The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
Whether a sleek, technological tool for the full optimisation of a Modern lifestyle, or a dreamlike vision of the highest luxury, the ideal home has long been an object of fascination for architecture. Such an ideal can be conceived at the scale of a single client, closely tailored at extravagant expense, tuning in to every quirk and precise particularity. The ideal home can also take the position of a prototype; a generalising, potentially mass-produced but always aspirational template for living well.
While such standardisation certainly pulls higher quality of life into reach for the many, the norms expressed in cookie-cutter Modern living are not absolute, but representative of the conditions of their construction, the politics of the time and the tendencies of the hand that draws them. The values that underlie each line are worth questioning.
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Outrage: the toxicity of house porn, AR July/August 2019, Catherine Slessor
‘Framed as apparently harmless light infotainment, house porn appeals to the nation’s Hyacinth Bucket tendencies of slightly gritted, nosey neighbour one-upmanship. Would you want to live in a house like that? Yet it has a nasty, seamy underbelly, reducing architecture to a wretchedly idealised, devil-take-the-hindmost, Daily Mail vision of lifestyle’
Flat-pack Wright, AR August 2015, Nicholas Olsberg
‘From the first popular presentation of his work in 1901 until the end of his career, everything that mattered most to Wright was wrapped up in this single fundamental problem: how to house the average American family in an efficient, economical and life-enhancing work of art’
Outrage: the problem with tiny homes, AR June 2020, Jack Self
‘Tiny homes are a pathetic compromise, a poor trade-off between impossible cultural aspirations and pure economic desperation. They are reactionary products, manifestations of our fears about the future’
Tudoresque: In Pursuit of the Ideal Home by Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law, AR August 2011, Timothy Brittain Catlin
‘These houses represent a view of the British as self-reliant, untrusting of big government, of homogenised culture. The authors trace the origin of this to a law of Elizabeth I, stipulating every cottage must be provided with four acres of land’
AR 120: Gillian Darley on Home, AR December 2016/January 2017, Gillian Darley
‘Architects in Britain are scrutinised not only for the failed utopias of these postwar buildings but also those conceived to replace them and their complicity in the “social cleansing” of tenancies’
Designing for the moment: on 70 years of Japanese house architecture, AR July/August 2017, Manon Mollard
‘Western domesticity speaks of permanence and property, privacy and identity, but the Japanese house inhabits a different reality. Its average lifespan oscillates between 25 and 30 years. In the US, this rises to 103 years, and 141 in the UK. Toyo Ito’s White U house, designed for his widowed sister in Nakano, was taken down after just 21 years’
The continuous interior: an endless domestic landscape, AR July/August 2018, Anna Puigjaner
‘The house is no longer just an unchanging space for our belongings, but a transient and networked space that can be expanded and decreased according to our needs through the use of apps and similar commodities’
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