HOUSE AND HOME

摘要

The private house continues to occupy a unique position in both the history of architecture and human imagination. The house, the domus, the home, is at once refuge and shelter. It is the place of communion for the family (and its many contemporary variations), for domestic activities, for living, working, eating and sleeping. It is also an intensely private, personal domain capable of infinite variation. The distracting delights of cities and social interaction are manifest, but everyone dreams of having a home. For clients, the aim is to create a place of shelter and stimulation; for the architect the house is both talisman and testing ground. When an enlightened client meets the right architect, the repercussions can be historic. Where would modern architecture be without the Villa Savoye or the Tugendhat, Schminke or Famsworth houses? All were staging posts on a road of experiment and discovery that not only changed the notion of the house and how to live in it, but also had much wider cultural resonance. Most famously Le Corbusier's reconceptualisation of the house as a 'machine for living in' was a Modernist call to arms and encapsulated a genuinely thrilling shock of the new. And even now, the house continues to catalyse revolutionary approaches to architecture, technology and domestic life.