I recently interviewed nine well-known American architects to find out what house has made the biggest impact on them, and why, for a piece in AIArchitect. I’d expected them to name family houses, fictional houses, or houses they’d built. Instead they all named modern houses in the United States and Europe, most of them canonical. But Brian Phillips, who leads Philadelphia office ISA, made a bold choice: the 1960 Prairie House in Norman, Oklahoma by Herb Greene.
This sloping, funnel-shaped, two-story, wood-frame house, clad with fans of cedar shingles and strips of aluminum, dominates its flat, grassy plot like a wild animal. And this is exactly the idea. Phillips says that the house “needed to show its aggressive plume to stand against the relentless minimalism of the prairie landscape." And Greene, on his website, writes, "The aim is to introduce a reference frame of feeling usually reserved for sentient creatures. Pathos, vulnerability and pain are juxtaposed with the more familiar house-meanings of sheltering, protection and comfort.”
What I love most about the house is its joyous, raucous formal freedom, and its contrarian, macho style. This house was built at the height of the international style, when less was more, and prominent architects were building houses with glass walls, flat roofs, and marble floors. Greene is one of a strain of energetic, unmannered, individualistic American architects – let’s call them Wild Men – who follow the visions in their heads rather than the demands of good taste, or their clients. He trained with Bruce Goff, who had trained with Frank Lloyd Wright, whom the name of this house, deliberately I think, conjures. If the heart of Wild Man Architecture is in the midwest, where these three men hail from, there is also another healthy strain of it today in Los Angeles, where architects like Eric Owen Moss and Thom Mayne are going at it, and Frank Gehry has become elder statesman. I hope they never stop.
Photograph by Julius Shulman, courtesy of Herb Greene.