Architects’ Own Houses

All 20th-century architects built homes for themselves, all except Soviet architects, in whose country stand-alone residences ran against the powerful Socialist tide. How Melnikov managed to evade these constraints is a mystery and our good fortune that providence happened to smile on this wildest of all the dreamers of the Soviet avant-garde. The home is made up of two cylinders with honeycombed walls and a single bedroom for the entire family. The house is an architectural masterpiece, is celebrated worldwide and is one of the top attractions for foreign tourists to Moscow. But, for Russians, it is important not so much as an architectural wonder but as a cultural anomaly: a single-family home built during the era of the accursed “apartment question” with the inscription, “Konstantin Melnikov architect”, proudly displayed over the entrance and with an enormous, bright, cathedral-like studio on the third floor, all of it bespeaking Melnikov’s pride in a profession little recognized in the USSR, whose members were treated as anonymous functionaries of design institutes and slaves of the building industry.

Walter Gropius was one of the principal modernist architects. His move to the United States in the 1930s was an event of historic significance. Thereafter, the United States, not Europe, would lead the way in innovative architecture. In the US, Gropius taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He used his home as instructional material. It became a symbol of the new international style that had come to America from the old world and that drew fire from many quarters—ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright to Gropius’ angry neighbors.

In 1932, Philip Johnson organized “The International Style: Architecture since 1922,” a show in New York that introduced the United States to modernist European architecture. Johnson later helped find positions in the US for the architects featured in the show. After receiving a degree in architecture, Johnson began his professional life by building his own home. The small house is the embodiment of modernism. The residential capsule is limited to a bare minimum of space, with a minimum of furnishings, no exterior walls (the walls are windows) and no interior partitions (the entire interior is a single room) and blends into the air and green of the surrounding woods. This is an almost immaterial home-idea.