Read Mid-Century Modern Architecture: A Complete History

Mid-century modern is the only architectural style most people can name from a photograph: the flat roof, the wall of glass, the carport, the pool, the house open to its garden. It is also the style most people live inside without knowing it, because its inventions — the open plan, the indoor-outdoor room, the kitchen that looks into the living space, the car sheltered beside the house rather than locked behind it — became the default grammar of the ordinary house. This book follows those inventions from their urgent origin to their worldwide afterlife. It begins in 1945, when millions of returning soldiers needed houses and the building industry answered with speed, and follows the Bauhaus masters into American exile, where their ideas met cheap timber, mild climates and a new consumer economy. It follows John Entenza's Case Study House Program in Los Angeles, where a magazine commissioned architects to design houses ordinary families could afford, and where the Eames House and the Stahl House became the movement's two great images: one warm and cluttered with life, the other cool and almost all view. It follows Richard Neutra's health houses, Rudolph Schindler's early experiments, Albert Frey's desert modernism, John Lautner's structural daring and Joseph Eichler's tracts, where modernism reached buyers by the thousand. It leaves California for Scandinavia, where Alvar Aalto softened the machine with timber and light, and for Brazil, where Oscar Niemeyer bent the right angle into curves. And it is honest about the record: the glass house overheated and leaked, the open plan offered nowhere to hide, the suburb the style enabled consumed land and enforced segregation, and the revival that now saves these houses also prices out the families they were built for. The debates are flagged where they arise, because mid-century houses reward the reader who separates what the glass wall proves from what the postcard prefers.