Friday, January 12, 2018

Q: What is a house?


“The house is a machine for living.”
~ a banality from the very banal Le Corbusier

“Oh yes, young man; consider that a house is a machine in which to live, but by the same token the heart is a suction pump. Sentient man begins where that concept of the heart ends.     “Consider that a house is a machine in which to live, but architecture begins where that concept of the house ends. All life is machinery in a rudimentary Sense, and yet machinery is the life of nothing. Machinery is machinery only because of life.”
~ Frank Lloyd Wright, from his lecture ‘To the Young Man in Architecture'

"A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man — his extension, his release, his spiritual emanation. Not only its visual harmony but its organisation as a whole, the whole work combined together, make it human in the most profound sense…  The poverty of modern architecture stems from the atrophy of sensuality.”
~ architect Eileen Gray, designer of the house that Le Corbusier could never have designed, but nonetheless fell in love with

 “A house is not an object but a universe we construct for ourselves – not a garage where we park ourselves.”
~ architect Claude Megson, on 'making a home for man'