Four Takes on a Brave New (Residential) World.

Essays compiled by Ed Leibowitz.

Philip Johnson.

Philip Johnson, at 92, is considered the reigning dean of American architects. His career spans most of the 20th century revolution in home design. As an architecture critic in the 1930s, he and collaborator Henry-Russell Hitchcock helped define the “International Style” of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius in their book of the same name. In 1949, he built the Philip Johnson residence, the see-through glass house at his estate in New Canaan, Conn., where he still lives.

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The level of architecture in the present housing situation is in a bad way, but architects are apt to be defiant of the present and hopeful of the future. Empirically, there’s no reason to be pessimistic. Everything’s going fine, and we’re all working hard on new houses.

What we’re looking at now is a switch from the Modern period, like my old glass house, and the switch from the Postmodern trend to go back to colonial at all costs, which has taken over the East Coast. I think what we’re doing is feeling for new shapes for the new world; that is, a freer, more sculptural approach to the house. The best example of that is Frank Gehry or Peter Eisenman, who are trying out new shapes all the time. There’s an architectural show at the Museum of Modern Art in July which will be very revelatory of our directions. This is a reaction to the colonial reaction: the new shapes are sculptural, well, wigglies even, with no historical background at all.

I don’t think this emerging architecture will affect the tract house. Tract houses are likely to remain the same for cost reasons and for the taste of the general buying public, which is OK. There always has been that gulf, and I don’t see any reason for it to change.

We’re busy in this part of the woods tearing down the International Style work of the ‘50s and putting up colonial. Of course, the prosperity of the country has made even the tract house balloon into huge buildings. These colonials are some elements of 20th century architecture that I would dislike most to see carried over into the 21st. It’s really the dimensions, the hugeness of the new colonials that have drowned out all sense of the landscape--in the East. I think California is always ahead of us. You’ve got a history there of more advanced thinking in both tract architects and the individual artist architects.

The cycles of architecture will go on cycling. I don’t believe in any fixed ideals. The state of flux is a very healthy state. We couldn’t be in a particular worse state--I’m talking about the East Coast now--than we are, but California has been more independent always and I hope it will go on being so and lead the world. Richard Neutra took one direction, but, of course, the kids are doing quite different work and more interesting.

I wouldn’t write any recommendations for the 21st century. Whatever I say is going to be different; anybody who prophesies is just plain wrong. What we architects prophesy is what we wish, what we’re dreaming about. Naturally, I dream of sculptural architecture of very, very strange and interesting shapes, but to say that “something” is going to happen is silly.

As for our American habit of ruining a landscape as we go along, I think even trying to change that would be a task beyond the architect’s dreaming. It’s a business decision, and developers’ moneymaking desires will settle that. After all, the bright new towns like Telluride have the stiffest rules in the world against what we call modern architecture. Telluride is made up of a bunch of special ski people who have money and who don’t want anything to change at all. In Telluride, they even determine the pitch of the roofs. I’m building a house there now, and it’s very difficult: I try to follow exactly the words without following their spirit, and it’s an interesting battle. I’m having a great deal of fun.

Fifty years ago, when I built the glass house, it had a normal bedroom, a normal living room. The living room has been going recently, but the whole approach to the home is going to be different. Nothing’s going to be unrecognizable, because it’s going to be so slow, due to the general timeline of appreciation. You’re just going to get a lot of individual attempts like Frank Lloyd Wright or like me nowadays, but I don’t think it’s going to change very fast.

A fireplace is the essence of home in any period, because there’s something primeval about it, the dancing of a fire, that is captivating to everybody in all history. The flickering and warmth! The warming of the tushie! The whole feel of it!

Of course, what I’m saying is just personal; there is no objective truth in it. That’s the difference between us and the International Style people. Neutra knew he had the right idea: well, Frank Gehry has settled that! And the great architecture does not depend on the rules of the International Style. There are no rules; that’s the big discovery of our period, and it’s a very “loosening-up” idea. It frees you to use your brain again and use your imagination, and use your artistic desires as a guide.

ZAHA HADID.

Zaha Hadid is one of the world’s leading avant-garde architects. After a decade of designing buildings too grandly conceptual to ever break ground, architectural realities are catching up with her visions. In the United States, Hadid’s first completed work will be Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, due to open in 2001. Hadid, 48, was born in Baghdad and lives in London.

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In anticipating private residences of the next century, we must take account of spatiality. We must look at major shifts of living, and look seriously at how we will live and work in the future--not just about having computers and modems and so on, but how these shifts will affect the relationships among the various spaces within the home. As more people begin to work out of their homes, as the once separate concepts of work and leisure and living begin to merge much closer together, the traditional spaces--bedrooms, dining room, kitchen and study--may not be so dichotomized as they are today.

I think residential architecture may be leading to a hybrid condition. With the rise of gender equality, the idea of the husband and wife having separate roles has changed; the traditional oversized American kitchen as the homemaker’s domain has ever less justification. Not only have the daily activities of work and leisure begun to blur within the home, but the roles of parents too have become fluid. All this can make the traditional residential plan of walled-off rooms with strictly confined functions seem simplistic.

So the home itself may become more inclusive, more integrated and, on the other hand, more fluid. You can flow from one place to another, from work to leisure to meals to child care, with much more ease and freedom. Instead of walls, you could have furniture dividing the interior spaces, or different levels of interior terrain defining different areas. While there no longer is such a strong differentiation between living space and kitchen space and dining space and playroom, the trick is how to separate these places without making them seem separate.

Fluidity can be seen somewhat as a revival. In the ‘60s, there was the idea of the open plan--such as the loft, which offers no differentiation between a vast interior space. I think there is an emerging interest in such open plans again. But now, the liberated interiors are informed by considerations of landscape and topography, of how people actually inhabit spaces both public and private. In my own work, there is more emphasis of how the oblique flow of light into a house might affect the flow of the people and their activities within it.

Within the future home, fluidity can also provide a measure of luxury. I’ve always believed that luxury rests not only in the kind of materials used in a house, but also within the quality of the space. So in a small apartment or house, the adjacency of spaces, the emphasis on views, could recall the more open landscape outside. By letting the larger overall landscape outside come into play within your interior landscape, you can suggest something far larger and more luxurious than a house of tiny cubicles.

Philosophically, there has also been another welcome change. There no longer exists this ideological dogma of how people should live. There was this notion in Modernism before, that you could either live in a conservative condition or you must live in a new way just as dogmatically defined. I think these boundaries are not there anymore, and that people are living in whichever way they want.

Denise Scott Brown.

Denise Scott Brown is co-author, with husband Robert Venturi, of one of architecture’s most seminal texts, “Learning from Las Vegas.” Brown, 67, has designed university buildings and museum additions ranging from London’s National Gallery to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She was born in Zambia and lives in Philadelphia.

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In the 21st century, most people will be living in existing housing, so most rooms will look the same. The big changes will be seen in what they’ll be doing within these existing homes. With mothers and fathers both working, leisure becomes very precious, and the home will reflect this scarcity. The family will want to be together, because everyone’s been scattered at day care or the office, and then they must run out for shoes for the kids at 7 at night, because that’s the only time they’ll be able to go. When they come back, they’ll want to be comfortable.

So family togetherness in the evening will be central to future residential architecture. Living spaces may become a bit bigger to accommodate that. As for the fireplace, if you can fit a TV inside it, it might still remain the living room’s focus, but the hearth might also be replaced by a view, by the TV, by comfortable chairs and the like.

As time becomes more precious, an alternative scenario would be the expansion of the so-called master bedroom, rather than the living room. The master bedroom may be where you could have your breakfast, and maybe your kids would gather there for meals too. And if you are living in an old home, which was made for a three-kid and two-parent family, a third room might become the computer room, which would also be where the kids do their homework.

As an architect and a planner, I see the living environment as being the home and the neighborhood. For example, people will probably drop the kids off at day care near their work rather than near their home. Either way, day care will constitute an important relationship at the neighborhood level. Day care is a new institution that society has evolved; “adult” communities and cyber cafes are others. What will be the next new institution that we’ll embrace for the kind of lives we’re living? As we all get older, my theory is that cappuccino coffee shops might serve an aging population as neighborhood centers--I call them “the demographic McDonald’s.”

Of course, you also need to look toward the home of single-parent families, and how they will emerge. There ought to be a physical concomitant to Hillary Clinton’s statement, “It takes a village to bring up a child,” particularly with low-income single mothers. Among them, there may be more neighborhood relationships and, perhaps, an ability to convert existing larger housing into group housing.

What is going to happen when people come off welfare, and when one presumes day care will become more available? I could foresee single mothers getting together to help themselves and each other. In low-income areas, there are lots of small workers’ houses suitable for traditional single families, but there are also large old houses that don’t have that much use now, but could be very useful for collaborative, cooperative living.

In the old ethnic areas, what we now do by social services was done by family. When you hear of generations on welfare, it may be that those same generations will now coalesce into cooperative multi-family households, but there could also be collaboratives among people who make ersatz families, or family supplements. So whether these extended families are related or not, social changes may bring them closer together.

There has been some lamenting about the deterioration of the whole concept of neighborhood. I’ve always acknowledged the wisdom of Mel Webber’s “community without propinquity” for people who are mobile and middle class. But even here, there is an immediate environment that is cared for and used by the very young and for the people who aren’t so mobile, that has always existed in parallel. And the reality of a neighborhood is especially important for those in low-income families.

Which brings me to a final word of caution. It would be a pity in this series to forget that well under 5% of houses are designed by architects. When one thinks of the “house of the future,” there is always the inclination to look at how architects might do it. But the general population doesn’t have the benefit of architects.

Kazuo Shinohara.

Kazuo Shinohara has designed some of the greatest modern houses in Japan and remains a leading nonconformist architect in that country. In the 1960s, he designed houses with such traditional Japanese elements as roof tiles, shoji screens and timbers, even as other architects rejected them. In the ‘70s, Shinohara turned to a style less rooted in history. Shinohara, 74, lives in Tokyo.

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The ideals of rationality introduced by modern architecture led to great achievements in the first half of this century, in no small measure because these ideals successfully embraced the system of the industrial society. In any country, it is not possible to say that the houses of the 20th century are more beautiful than the houses of the Middle Ages. One thing that can be said, however, is that technological developments have helped to make the functional aspects of the house more convenient.

But as science and technology have undergone great changes since the Modern movement’s inception more than half a century ago, I proposed a new concept that outlines the design direction of architecture and the city of the future.

My claim in 1960 that the contemporary city can only express the beauty of chaos found a counterpart in the 1980s theory of chaos logic, in which a state of disorder that had customarily been regarded as insignificant was now seen as an essential part of existence. I focused on representative areas of Tokyo such as Shibuya, totally neglected by the contemporaries, and defined the situation as “progressive anarchy.” I made the hypothesis that this progressive anarchy will become the basis for a new type of city structure. With support from influential architects in Paris and London, it is becoming a reality.

In the emerging architecture, a simplistic extension of the Modernist ideas will not lead to the same success in the face of a more complex society. Versatile thinking will be necessary to arrive at an architectural theory that corresponds to the specifics of our changing social structure and current and future progress in the sciences and technology.

One aspect of Modernist planning ideas based on Western tradition that has influenced post-WWII Japanese houses is “the living room.” However, with the rapid changes in society and technology, including the introduction of television, the living room has perhaps been transformed into something with little resemblance to the original concept. The limited size of Japanese houses is also related to this unique adaptation. Continued development of electronics is expected to affect the function and form of houses. It is quite possible that the traditional Japanese spatial composition, which does not specify functions to a given space, may be reconsidered in another form. In the process, the designs of Mies van der Rohe, whose spaces are not defined by specific functions, will become a point of reference once again.

I have analyzed and extracted the essential aspects of traditional Japanese architecture and placed them at the basis in formulating my architectural concepts and design methods. My designs have gradually evolved from compositions that can be connected directly to Japanese tradition to those that can be termed as “abstraction,” concerned with purely spatial concepts with few historical references. I believe that further development of spatial concepts within this context will be at the basis of architectural expression of houses.

Builders of mass-production houses, not as a direct application of the industrial system to building but of a more sophisticated production methodology, have the ability to produce well-rounded functional houses with a wide variety of stylistic expressions. Just as in fashion, order-made designs for houses will become a novelty.

Forms of life, including human beings, are vivified by the mechanism that can adequately respond to “partial disturbance.” In future architecture, the possession of this versatile mechanism--this ability to respond to any disturbance--is what will make the “chaos system” an open, complex and highly adaptable system. In my opinion, Tokyo has become one of the prototypes of this new chaos city.

This chaos city, the “city of the super big numbers set,” which has no precedence in history, will produce new responses. And in time, this quality will characterize not only the 21st century city but also its smallest component, residential design.