The dome home of Buckminster Fuller and Anne Hewitt Fuller in Carbondale, Illinois, is now being restored. The only dome in which the Fullers actually lived, it took less than a day to build: seven hours from start to finish.
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7 hours to build and 6 months to restore
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revisiting the bronze age in britain
Once upon a time — about 2,500 years ago — people in what is now Britain switched from building rectangular houses to building round houses: in many instances, small circular structures with wooden walls made of wattle and daub, no windows, a conical roof, and a single entrance. And for more than 2,500 years, from the early Bronze Age to the late Iron Age, they stuck with this circular design, even while people in the rest of Europe — or what later became Europe — lived in rectangular structures.
It was with the Roman conquest that the British, too, began to adopt rectangular house designs. But evidence of the region’s history of round construction can still be found in archeological sites all over the UK, from Dartmoor, Devon, England, to Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
In recent years, a number of replica round houses have been built. Below is one in Burwardsley, Cheshire, which is open to school groups and other visitors -
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why in the world a round house?
If you’ve always wanted to live in a round house, but have never found the right one, in the right place, for the right price, you could always try building one yourself. That’s what Tomasi and Irene Tukuafu did in 2009, and they seem very happy with the results -
The couple, who live on the banks of the Mississippi River in Nauvoo, Illinois, built the house using reclaimed timbers from an old log cabin that had been torn down. During a televised house tour just after the house was finished, Irene Tukuafu explained the couple’s interest in circular design to a skeptical interviewer.
“Why in the world a round house?” he asked.
In a later interview with a local newspaper, Irene further explained her thinking: “There’s no place that’s not beautiful, I want a round house to see the whole thing.”
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round house cafe
This cafe was built in the early 20th century in a resort area in the San Bernardino Mountains, in California, and existed until at least the 1940s. It looks like it may have since been integrated into a large conference center -
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happy birthday frank lloyd wright & bruce goff!
Two of the most creative architects ever to embrace the round form, Frank Lloyd Wright and Bruce Goff, were both born on June 8—Wright in 1867, and Goff in 1904.
For Wright, the circular form symbolized freedom, an escape from the traditional residential box. As he explained in 1952, “a box is a containment. I tried to abolish the box.” Wright designed at least 14 round and semi-circular houses, as well as, most famously, the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in NYC. Not all of his round house designs were built; sadly, some of his most beautiful and innovative efforts never made it beyond the planning stage.
Wright’s 1938 project for Ralph Jester, meant for a suburban housing community in Palos Verdes, California, was his first attempt at a circular residence -
Another unbuilt round house was the Ludd M. Spivey house, which Wright designed during the same period.
Among Wright’s circular and semi-circular designs that were actually built are the Sol Friedman house, the David and Gladys Wright house, and the Jacobs 2 house.
Wright once named Bruce Goff, a self-educated architect based in Oklahoma, as one of the only US architects he considered creative. The term creative is a massive understatement when applied to the iconoclastic Goff, whose wildly original designs took unusual building materials and put them into extremely unconventional shapes.
Goff explained his thinking to a university audience in 1953: “What I would like to see is the clock striking thirteen around here,” he said. “I would like to see something strange, and new, and different … not to be strange, just as a name, because that will never work. What you do if you do something that we are talking about here—having an idea of your own—will naturally seem strange.”
Unsurprisingly, some of Goff’s round designs were never built: the 1954 Garvey house is one of them. But perhaps even more surprising is that some of his most radical concepts were eventually rendered in bricks and mortar—or at least in coal, hemp rope, and blobs of slag glass.
The tragedy of Goff’s Bavinger house, in Norman, Oklahoma, deserves its own post, which I hope to write soon.
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round house plans
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house no. 25
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psychedelic african hut
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on the market
An early 19th century Martello tower in Suffolk, England, is now on the market. Built as a rampart against a feared French invasion — one of 11 Martello towers that still line the Suffolk coast — it was converted to a residence in 2010. Architect Stuart Piercy and designer Duncan Jackson collaborated on the project, creating “one of the most original and soul-stirring modern homes in Britain.“
The asking price is £995,000 (about $1.58 million). If you can’t afford to buy it, you may be able to rent it for a holiday.
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build different
In a village full of rectangular houses near the town of Grimari, Central African Republic, one house stands out -
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into the futuro
If you can get to London in the next 10 days, you will have the rare chance to visit a restored Futuro House. A prefabricated, spaceship-like structure, the Futuro House was designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968 as a holiday cabin -
Built of fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic, and measuring 26 feet in diameter, the Futuro House sits on a metal stand; it was meant to be easy to build and easy to transport. The idea was to mass produce the structures and sell them around the world, but their design found little favor with the public. Fewer than 100 Futuro Houses were ever built; only about 60 of them exist today, many in disrepair. (For the closest thing to a full list of those that have survived, visit FuturoHouse.net, which has tracked down Futuros in Japan, Russia, Malaysia and Ukraine, among other places.)
Artist Craig Barnes discovered the house above while on vacation in South Africa. He bought it, dismantled it, shipped it to the UK, and spent the past 18 months restoring it to its former glory. At Matt’s Gallery in east London, it is being used as a temporary space for an “intimate and informal series of talks, discussions, lectures, exhibitions, screenings and performances at 4pm every day.”
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the future is not yet here
The vacation house of the future, as conceived in 1957 by automobile designer James R. Powers –
It has stylistic affinities with the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport, built during the same period –
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round houses with a view
Sunrise in northern Ethiopia, near Lalibela –
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pi day is coming
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a round house no one wants to visit
The F-House cell block at Stateville Correctional Center, in Illinois, is the last remaining panopticon-style prison building in the United States –
The round plan of a panopticon, as designed by 18th/19th century British philosopher and criminologist Jeremy Bentham, was meant to allow the guards, stationed at the center of the circle, to monitor prisoners without the prisoners themselves knowing whether or not they were being observed. Bentham once described the panopticon as “a mill for grinding rogues honest.” All the flowers in the world cannot disguise the design’s essentially coercive function.
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cool britannia
Add this fantastic house to your list of reasons to visit London –
British designer Tom Dixon bought a disused water tower in north London in 2005, collaborating with sustainable architectural firm SUSD to convert the landmark structure into a home.
Watch the building being constructed on the concrete base of a 1930s water tower –
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modernist mogadishu
Odd, bunker-like round houses in Mogadishu, built in the 1930s –
I wonder if they still exist.
Mogadishu evidently witnessed a period of modernist expansion in the 1930s, including the construction of several majestic art deco buildings. Most were badly damaged if not destroyed during Somalia’s decades of civil war.
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windmill house
A former windmill, now a private home, is for sale in Leeds, England. Here is how it looked in the early 1900s –
The windmill was built in the mid to late 18th century. A 1789 lease between the Earl of Mexborough, Peter Garforth and William Burrows makes reference to a “windmill lately built, Scott Hall Gate Close, (in possession of Joseph Ingle) and newly erected dwelling place.”
The windmill is thought to have been converted to residential use in the late 19th century. A Leeds directory from 1882 states that the house was occupied by David Lee, market gardener, and called Windmill House. Now known as the Round House, it can be yours for £295,000.
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det runda huset
One of my favorite round houses — just off the beach in Bastad, Sweden — is once again for sale. It’s beautiful both inside and out –
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excavating round house history
First constructed in the 3rd millenium BC in what is now southwest Scotland, prehistoric round houses continued to be built up through the UK’s Roman period, particularly in the north and west of the country.
In recent decades, archeologists have discovered and excavated an enormous number of ancient round house sites. As of 2008, the number of excavated round houses in Britain had nearly reached 4,000.
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