A round house on South Padre Island, at the very tip of Texas, hosted Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and former Texas Governor Anne Richards.
Scarlet and George Colley fell in love there, and went on to become our Island’s foremost dolphin experts. Nancy Marsden lived there for a while too, and subsequently met her new husband Mike. It must be some kind of powerful love-shack, if you ask me, as everyone still is together.
In an interview with The Guardian, architect Zaha Hadid talks about resisting rectangular design. “The world is not a rectangle,” she insists. “You don’t go into a park and say: ‘My God, we don’t have any corners.’”
A pillar-box. A quite ordinary-looking pillar-box. Or was it? That was what Robin was to find out. And without this ordinary — or extraordinary pillar-box there could have been no story — no funny, fantastic adventures with Mr. Papingay, and the Home-made fairy, and Penny and all the rest of them.
Marion St. John Webb’s The Little Round House was originally published in 1924 in the UK; the illustrated version above came out in 1956. The book was the first of an extremely popular series of children’s stories.
INT, exhibition hall, men and women stand around a low display table showing a scale model of a circular home. R. Buckminster Fuller is interviewed by a man in a suit.
Man: “Mr. Fuller, why a . . . a round house???”
Fuller: “Why not? The only reason that houses have been rectangular all these years is that, that is all we could do with the materials we had. Now with modern materials and technology, we can apply to houses the same efficiency of engineering that we apply to suspension bridges and airplanes . . . . The whole thing is as modern as a streamlined plane.“
“The ventilator, on top, can induce a complete air change every six minutes.”
“Here is the living room. Its window is 40 feet long.”
“It can withstand winds up to hurricane force, and beyond — up to 180 miles an hour.”
News of Buckminster Fuller’s circular aluminum house, complete with artist’s rendering, in the Pittsburgh Press, on April 12, 1946 -
The circle-studded facade of NYC’s Dream Downtown Hotel -
The hotel is the latest incarnation of an iconic 1966 building designed by Louisiana architect Albert C. Ledner, known for a sort of playful, oddball modernism. Just off Ninth Avenue, stretching between West 16th and 17th Street, the building was recently transformed by Handel Architects. The building’s 16th Street facade, above, was covered in shiny stainless steel, as was its 17th Street facade (on the left, below, in its original red-brick cladding).
The building’s circular motif — equally in evidence in the adjoining Ledner-designed structure, the white tile and concrete Maritime Hotel — reflects the structure’s history. Both buildings were originally annexes to the headquarters of the National Maritime Union: the porthole windows were a coy reference to life at sea.
Ledner, whose use of circular forms extends from his professional to his personal life, or vice-versa, lives in a round house of his own design in New Orleans.
“We are living in a spheroidal universe. A round spheroidal world—not a cubicle sugar lump world.”
– Buckminster Fuller, in 1929, presenting an early model of the Dymaxion House.
Buckminster Fuller’s first Dymaxion House, sketched out in 1927, was a hexagonal design suspended from a central mast.
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By 1945, when Fuller entered into an agreement with Beech Aircraft Corporation to mass produce the house, its plan was circular. Asked later about the Dymaxion House’s unusual form, Fuller said that functional rather than aesthetic considerations determined his choice. “We did nothing arbitrary,” he emphasized. “We were not trying to make a cute house. Its shape is due to the solution of our problems of space, weight and mass production.”
Unveiled with much fanfare in early 1946 to a public hungry for solutions to post-WW II housing shortages and to a news media entranced by high tech, futuristic design, the house garnered enormous media attention. Laudatory articles ran in the New York Times, Reader’s Digest, and countless local papers; a photo of the house made the cover of Fortune magazine.
In interviews at the time, Fuller was confident about his design’s future, saying that he expected the Beech Aircraft factory to produce some 50,000 Dymaxion Houses by the end of 1947. His company, Fuller Houses, Inc., reportedly received at least 37,000 sales inquiries from members of the public in the first few months after the house was launched. According to an expert at the Henry Ford Museum — which now exhibits the only remaining exemplar of the house — Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis opened negotiations for 2,500 Dymaxion Houses to solve the city’s housing deficit.
But the momentum didn’t last. Pressed to make cost-saving compromises to his design, Fuller balked. As the New York Times later explained, “he demanded more time for research and development, and resisted all the efforts of stockholders, friends and supporters to put the Dymaxion House on the market. In the end, the delays and wrangling proved fatal. Lacking the $10 million required to tool up for production, Fuller Houses collapsed.”
Just two prototype Dymaxion Houses were ever built. In 1948 a former Fuller Houses investor bought and combined them into a single, hybrid structure, the only Dymaxion House that ever functioned as a dwelling. Although by 1950 the news media called the Dymaxion concept the “Forgotten House,” the family that lived in the house stayed there for decades.
Time and again, when people are asked to choose between an object that’s linear and one that’s curved, they prefer the latter. That goes for watches with circular faces, letters rendered in a curly font, couches with smooth cushions — even dental floss with round packaging.
Recently neuroscientists have shown that this affection for curves isn’t just a matter of personal taste; it’s hard-wired into the brain …. “Curvature appears to affect our feelings, which in turn could drive our preference.”
The Harvey Residence, in LA’s Los Feliz neighborhood, designed by John Lautner in characteristically exuberant style -
Built in 1950, the house was said to be in terrible shape in 1998 when it was bought and restored by actress Kelly Lynch and writer Mitch Glazer. Lautner principal Helena Arahuete led the restoration, and the original builder, John de la Veaux, came back to assist on it.
The swirling living room is stunning.
Back in the late 1950s, when living in the suburbs was understood to be the common aspiration of mankind, the magazine Suburbia Today asked this question of its readers. In an article about the “unusual suburban home” of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Benson, whose circular floor plan offered ample open space for entertaining guests, it gave an appealing glimpse of life in the round.
Stunning views, tasteful furnishings, elegant cocktail parties — a round home was modern and glamorous, the magazine suggested.
The Walter Bensons wanted their house to be round so that they could get maximum exposure to their magnificent views. To live way, way up on the top of a mountain in a house that seems to melt in with its surroundings; to look freely all about you and see the mountain ridges to the side, the bay and ocean below, and the teeming city across that you must be part of and yet can turn away from at will — this was the dream of the Bensons.
Designed by Bay Area architect Mario Corbett in 1954, the Benson’s redwood and glass house was built on a hillside in Sausalito, California. It is now nearing its sixtieth anniversary – still there – and still, one assumes, a great place for a cocktail party.
A newly-built, near-circular house in Thornbury, England, is now on the market -
The floor plan shows the circular foyer -
Cecil Alexander’s circular house in Atlanta, on the cover of Florida Architect in April 1958. Finished in 1957, the house was featured in Life magazine in November of that year, and in Progressive Architecture in November 1959.
A colony of Wallace Neff’s bubble houses (“maisons ballons”) in Dakar — as they look now -
And as they looked in 1949, when they were built -
On the grounds of an abandoned military base in southern New Jersey, there survives a small collection of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Deployment Units (DDUs), the innovative designer’s WWII-era effort to create an inexpensive, portable housing system.
Developed in 1941, as war swept across Europe, the round, galvanized steel structures were based on grain storage containers that Fuller had seen while driving across Illinois. As with the designer’s post-war Fuller House, which they resemble both physically and conceptually, the DDUs were meant to be mass produced at a low cost.
In October 1941, the Museum of Modern Art in New York displayed a DDU prototype in its sculpture garden, billing the structure as “portable defense housing.” The news release for the exhibition proclaimed the DDU’s suitability for wartime use, noting that the structure’s “circular corrugated surfaces deflect bomb fragments or flying debris.” Fuller himself, in a letter meant to encourage the military to buy his shelters, touted them as fire-proof, mobile, mass producible, bullet-resistant, camouflageable, and economical in cost and materials.
Both the US Army Signal Corps and the British Air Force, convinced of the structures’ functionality, made orders for DDUs. While a hundred or so of the structures are believed to have been built — most of them transported to US military bases around the world — wartime metal shortages put an end to their production. Very few are known to have survived to the present day, all of them located at the former Camp Evans, in New Jersey.
Designed by maverick American architect Bruce Goff, the Ruth Ford House — known variously as the Round House, Coal House, and Umbrella House — is a creative tour de force. It could not look less like neighboring houses in suburban Aurora, Illinois, where it was built in 1947-49, and local people took it as an architectural affront. Fortunately, as the photo below attests, the owners of the house were undaunted -
Life Magazine published a several-page spread on the house in 1951, with lovely color photos by Eliot Elisofon of the house’s interior and exterior.
