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Likewise, Reyner interpreted it as a coming inevitable mechanical progress which would threaten the long-established role of architecture as a creator of open spaces. The essay is aimed to review and analyse the article ‘‘A Home Is Not a House’’ by Reyner Banham, primarily the main criticism towards the North American housing architecture and proposed solutions to enhance it by implementing the technological innovation. But it is in one building that seems at first sight nothing but monumental form that the threat or promise of the un-house has been most clearly demonstrated-the Johnson House at New Canaan. So much has been misleadingly said to prove this a work of architecture in the European tradition, that its many intensely American aspects are usually missed.
This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner - scenically it is the ole swimmin' hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed and it's chlorinated too. From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaborate family barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller's experimental domes. And it hit me then, that if dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of control by other means, the United States would be happy to dispense with architecture and buildings altogether. This beach combines the outdoor and the clean in a highly American manner – scenicly it is the old swimmin’ hole of Huckleberry Finn tradition, but it is properly policed and it’s chlorinated too.
“A Home is not a House”, by Reyner Banham and François Dallegret, 1965
What is under discussion here is an extension of the Jeffersonian dream beyond the agrarian sentimentality of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian / Broadacre version -the dream of the good life in the clean countryside, power-point homesteading in a paradise garden of appliances. This dream of the un-house may sound very anti architectural but it is so only in degree, and architecture deprived of its European roots but trying to strike new ones in an alien soil has come close to the anti-house once or twice already. Wright was not joking when he talked of the "destruction of the box," even though the spatial promise of the phrase is rarely realized to the full in the all-too-solid fact.
Grass-roots architects of the plains like Bruce Goff and Herb Greene have produced houses whose supposed monumental form is clearly of little consequence to the functional business of living in and around them. Likewise, Banham made an enormous influence on most of the current architects to incorporate a new innovative perspective on technological innovations when creating a project. Reyner’s ideas regarding the housing architecture in North America led to the notion of accepting and understating the environmental aspects in building the potential homes for inhabitants.
PRECIS ON “A HOME IS NOT A HOUSE” BY REYNER BANHAM
Indeed, Reyner had an ability to understand both the social and political involvement of visual arts in architecture and somehow his writing style had a way to be anything but cynical and descriptive. To the man who has everything else, a standard-of-living package such as this could offer the ultimate goody - the power to impose his will on any environment to which the package could be delivered; to enjoy the spatial freedom of the nomadic campfire without the smell, smoke, ashes and mess; and the luxuries of appliance-land without those encumbrances of a permanent dwelling. Only, the monument is such a ponderous solution that it astounds me that Americans are still prepared to employ it, except out of some profound sense of insecurity, a persistent inability to rid themselves of those habits of mind they left Europe to escape.
From where I stood, I could see not only immensely elaboratefamily barbecues and picnics in progress on the sterilized sand, but also, through and above the trees, the basketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller’s experimental domes. Another drawing titled ‘‘The Environment Bubble’’ shows Banham and Dallegret sitting peacefully in the technological “Transportable standard-of-living package”, a mobile environmentally friendly habitat, equipped with solar panels . In one such image called ‘‘Anatomy of a Dwelling’’, the reader is provided with the adequate representation and interpretation of the huge network of cables and tubes, an accumulating “baroque ensemble of domestic gadgets” between the sky and the earth . Naked and sat around a technological totem, Banham and Dallegret appear in “Transportable standard-of-living package” a mobile habitat environmentally friendly, equipped by solar panels, for an hippy yet hypertechnological nomad youth. The present mobile home is a mess, visually, mechanically, and in its relationship to the permanent infrastructure of civilization.
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And since that tradition agrees with him that the American hollow shell is such an inefficient heat barrier, Americans have always been prepared to pump more heat, light and power into their shelters than have other peoples. America's monumental space is, I suppose, the great outdoors - the porch, the terrace, Whitman's rail - traced plains, Kerouac's infinite road, and now, the Great Up There. This can never replace the time-honored ranch-style trilevel with four small boys and a private dust bowl. There are, admittedly, very sound day-to-day advan-tages to having warm broadloom on a firm floor underfoot, rather than pine needles and poison ivy. America’s pioneer house builders recognized this by commonly building their brick chimneys on a brick floor slab.
Now, large single volumes wrapped in flimsy shells have to be lighted and heated in a manner quite different and more generous than the cubicular interiors of the European tradition around which the concept of domestic architecture first crystallized. Right from the start, from the Franklin stove and the kerosene lamp, the american interior has had to be better serviced if it was to support a civilized culture, and this is one of the reasons that the U.S. has been the forcing ground of mechanical services in buildings so if services are to be felt anywhere as a threat to architecture, it should be in America. However one might argue that the article leads to a subjective elucidation that the domestic housing architecture in its worst position and demanding the necessary changes to implement into the structure of the American architecture. But the relationship of the services-kit to the floor slab could be re-arranged to get over this difficulty; all the standard-o£-living tackle could be re-deployed on the upper side of a sheltering membrane floating above the floor, radiating heat, light and what-not downwards and leaving the whole perimeter wide-open for random egress-and equally casual ingress, too, I guess. That crazy modern-movement dream of the interpenetration of indoors and outdoors could become real at last by abolishing the doors.
The distribution of the air-curtain will be governed by various electronic light and weather sensors, and by that radical new invention, the weathervane. For really foul weather automatic storm shutters would be required, but in all but the most wildly in climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning kit to with most of the weather most of the time, without the power consumption becoming ridiculously greater than for an ordinary inefficient monumental type house. The basic proposition is simply that the power membrane should blow down a curtain of warmed/cooled/conditioned air around the perimeter of the windward side of the un-house, and leave the surrounding weather to waft it through the living space, whose relationship in plan to the membrane above need not be a one-to-one relationship. The membrane would probably have to go beyond the limits of the floor slab, anyhow, in order to prevent rain blow-in, though the air curtain will be active on precisely the side on which the rain is blowing and, being conditioned, will tend to mop up the moisture as it falls. The distribution of the air curtain will be governed by various electronic light and weather sensors, and by that radical new invention, the weathervane. For really foul weather automatic storm shutters would be required, but in all but the most wildly inconstant climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning kit to deal with most of the weather most of the time, without the power consumption becoming ridiculously greater than for an ordinary inefficient monumental type house.
A transparent airdome could be anchored to such a slab just as easily as could a balloon frame, and the standard-of-living package could hover busily in a sort of glorified barbecue pit in the middle of the slab. But an airdome is not the sort of thing that the kids, or a distracted Pumpkin Eater, could run in and out of when the fit took them – believe me, fighting your way out of an airdome can be worse than trying to get out of a collapsed rain-soaked tent if you make the wrong first move. “A Home Is Not a House” is a unique interpretation of Reyner’s point of view in relation to the development of contemporary modernism in the North America. The Reyner’s work has been published just in the period when Reyner was captivated in investigating the role of technical services in the modern architecture. The article might be perceived as a direct criticism towards the inhabitability of the housing architecture. Nevertheless one of the vital meanings of the article is a deep concern for the lack of development of environmental sustainability.
No doubt about it, a great deal of the attention captured by those labs derives from Kahn’s attempt to put the drama of mechanical services on show – and if, in the end, it fails to do that convincingly, the psychological importance of the gesture remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow architects. Services are a topic on which architectural practice has alternated capriciously between the brazen and the coy – there was the grand old let-it-dangle period, when every ceiling was a mess of gaily painted entrails, as in the council chambers of the U.N. Building, and there have been fits of pudicity when even the most innocent anatomical details have been hurriedly veiled with a suspended ceiling. Next the articles introduces to the Transcontinental “Instant Split-Level” trailer home U-Tility Life-Support pack . It can be described as a mobile home with the inclusion of visual mechanical system, linked to the basic structure. Such solution gives an advantage to be neatly packed together and movable without depending on static utilities, the mobile home could promise an ideal solution for people with a very functional life style.
Here you will also find the best quotations, synonyms and word definitions to make your research paper well-formatted and your essay highly evaluated. In other words, Reyner believed that the architecture can’t be hold with the boundaries when creating a home for people. Six drawings have been realized by French architect and artist François Dallegret when asked in 1965 by Magazine Art in America to illustrate the article by Reyner Banham “A Home is not a House” (Art in America #2, 1965).
But if it could be rendered more compact and mobile, and be uprooted from its dependency on static utilities, the trailer could fulfill its promise to put a nation on wheels. The kind of mobile utility pack suggested here does not exist yet, but it may be no farther over the hill than its coming-attraction. In response Banham stated the “un-house” creates a favorable environmental condition for inhabitants to plan the behavior when dealing with different climate seasons. Critics insist that the article “A Home Is Not a House” lacks the relevant ecological research to support the theory. The advantage of pushing present tendencies to such extremes is that the extremes indicate possibilities not otherwise exploited and present alternatives in a clear light. Perhaps the furthest limit in increasing ephemerality is either religious mysticism, or a mood controlled environment which is induced entirely in the mind – through drugs, and electrodes implanted on the brain.
In the open-fronted society, with its social and personal mobility, its interchangeability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost universal expendability, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental-space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough. Around this has been draped precisely the kind of insubstantial shell that Conklin was discussing, only even less substantial than that. The roof, certainly, is solid, but psychologically it is dominated by the absence of visual enclosure all around. As many pilgrims to this site have noticed, the house does not stop at the glass, and the terrace, and even the trees beyond, are visually part of the living space in winter, physically and operationally so in summer when the four doors are open. The "house" is little more than a service core set in infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all directions at the Great Out There. In summer, indeed, the glass would be a bit of nonsense if the trees did not shade it, and in the recent scorching fall, the sun reaching in through the bare trees created such a greenhouse effect that parts of the interior were acutely uncomfortable - the house would have been better off without its glass walls.
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