an affinity for curves

With the death of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer on December 5, the world has lost one of the leading proponents of curved, rounded, wavy and spiraling forms. A modernist innovator, Niemeyer, who began working in the late 1930s, eschewed the straight lines and boxy shapes that had characterized modernism up to that time.

“Right angles don’t attract me. Nor straight, hard and inflexible lines created by man,” explained Niemeyer in The Curves of Time, his 1998 memoir. “What attracts me are free and sensual curves. The curves we find in mountains, in the waves of the sea, in the body of the woman we love.”

a 1940s housing bubble

Wallace Neff, a Southern California architect who made Spanish-style mansions for Hollywood stars in the ’30s and ’40s, also tried his hand at designing innovative, low-cost housing for the poor.  His Airform houses, often called bubble houses, were inexpensive and easy to build -

Meant to remedy 1940s housing shortages, the houses never caught on in the United States.  Only a few hundred of them were built here, rather than the thousands that Neff expected, and nearly all have since been torn down.

det runde hus

Very cool runde hus built in 1949-52, in Gladsaxe, Denmark -

Check out the yellow bathroom, which looks like it’s in the second-story cupola. Wow!

semi-circular “usonian” house

The Curtis Meyer Residence by Frank Lloyd Wright -

rugged little stone house

The Freeman Round House, built by stonemason Oliver Nestus Freeman in Wilson County, North Carolina, in the 1940s -

john lautner’s california houses

John Lautner, an innovative modernist architect who worked in the ’40s through the ’70s, designed a number of curving, round, arched, and wavy homes in California.  He also liked triangles and odd-shaped polygons.  What one doesn’t see a lot of in his designs are rectangles, right angles, and squares.

Perhaps his most famous house — shaped like a flying saucer — is the Chemosphere, an LA landmark.

A Lautner design with a round roof and zigzag glazing, known as the Pearlman Cabin, was built a few years earlier in Idyllwild -

Another house from that same period, called the Hatherall House, had a dramatic circular “great room” -

This jewel of a house, in Palm Springs, featured in the movie “Diamonds Are Forever” -

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he studied with, Lautner was a prolific and successful architect who saw more than 100 of his designs built.  He worked primarily in California, though a few of his works can be found elsewhere. Sadly, a number of his houses and buildings have been torn down, some quite recently.

A fairly comprehensive listing of Lautner’s works can be found here.

a bug for round things

North Charleroi, Pennsylvania, has two round houses, both designed and built in the wake of WWII by contractor Walter Rockwell. “He had a bug for round things,” his son told a local paper.

double round

Durham, North Carolina, has two round houses designed by local architect Archie Royal Davis.  Built in 1947 just doors away from each other, they are small and modest cinderblock structures -

1940s round house mania

For some unknown reason Des Moines, Iowa, and its suburbs have more than a dozen modest brick round houses, all built in the immediate post-WWII period.