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Newsweek: It makes me wonder whatever happened to the modern house, and why the core idea of modernism—that through mass production, ordinary people could afford the best design—never caught on when it came to houses. Le Corbusier called the house “a machine for living in”—which meant, notes New York architect Deborah Gans, that the house is a tool people control, not the other way round. The brilliance of the modern house was in the flexible spaces that flowed one to the next, and in the simplicity and toughness of the materials. Postwar America saw a few great experiments, most famously in L.A.’s Case Study Houses in the late 1940s and ’50s. Occasionally, a visionary developer, such as Joseph Eichler in California, used good modern architects to design his subdivisions. Today they’re high-priced collectibles…
Photo by lee_3dhighway
The housing industry says that we want bigger and bigger houses. But I think they’re not taking credit for their marketing skills. Last year’s annual report for Pulte Homes, one of the nation’s biggest builders, contains an astonishing fact: if you adjust for inflation, houses of the same size and comparable features are the same price today as they were in the 1970s. That means that if business is going to grow, the industry has to sell more product—not just more houses but more square footage. It’s like the junk-food-marketing genius who figured out that people wouldn’t go back for seconds but they’d pay more upfront to get, say, the 32-ounce Big Gulp…
But finally some people are saying “Enough already.” Sarah Susanka, a Minnesota architect, started a mini-movement with her best-selling 1998 book, The Not So Big House. Susanka argues that a good architect understands the importance of human scale. Under the dome of St. Peter’s, you’re meant to feel awe. But if your bedroom’s the size of a barn, how cozy can you get? The eco-conscious hate big houses, too, with the energy cost of heating and cooling all those big empty rooms. And now that McMansions not only are the staple of new suburbs but are invading older, leafy neighborhoods, built in place of tear-downs and overpowering the smaller vintage houses nearby, communities from Greenwich, Conn., to Miami Beach are beginning to take action.