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© Todd Eberle
© Stacy Bass
© Los Angeles Office of Historic Resources
© Greg O'Beirne
© John Morse/Wikipedia Commons
© William Veerbeek
© Bryan Robb
© Alvar Aalto Museum/Maija Holma. // SE: Huset på Rievägen, Helsingfors (1936).
© Carlos Eduardo Rodriguez
© Leo Wery
© Gropius House, Courtesy of Historic New England
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The only one of these homes that has any charm is the one designed by Mr. Dow. And I think that is because of the surroundings. And the all look alike.
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you have seen my designs, In Beijing (2008) Shanghai 2010 (Hint), Hong Kong soon in South Africa. Everone has the right to voice. But to say these are the 10 best. come on. I have students that hav
and what about that cool house mr. brady designed?
Has MSN has been infiltrated by bourgeois capitalist pigs? Those homes look like the 1% might live in them. Such decadence and nonconformity. Those houses should have dozens of your comrade's families living in them, such waste. I'll bet they even have running water and heat,..what a disgrace!
So 'sophisticated', yet I don't even see one cabbage or turnip garden,...and where are the chickens?
Eames is someones last name so it should not have be spelled Eameses it should be Eames'.
The architect has done a beautiful of construction, and the structures blend with environment. Is there a hint of what builder should do.
10 homes architects built for themselves
By Roger Fillion of SwitchYard Media
Architects' homes can be their castle, especially when they design the buildings themselves.
They pour their creative talents into a house they plan to live in — perhaps until they die. The home becomes a showcase of the genius that made each architect famous. It can also be groundbreaking in its design.
Here are the houses of 10 internationally famous architects who channeled their passion into the place they called home.
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10 homes architects built for themselves
Philip Johnson
New Canaan, Conn.
Philip Johnson was the creative genius behind some of America's greatest modern architectural gems, including the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Sony Plaza, formerly AT&T's headquarters.
Perhaps his most notable work was his home, the Glass House. The 1,728-square-foot glass home on a 47-acre spread overlooks a pond and has a view of the woods beyond. It's not visible from the road.
Johnson, winner of the first Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979, lived in the Glass House from 1949 until he died in 2005. He donated it to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1986, retaining a life estate.
10 homes architects built for themselves
Ray Kappe
Los Angeles
Kappe's home is often considered the most important home the 84-year-old Southern California architect has designed.
Perched on a rocky hillside in Pacific Palisades, the 4,000-square-foot wood and glass house rests on laminated beams. Water from natural springs bubbles through the space below and down the hillside. Surrounding the secluded home, built in 1967, are bamboo, eucalyptus, oaks and sycamores. Inside, occupants can look out in all four directions, thanks to the home's open design. Only the four bedrooms have doors.
The property has a tax-assessed value of $381,000 and an estimated value of $3 million.
10 homes architects built for themselves
Frank Lloyd Wright
Scottsdale, Ariz.
Wright began building Taliesin West in 1937 as his personal winter home, studio and architecture school. The complex of low-slung buildings sits on the western slope of the desert foothills of the McDowell Mountains, at the edge of Scottsdale.
Taliesin West is a Wright masterpiece. He sought to integrate it with the surrounding desert. For example, the complex is built mainly from the multicolored volcanic rocks in the area. The rocks are set in wooden forms and bound with a special mix of cement and desert sand to form massive walls and other key features.
Today, the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation owns the property.
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10 homes architects built for themselves
Charles and Ray Eames
Los Angeles
The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames designed the Eames House, also known as Case Study House No. 8. Arts & Architecture magazine commissioned it in the 1940s as part of a program asking architects to create progressive but modest Southern California homes.
The Eameses moved in on Christmas Eve 1949, and lived there until they died — he in 1978, she in 1988.
The Pacific Palisades home occupies a densely landscaped, 1.4-acre site overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It includes a 1,500-square-foot modular house and a 1,000-square-foot studio, both of which cost $1 per square foot to build, using off-the-shelf materials. It features colorful panels made from glass, metal and stucco. The open interior includes a 17-foot-high living room.
The Eameses donated the property to the Eames Foundation.
10 homes architects built for themselves
Frank Gehry
Santa Monica, Calif.
Gehry, known for Spain's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, designed this groundbreaking home in Santa Monica, Calif., for his wife and two sons. When completed in 1978, it was lauded for its revolutionary design — and vilified by detractors.
Gehry first bought a modest, two-story, clapboard bungalow home. He transformed it by wrapping it with workmanlike materials, including corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fencing. The interior was gutted to expose the wood framing. Gehry kept some original interior doors and added his own. Buying the home and renovating it cost $260,000, Gehry said in the book "Conversations with Frank Gehry."
In January, the American Institute of Architects selected the house for its Twenty-Five Year Award, which “recognizes an architectural design that has stood the test of time for 25 years.”
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10 homes architects built for themselves
Alden B. Dow
Midland, Mich.
Like his mentor Frank Lloyd Wright, Dow integrated natural surroundings in his architecture.
Dow, son of the Dow Chemical Co. founder, designed his home and adjoining studio in 1933 in Midland. They total 20,000 square feet and were built using Dow's patented "Unit Blocks," cast from cinder concrete.
The two buildings sit along a stream and plum grove. The home is a low-lying and winglike structure. Inside, visitors first see two walls of windows, a vaulted ceiling and views of the terraced garden beyond.
The studio's roof hangs over an artificial pond containing rushes and lilies. Inside, the floor of a sunken conference room rests 18 inches below the water's surface. Water laps at the window on windy days.
Dow and his wife, Vada, lived there until they died — he in 1983, she in 1991. The home and studio were donated to the Alden and Vada Dow Creativity Foundation.
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10 homes architects built for themselves
Alvar Aalto
Helsinki
Finnish architect Aalto, one of the most influential architects of the Scandinavian modern movement, designed his Helsinki home with his wife, Aino. It was completed in 1936.
The building contains a home and an office located in separate wings. The home's living and dining rooms are on the first floor.
The living area is open, with a wall of windows looking down the slope of the garden. A central hall served as a cozy breakfast space with a fireplace. Upstairs are two bedrooms. The building has a flat roof and a large, south-facing terrace.
Today, the Alvar Aalto Museum is custodian of the house.
10 homes architects built for themselves
Luis Barragán
Tacubaya, Mexico
UNESCO added Barragán's home and studio to its World Heritage Sites list in 2004. The United Nations education and cultural agency said the concrete building, built in 1948 in the suburbs of Mexico City, is "a masterpiece of the new developments in the Modern Movement.”
The inside measures nearly 12,500 square feet. It has a ground floor and two upper stories, plus a small, private garden.
UNESCO notes the house has an "austere, almost unfinished appearance." It adds that "the house would almost be unnoticed, except for its scale, which contrasts with the rest of the buildings in the neighborhood."
Barragán, a trained engineer and self-taught architect, lived there until he died in 1988. The Mexican state of Jalisco and the Luis Barragán Architecture Foundation now own it.
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10 homes architects built for themselves
Oscar Niemeyer
Rio de Janeiro
Famed Brazilian architect Niemeyer built his cutting-edge home, Casa Das Canoas, in the early 1950s in Rio de Janeiro. It's considered a masterpiece of modern architecture.
The curving, white, two-story building sits on a hill overlooking picturesque Guanabara Bay. Its huge living-room windows look out to trees and lush vegetation. A built-in pool is just outside, with statues standing near the water. A large piece of irregularly shaped granite rests beside the pool and projects back toward the living room.
Niemeyer, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1988, is 104 years old. His credits include the United Nations headquarters in New York. Niemeyer's home became the headquarters of the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation.
10 homes architects built for themselves
Walter Gropius
Lincoln, Mass.
Gropius, a founder of the modern-architecture movement and leader of the Bauhaus, built his two-story home in 1938, in the Boston suburbs.
Gropius arrived from his native Germany to teach at Harvard University. Philanthropist Helen Storrow gave him the land and money to build the home. It cost about $20,000. Storrow stipulated that Gropius would pay 6% of the construction cost as rent and would get a crack at buying the property — which he and his wife, Ise, did in 1945.
The home occupies a 5.51-acre parcel. The 2,300-square-foot house uses traditional New England building materials — wood, brick and fieldstone — and unconventional ones, such as glass bricks, acoustical plaster and chrome banisters.
Ise Gropius donated the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England, in 1979. She lived there until her death in 1983.
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