Gordon Drake, Home Residence, Los Angeles, CA, United States,1946

The author’s home house, which led the author onto the LA scene in 1946 by winning the Progressive Arquitecture’s First Annual Award competition. The award was given due to the recognition of architects attempting to improve contemporary standards of the time.

Being a small house, located in Beverly Glen Canyon in West Los Angeles, it is a minimal home based on a one room structure with a nicely schemed outdoor terrace, athough it achives the amenity of a house ten times bigger. This design has the characteristic of being unrestricted, as most of the author’s designs, which were highly influenced by Harwell Hamilton Harris.

It’s main charactaeristics are that it is a one space home, where you can wander form one site to another without finding any doors or obstacles in your way as you develop you’re day to day life. It is easy to stand at one point of the house and being able to observe the rest in complete harmony, from the entrance to the terrace.  Life seems to be able to flow from one space to another.

It is based on a wood architecture combined with glass windows which makes the home available and an easy connection between outside and inside, without too much restriction or privacy. It adapts a sense of modernity and homelessness to involve both exterior and interior. Amidst the growing paradigm of steel and glass construction for residential design, drake merged the regionalist pledge to anchor architecture to its site with the modernist assertion that design disengaged from the industrial processes of mass production was a proposition with neither relevance nor a future in avant-garde design discourse.

References

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reviewed by XiaoLiu