On the other hand, my house is as unarchitectural as it gets.
In deference to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown and their notion of a “decorated shed” – their term for the “ugly and ordinary” in vernacular architecture – mass produced houses like mine are almost undecorated sheds, virtually free of architecture, and unencumbered by any historical memory. This, nonetheless, did not deter eager buyers from wanting one of these pragmatic solutions to the problem of shelter. Prospective buyers waited in very long lines in the early 1950s to buy one.
They are not beautiful houses. They are not sentimental. They do not appear to be consoling.
It is only their humility that makes them seem ironic.
The photograph on this page is from the author's collection.
Subscribe to Where We Are's feed.
But--these houses are indeed sentimental! For they combine an essential modernity and lightness of construction, with traditional touches that connect the dweller to nearly-lost memories of patterns of inhabiting.
Just look at Model 16-A (hardly a sentimental name, I admit), and see the recessed entry protected on the side not by a wall, but a screen--a place to view the neighbors (and perhaps greet them) yet with a sense of privacy and enclosure. See the interior space expand--almost bursting--out the front, with the bay window expressing on the outside the place of gathering for friends and family within, and displaying it all to neighbors and passers-by. Is there a better place for a beautifully-decorated Christmas tree?
And for those in the know, the bedroom windows at the side of the bay window, enhanced by the perfumed flowering of potted plants carefully located to both add detail to the home's exterior at that end, and provide a moment of grace when waking up in the morning within. Even the vestigial shutters, affixed to each side of the front bedroom's windows, convey a sense of rest and protection, and signal to the outside world both the human, touchable scale of the house, and its tranquil qualities within.
Yet even with these conventional signals, the presentation--the drawing, I mean--projects an air of modernity, almost streamlined. The strong horizontal lines of the mid-century ranch house make their appearance, with a clean, thrusting roof line providing a unifying horizon line, the dynamic perspective pointing toward the garage at the side: these are encoded signals of modern life, where the useless ornaments of stultified societies elsewhere (back East, perhaps) have been replaced by the simpler, newer attractions of simplicity, speed and technology.
It is a cottage, yes, but also a complex amalgam of the traditional foundations of suburban domesticity with the dynamic modernism of a life in movement. It is indeed beautiful, and sentimental as well.
Dan J.