'My father was the house. The house was my father'

摘要

A recurring representation of avant-garde Modernist houses in film and literature is of environments ill-suited to everyday living, often indeed almost actively hostile to their inhabitants. In the 'ferro concrete and aluminum' house King's Thursday in Evelyn Waugh's 1928 novel Decline and Fall, the architect's aim is the 'elimination of the human element'. Jacques Tati describes the ultra-automated Villa Arpel in his 1958 film Mon Oncle as 'so geometric as to have lost any human or inhabitable character'. More recently, OMA's radical Masion a Bordeaux with its floor-as-lift appeared in Beka & Lemoine's 2008 documentary Koolhaas Houselife almost like a character, one with which the housekeeper goes daily into battle as she opens it up for the day.