are especially rewarding places to browse, including Mrs. Dalloways Literary & Garden Arts, Builders Booksource, and William Stout Architectural Books. Happy reading and Happy holidays.