AR Reading List 058: private lives

The private house remains a site of fantasy and experimentation for architects. As the base unit of social reproduction in our common imagination, the negotiations between privacy and publicness in the individual dwelling, of how we live with our without one another, are vital in how they structure the most basic building blocks of society. This reading list concerns itself with how we conceive of the boundaries of the home, as secretive or as spectacle – with the ideals the home reveals as individuals who are part of a public.

The house offers the potential for genuine innovation, reformatting how we live our lives from the ground up. Launched in 2010 and now open for entries, AR House recognises originality and excellence in the design of dwellings. Click here to find out more about AR House 2021

Public house: the city folds into the space of the home, AR June 2020, Atxu Amann y Alcocer and Flavio Martella
‘The pandemic abolished public space in an instant, promptly labelling it as dangerous and harmful to health. Parks and squares were fenced off to avoid gatherings of people, all spaces with commercial activities closed, as well as recreational ones, while streets are now quickly crossed, avoiding human contact at all costs’

Private life: the line between domesticity and publicness at Kettle’s Yard, AR December 2019/January 2020, Eleanor Beaumont
‘Paulo Mendes da Rocha argues that the home is a public building, insisting that “all space is public. The only private space that you can imagine is in the human mind”. His Casa Butantã in São Paulo, in which he still resides and which is not open to the public, is arranged around “streets” and squares like a city in miniature’

Houses in the sky: Chicago in the age of the apartment, AR October 1977, John Craib-Cox
‘The apartment is the solution of the living problems of the city. The modern apartment is an amazing illustration of the rapid development of an idea. The larger ones are quite as magnificent as any houses could be’

Loos and Baker: a house for Josephine, AR March 2018, Catherine Slessor
‘Here, transfixed by the imaginary spectacle of Baker ‘performing’ in her pool, Loos’s default interior choreography of comfort and covering erupts into theatricality and exposure’

Typology: the semi-detached house, AR June 2015, Tom Wilkinson
‘The cleavage of the semi exposes the tension at the heart of housing, which is at once commodity and dream; an ontological need for dwelling-in-the-world, and an excuse to go shopping at IKEA. It expresses both the desire for individual freedom and the inescapability of socio-economic bonds’

The mathematics of the Ideal Villa: Palladio and Le Corbusier compared, AR March 1947, Colin Rowe
‘Here is set up the conflict between the contingent and the absolute, the natural and the abstract; the gap between the ideal world and the too human exigencies of realisation receives its most pathetic presentation’

Holiday pay: vacation homes by Living Architecture in the UK and Solo Houses in Spain, AR September 2019, Manon Mollard
‘Whether they mark the apotheosis of a style or the radical departure of an established language, weekend retreats and vacation homes have proved to be some of the most experimental and extravagant houses designed by architects’