From the airport to the individual dwelling, from the newest sort of structure to what is presumably the oldest, represents a considerable jump. Yet it is at least debatable whether the best houses of the mid twentieth century, continuing a line of development that has earlier been traced forward from 1800 (see Chapter [15]), were not more satisfactory solutions of the problems their designing and building poses, both practically and aesthetically, than any of the airports mentioned. To a considerable extent they were as novel.[[544]] The dwelling may not, in the years after 1925, have developed primarily as a ‘machine for living in’, according to Le Corbusier’s famous phrase, but it certainly became more and more a ‘box for housing machinery in’. As the relative proportion of the total cost spent for mechanical equipment went up, the shell had to shrink. As the shell shrank, planning was increasingly simplified. Only rarely was the ultimate in unification of space reached, as in Mies’s Farnsworth house or Philip Johnson’s own house in New Canaan, Conn., where only the bathroom is enclosed and the other subdivisions of the interior are but ranges of cupboards not reaching to the ceiling. Equally rare is the exclusively glass walling of these two houses, clearly the extreme point of a crescendo that goes back at least to the window-walls of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. But if they represented the end-point of several developments, from which there has since been a return even on the part of their own architects (Plate [190A]), the extremes that they illustrate were in many respects those towards which houses in general were then tending.

The house as a detached, individually-designed edifice was still for most people the ideal dwelling. But at no time since 1800 had such a dwelling been more of a luxury. Convenience and economy drove rich and poor alike towards more communal forms of habitation, whether they were the cabañas of the millionaires’ motels at Palm Springs or the low-cost flats in suburban ‘point-blocks’. In between these poles were all the varieties of terrace-housing, ‘semi-detachery’, and builders’ standardized products, ranging from conservative parodies of the individually designed houses of a generation ago through various vulgarizations of more modern houses to the prefabricated package-dwelling which seemed to be no nearer to receiving that general acceptance which would make it economical than it was a hundred years ago. Mass housing, no matter what form it took, whether the forty-eight tall slabs of the Cerro Piloto or the forty-eight hundred, more or less, semi-detached two-storey dwellings of an English housing estate, belongs increasingly to the world of bureaucratized architecture. The house, on the other hand, conceived as an individualized entity, remained almost as much a specialized and exceptional product as the church; yet the changes first made in individual houses gradually affected all housing standards. Particularly in North and South America they still provided architectural opportunities of the greatest interest and variety. Most Latin American houses, for example, retained the semi-oriental ideals of seclusion of the Iberian tradition; yet behind the walls surrounding their plots to cut out the world, they were often opener than houses in the United States, since a warm climate makes of the patio or garden the principal living area. Niemeyer’s own house of 1954 at Gávea outside Rio de Janeiro is almost as much a glass box as Mies’s or Johnson’s, although its glass walls are set under a slab whose outline is a continuous free curve. The house of Osvaldo Arthur Bratke (b. 1907) at 3008 Avenida Morumbí outside São Paulo is also closer in plan and conception to houses in the United States, protection of various sorts being provided by grilles and movable shutters (Figure [56]).

Figure 56. Osvaldo Arthur Bratke: São Paulo, Morumbí, Bratke house, 1953, plan

There was considerable variety in mid-century house-design in Latin America, ranging all the way from such Mexican houses as those of Francisco Artigas (b. 1916) or Sordo Madaleno that present a blank wall to the street and yet open up completely to a patio or a garden, to Niemeyer’s open pavilion at Gávea. In North America there was perhaps even wider diversity. Despite the equalization of climate by then readily provided by heating and cooling facilities, there were still great differences between one region and another in the forces of nature that must be controlled or protected against, from the insects and hurricanes of Florida to the blizzards of Minnesota, than between the various countries of Latin America. Johnson’s Davis house at Wayzata in Minnesota was enclosed, however, not because of the climate, but in order to provide hanging space for an art collection, while it opens within on to a patio that can be roofed in winter (Figure [57]). Neither screening nor anchorage against high winds is conspicuous in the design of most of the Florida houses of Paul Rudolph (b. 1918). On the West Coast the aberrant casualness of the Bay Region manner of the thirties and forties now became increasingly disciplined. Wooden construction, pitched roofs, and a certain discursiveness of planning still contrasted, however, with more rigidly Miesian design; yet the finest houses of Joseph Esherick in and around San Francisco or of John Yeon in Portland, Ore., to mention only two West Coast architects, sometimes rivalled in distinction those of Johnson and Rudolph.

Figure 57. Philip Johnson: Wayzata, Minn., Richard S. Davis house, 1954

Whether the building of individual houses in other countries will ever again have the significance it still retains in the New World depends on many extra-architectural factors. The last thing a historian should pretend with regard to this or to any other aspect of the near-present is that he is capable of prophecy. The history of architecture in the second half of this century can only be written in the future. The glimpses—for they are no more than that—of post-war production given here represent a critic’s and not an historian’s selection, and a selection that has inevitably been much influenced by what that critic knows best at first hand.

Despite the obligation to provide in the Introduction some sort of eighteenth-century foundation, this book had a real historical turning-point for its actual beginning; it had, in the mid 1950s, no such point at which to end. From Wright, near ninety, to men two generations younger, some of whom have been mentioned in this chapter, the work of the architects of the western world showed then no convincing evidence of a major and general turn, however surprising in the light of his work of the twenties Le Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp might seem. We stopped in mid-stream and even the [Epilogue] which follows can provide no true peroration. Fortunately the contemporary history of architecture is being recorded more promptly and completely than ever before in the professional press. It does not seem necessary to footnote this chapter or the [Epilogue] with references to periodicals when every issue of the principal journals inevitably includes material illustrative of current production throughout the world. Yet when one leaves the world of history for the world of ‘current events’, the time has come to turn from books to periodicals. In the Bibliography there are naturally few ‘monographs’—i.e. books or summary articles—devoted to the men first mentioned in this chapter, since many of them were still at the outset of their careers.[[545]]