Banham, Reyner. "A Home is Not a House", Art in America. 1965, volume 2, NY:70-79. A HOME IS NOT A HOUSE Reyner Banham Allustrated by Francols Dallegret hhen your house contains sueh a ‘complex of piping, fucs, ducts, wins, Tights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hifi re- verberators, antennae, eonduits, freezers, heaters—when it contains so many services that the hard> ‘ware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up? ‘When the cost of allthis tackle is half of the total outlay (or more, as it often is) what is the house doing except eoncealing your mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the sidewalk? Once or thrice recently there have been buildings where the public was genuinely confused about what was me- chanical services, what was structure—many visitors to Philadelphia take quite a time to work out that the floors of Louis Kahn's laboratory towers are not supported by the flanking brick duet boxes, and when they have worked it out, they are inelined to wonder if it was worth all the trouble of giving them fn independent supporting stractare. ‘No doubt about it, a great deal of the attention eaptured by those labs derives from Kahn's attempt to put the drama of mechanical services on show-—and if, inthe end, it fails to do that convineingly, the psychological importance of the gestare remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow architects. Serv= ices are a topic on which architectural practice has alternated eapriciously between the brazen and the ‘oy—there was the grand old Letit-dangle period, when every eeiling was a mess of gaily painted en- trails as in the eouneil chambers of the Ux building, and there have beed ‘when even the ‘uch use in eoping with the mechanical invasion, The nearest thing, in a signileantly negative way, is Le Corbusier's “Pour Ledour, cétait facle—pas de tubes,” which seems to be gaining. proverbial- type currency as the expression of a profoand nostalgia for the golden age before piping set in. ‘The second reason is that the mechanical invasion is a feet, and architests—especally American architeets—sense that it isa cultural threat to their position inthe world, American architects are r= ‘tainly right to feel this, beeause their professional speviality, the art of creating monumental spaces, has never heen securely established on this continent, It remains a transplant from an older enlture and architects in America are constantly barking back to that eulture. The generation of Stanford White ‘and Louis Sullivan were prone to behave like émigrée from France, Frank Lloyd Wright was apt to take cover behind sentimental Teutonicisms like Lieber Meister, the big boys of the Thirties anddenna cs / e Ke) ) » Au ‘etcnonappiences Basen i Mon at Sepicunt ANATOMY OF & DWELLING With very tittle exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic gad- ry epito Dlezity of gracious tiving—in other teords, this is the junk that Keepe the puul swinging. ‘The house itself has eon omitted from the drawing, ‘nt if mechanical services continue to accumulate at thie rato it may be possible to omit the house in fact. i a = Teaphone abies = Aeconiione sameDattegret’s 20-20 hindsight and fore sight produced this historical ca (price from the First Machine Age feell before the present article was s maotea. Tn the mode ts time, The present mobile home ie a moss, ‘visually, mechanically, and in ite ro- lationship to the permanent infra structure of civilisation. But if it ‘could be rendered more compact and ‘mobile, and be uprooted from its de- mndency om static wbiities, the trailer could fulfil its promise to put 4@ nation on wheels. The kind of ‘mobile utility pack suggested here does not exist yet, but st may be no farther over the Bill than itz com- ingeattraction style would suggest. [SUPER-COUPE DE LONG-WEEK-END, 1927 ‘TRAILMASTER GTO TRANSCONTINENTAL “Tralnarnr TO + 2th beni ace and ev ala Fil joint betwnan at and ala homePores eame from Aachen and Berlin anyhow, the pacemakers of fhePilties and Sixties are men of international eulture like Charles Banws and fof today, like Myron Gi Lat tothe own devices, Amevieans do not monumental Inhitectare, From the Cape Cod cottage, through the balloon frame Iothe perfection of permanently pleated aluminum sii Jnsed wood-graining, they have tended to build brick chimney and les collection of shacks against it. When Groff Conklin wrote (in She Weather-Conditioned Howse Jobson, anil so too, in many ways, are the eoming dsmith fnfsnce that tradition agrees with him that the Ameriean hollow Allis such an inefficient heat barrier, Americans have always Jen prepared to pump mote heat, light and power into their shelters Tas have other peoples. Ameries's monumental space is, T suppose, Bie grat outdoors—the poreh, the terrace, Whitman's ral-traced Phits, Keroutc's infinite road, and now, the Great U ihn the honse, Americans rapidly learned to dispense with the furtions that Enropeans need to keep space architectural and within Sounds, and long before Wright began blundering through the walls fiat subdivided polite architecture Jarl ron yon room et, humbler Americans had been slipping into There, Even ayer Banham, British architectural historian and crite, currently lds fellowship from the Graham Foundation to investigate the ‘of mechanical services in the rise of modern architecture. “A Is Not « Howse” is a direct product of this research, and the rations by Moroccan-born architect designor and car-buf is Dallegret ada a footnote whose importance, Banham says Dayond their quality as graphics “of the fear of many architects that acceptance of the domi- they demonstrate the hollow of environmental machinery will be ‘the end of creativity. a way of lie adapted to informally planned interiors that were, ef fectively, large sing Now, lange sing! lighted and heated in a manner quite different and more generons than the eubiewlar interiors of the European tradition around whieh the spaces have to be volumes wrapped in slimsy’ shell concept of domestic architecture first crystallized. Right from the start, from the Franklin stove and the kerosene lamp, the Ameriean interior has had to be better served if it was to support a civilize ‘and this is one of the reasons thatthe U.S. has be ing ground of ent the fore Adolf Loo, father of all European platitudes about the superiority ‘of US. plumbing. Te knew what he was talking about; his brie? visit to the States in the Nineties eonvineed him that the outstanding vir tues of the Ameriean way of life were its informality (no need to weer f top hat to call ou local officals) and its leanliness—whieh was bound to be noticed by a Viennese with as highly developed a set of Freudian compulsions as he had. That obsession with clean (whieh ‘ean become one of the higher absurdities of America’s Iysl-breathing Kleenex-culture) was auother psyehologieal motive that drove the nation toward mechani conditioning were not just that people had to breathe: Konrad Meier (Reflections on Heating and Ventilating,” 1901) wrote fastdiously cof “... excessive amounts of water vapor, sickly odors from res- piratory organs, unelean teeth, perspiration, untidy clothing, the ‘presence of mierobes due to various condition, stufly air from dusty services, The early justifications of air- cearpets and draperies ... cause greater discomfort and greater ill Death.” (Have a wash, and come back for the next paragraph.) Most pioneer air-conditioning men seam to have been nose-obsessed in this ways Id just about force themselves to tell America of her national B.0.—and then, compulsive salesmen to best friends 0 a man, promptly prescribed their own patent improved penacea for 1 the hell out of her. Somewhere among these clustering concepts—eleanliness, the Lightweight shell, the mechanical servi ‘Nvcontioner and detethe informality and indifference to monumental arehitectal values, the passion forthe outdoors—there alway seemed to me to lurk some clusive master concept that would never quite come into foous. Tt finally came elear and legible to me in Jane 1964, in the most highly appropriate and symptomatic ciremmstances, Twas standing up to my ehest-hair in water, making home movies (Koget that NASA kiek from taking expensive hardware into hostile environments) at the campus beaeh at Southern Ilinis. This beaeh combines the outdoor and the elean in a highly Ameriean manner— scenically it is the ole swimmin’ hole of Huekleberry Finn tradition, bout itis properly policed (by sophomore lifeguards sitting on Eames clirs on poles in the water) and it's chlorinated too, From where I stood, I eould see not only immensely elaborate Lamily barbeeues and pienies in progress on the sterilized sand, but aso, through and above the trees, the hasketry interlaces of one of Buckminster Fuller's ex- perimental domes. And it hit me then, that i dirty old Nature could be kept under the proper degree of eontrol (sex left in, streptovoee taken out) by other means, the United States would be happy to dis- ‘pense with architecture and buildings altogether: Bucky Faller of course, is very big on this proposition: nnon-rhetorieal question, “Madam, do you know what your house ‘weigh ?” articulates a subversive suspicion of the monumental. This suspicion is inarlieulately shared by the untold thousands of Amer- jeans who have already shed the deadweight of domestic architecture and live in mobile homes whieh, though they may never actually be ‘moved, still deliver rather better performance as shelter than do ‘erounilanchored structures costing at least three times as muel and ‘weighing ten times more, LE someone could devise a package that would effeotively disconnect the mobile home from the dangling wires of the town eleetrivty supply, the bottled gas containers insecarely pperehed on a packing ease and the semicunspeakable sanitary ar- i famous ‘TRANSPORTABLE STANDARD-OF-LIVING PACKAGE nant, Pan vien Landscape toolange schanguble pore pacts andlactnic conto ‘Stereo pears Weer OOL_) all lan tps playock and pre-e ita or amvonmatl onl ‘Jab FM and TV reiveramettionments that stem from not being connected to the main sewer— eu ve should really see some ehanges. It may not be so far away defense cuthacks may send aerospace spin-off spinning in new directions quite soon, and that kind of miniaturization- applied to a genuinely selfeontained and regenerative stan- Lofiving package that could be towed behind a trailer home oF stoi, could produce a sort of U-haul unit that might be picked dropped off at depots across the face of the nation, Avis aeame the frst in U-Tilty, even if they have to go on being a og second in ear hire of tht might come a domestic revolution beside which modern tecture would look like Kiddibrix, beesuse you might be able to ose with the trailer home as well. A standard-of-living package ‘phrase and the concept are both Bucky Fuller's) that really ‘might, like s0 many sophisticated inventions, return 3Lan toa natural state in spite of his complex eulture (much as ession of the Morse telegraph by the Bell Telephone vee “Bing ih oral at wut ere will thus be a variety of environmental ‘choices bulaneing ight against warmth according to need and interest. If you want to do close work, like shrinking a human head, you sit {none place, but if you want to sleep you eurl up somewhere diferent the floating kauckle-hones game would eome to rest somewhere quite different to the environment that suited the mecoting of the initiation- rites steering committee... and all this wonld be jim dandy if eamp- fires were not 0 perishing inefivient, unreliable, smoky and the reat of it, But a properly set-up standard-of-living packaxe, breathing out warm air along the ground (instead of sucking in cold along the ground like a campfire), radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo, with well-aged protein turning in an infra su glow in the rotisserie, and the ice-maker discreetly eonghing cubes into glasses on the swing-out bar—this could do something for a ‘woodland glade or ereek-side rock that Playboy could never do for its penthouse, But how are you going to manhandle this bunk of technology down to the ereek? Tt doesn't have to bo that massive; aerospace needs, for instanee, have dono wild things to solid-state ‘wehnology, producing even tiny refrigerating transistors, They don't as yet mop up any great quantity of heat, but what are you going to doin this glade anyhow; puta whole steer in deep-freeze? Nor do you have to manhandle it—it could ride on a cushion of air (its own air- conditioning output, for instanee) like a hovereraft or domestic ‘vacuum eleaner. ‘All this will eat up quite «lot of power, transistors notwithstand- ing. But one should remember that few Amerieans are ever far from ‘asouree of between 100 and 400 horsepower—the automobile. Beefed- ‘up ear batteries and a self-reeling eable drum could probably get this ‘package breathing warm bourbon fumes o'er Eden Tong before micro- ‘wave power transmission or miniaturized atomie power plants come o the man who has everything els, ‘a standard-of icing package such as this eoutd offer tho ultimate goody— impose hie will on any cumbrances of a permanent dwelting.Justa flat picee of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation eomes on ‘wheels, You bring your own seat, heat and shelter as part of the ear. ‘You also bring Coke, cookies, Kleenex, Chesterfield, spare clothes, shoes, the Pill and god.wot else they don't provide at Radio City io in their parked conve ‘ballroom in the wilderness (dance floor by courtesy of the Highway Dept. of course) ‘and all this is paradisal (lit starts to rain. Even then, you're not vestletod i with or withont ite booag, and he dome tf folded into a parachute pack, might be part of the package. From within your thisty-foot hemisphere of warm dry lebonsranm you could have spectacular ringside views of the wind felling trees, snow swirling through the glade, the forest fire coming over the hill or Constanee Chatterley running swiftly to you know whom through the dow you ean’t bring up « family in ‘a polythene bag This can never replace the time-honored ranchstyle trilevel standing proudly in a landseape of five defeated shrubs, flanked on one side by # raneh-style trilevel with six shrubs and on ‘the other by a raneh-styletri-level with four small boys and a private dust bowl. If the countless Americans who are successfully raising nee children in trailers will exeuse me for a moment, T have n few suggestions to make tothe even more countless Amerieans who are 80 inseeure that they have to hide inside fake monn and instant roofing. There are, aduittedly, very sound day-to-day advantages to having warm broadloom on a firm floor underfoot, rather than pine needles and poison ivy. America's pioneer house ‘builders reeognined this by commonly building their brick chimneys fon a brick floor slab. A transparent sirdome eould be anchored to such a slab just a easly as could balloon frame, and the standard of-living-package could hover busily in a sort of glorified barbeene pit in the middle of the slab, But an airdome is not the sort of thing that the kids, or a distracted Pampkin-cater could run in and out of ‘when the fit took them—believe me, fighting your way out of an air- dome can be worse than trying to get out of collapsed rain-soaked tent if you make the wrong frst move, ‘But the relationship of the services-kit to the floor slab could be rearranged to get over this difficulty; all the standund-of-iving tackle (or most of it) eould be redeployed on the upper side of 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 easual ingress, too, I guess. That erazy modern-movement dream of the interpenetration of indoors ts of Permastone 76 ‘and outdoors could become reat last by al nieally, of course, it would be just about possible to make ti membrane literally float, hovereratt style. Anyone who i stand in the groudffeet of a helicopter wil know that has little to recommend it apart from the instant dis paper. The noise, power consunuption and physical dis be really something wild. But if the power-membrane oui ‘on a column or two, here and there, or even om a briek: ‘unit, then we are almost in sight of what might be teh before the Great Society is much older. the floor slab, anyhow, in onder to prevent rain blowin, air-eurtain will be active on precisely the side on whieh blowing and, being eonditioned, will tend to mop up the it falls, The disteibution of the air-curtain will be governel clectroni light and wenther sensors, and by that radia tion, the weathervane, For really foul weather antomatie ters would be required, but in all but the most wildly i climates, it should be possible to design the conditioning with most of the weather most of the time, without the p ‘sumption becoming ridiculously greater than for ano cient monumental type house. Obviously, it wonld still be appreciably greater, but th argument hinges on the observation that it isthe Ameri spend money on services and upkeep rather than on structure as do the peasant cultures of the Old Word. In we don’t know where we shall be with things lke solar pa next deeade, and to anyone who wants to entertain an, vision of air-conditioning for absolutely free, lot me Shortstack (another smart trick with a polythene tbe) in ber 1964 issue of Antlog, In fact, quite a number of the common sense objections to the un-honse may prove 19 evaporating: fo noise may be no problem bea would be no suzrounding wall to reflect it back into the ivi and, in any ease, the eonstant whisper of the ait-eursin vide a fair threshold of loudness that sounds would havetol they began to be comprehensible and therefore dit Wild life? In summer they should be no svorse than with ‘nd windows of an ordinary house open; in winter alli creatures either migeate oF hibernate; but, in any eas ‘encourage the normal processes of Darwinian competition to the situation for you? AI that is needed isto trigger the means of a general purpose lure; this would radiate mating sexy scents and thus attract all sorts of mutually incompa ators and prey into a eompact pool of unspeakable closed-eieuit television camera eould relay the state of plplastic dome inflated by condi Air blown out by the package ise.The goal of present trends in do tmestic mechanization appears to be ver-morenflimsy structure that is tuade habitable by ever-moresmassive machinery, and. the Power-Mem brane house then pushes this idea to ite Togioal/llogical comclusion—the ‘open plan to end open plans, a wall Teas, garden house sheltering under the spreading arms of the wltimate appliance, Architectureseorld faint Hearts who fear this total condi tionce as the leviathan that ill trample down their ancient art shout observe how wear Dallegret has come to making a monument of the Poveer-Membrane; tke trve-blue Ddreeding, architecture will out, even ely eirenmstances sereen inside the dwelling and provide a twenty-fourdaur that would make the ratings for Bonanza look like eigen And privacy ? This seems to be such « nominal conceptin lite as factually lived that it is dificult to believe that seriously worried, The answer, under the suburban eons ies, is the same as for the gas architeots were designing so busily a decade ago—more sop This, after all is the homeland of the bullner transplantation of grown trees—why let the Parks Ot dhave all the fun? As was said above, this argument implies subucbia whieh fil this whole argument im or worse, is where Amerien wants to live, It has nothing to ay the city, whieh, like architecture, i an insecure foreign growth ntinent, What is under diseussion here s an extension of ted aan beyond the agrarian sentimentality of Frank sonia di Wright's Usonian Broadacre version—the dream of the godlil the clean countryside, power-point homesteading ina paradis of appliances, ‘This dream of the wn-honse may sound very architectural but itis so only in degree, and srehitxture dope its Buropean roots but trying to strike new ones in am alien il come elote to the anti-house once or twee already. all-too-slid fet, Grass-roots axehitects of the plains like Brow tnd Herb Greene have produced houses whose supposed maa | POWER-MEMBRANE HOUSE | Mala ervioomatl corti Igoe nial pear and dtr ‘hn | arene rand carpet ectroniban centr — Darian amage itore re Ltis dearly of little consequence to the functional business of ‘and around them, itis in one building that seoms at frst sight nothing but monu- alZorm tht the threat or promise of the un-house has been most rs deronstrated-—the Tohnson House at New Canaan. So meh en misleadingly said (by Philip Johnson himself, as well as 2) to prove this a work of architecture inthe European tradition, fis many intensely American aspeets are usually missed, Yot syouhave dug through all the erudition about Ledoux and Male- @iaud Paladio and stuff that has been published, one very sug- sl aveay—the sonree or prototype remains Tess easily expla persistence in Johnson's mind of the visnal image of a Joat New England township, the insubstantial shells of the consumed by the ire, leaving the brik floor slabs and standing The New Canaan glasshouse consists estentally of just two elements, a heated brick floor slab, and a standing unit J chimney ieplace on one side and s bathroom on the other. pd this has been draped precisely the kind of insubstanti stantial than that, rly even es of visual enclostre all around, As many pilgrims to this oticed, the house doce not stop at the glass, and the terrace, athe tres beyond, are visually part of the living space in physically and operationally so in summer when the four 0 open. The “house” is little move than a service eove set in anon and contole ‘vrhod di, TY. sarees infinite space, or alternatively, a detached porch looking out in all Aireetions atthe Great Out There, In summer, indeed, the glass would bbe a bit of a nonsense ifthe trees did not shade it, and in the recent scorching fall, the stn reaching in through the bare tres eveated such a greenhouse effet that parts ofthe interior were aentely uncomfort- blo—the honse would have been better off without its glass walls. also pretending that the expo Aoor-heating does not make the whole area habitable, whieh it does) and in any ease, what does he mean by a controlled environment? It 2 envixonment, itis simply an envie isnot the samme thing a8 « uni ronment suited to what you are going to do next, and whether you build stone monument, move away from the fire oF turn on the air- conditioning, tthe same hase human gesture yon are making. Only, the monument is such a ponderous solution that it astounds ame that Americans are still prepared to employ it, except out af some profound sente of inseeurity, a persistent inability to rid themselves ‘of those habits of mind they left Burope to escape. In the open- ‘fronted society, with its soeial and personal mobility its interehange- ability of components and personnel, its gadgetry and almost uni- versal expendablity, the persistence of architecture-as-monumental- space must appear as evidence of the sentimentality of the tough Sour powereatactorclle ruta outa spe noma ning pt hich stand star ae necnsr nt sumoundig landscape Main condoned si dtibto duct