radius house

Closer to a half-circle than a circle, the Radius House, built in 1958, was designed by architect Daniel J. Liebermann.  An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, Liebermann was only 28 years old when he built the house for himself and his wife.

The house was built of salvaged brick, exposed beams of Douglas fir reclaimed from a bridge in Ukiah, and skylights obtained from WWII bombers. A 2010 renovation led by Vivian Dwyer of Dwyer Design opened up the interior, updated the wiring and appliances, and added modern elements.

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.

an artist’s round design

Plans for a round house in Arroyo Grande, California, from artist Donald Judd -

renovated 1970s kit house

In Alamo, California, a run-down 1970s kit house was saved from likely demolition by new buyers Wayne and Marilyn Rasmussen, who renovated it rather than tearing it down.  ”Appreciation for a round house is an acquired taste — it’s not familiar, and, until you understand it, it doesn’t seem to be a comfortable living place where you lay down with your pets and the kids are watching TV and there’s the smell of food cooking.”

insta-round-house

Cool time lapse video of the construction of a round house in Crescent City, California.  Four weeks crammed into six minutes.

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.

all redwood round house

In Topanga, California, a round house from the 1970s whose interior and exterior are entirely redwood:

Inside are curves and a sculptural fireplace:

 

round entrepreneurship

In 1986, the Los Angeles Times ran an article describing a Malibu-based company, called Round Structures, Inc., that was marketing a construction system for building round houses. It explained: “The basic Round House is a 36-foot-diameter circle that sits on a 16-foot-diameter pedestal; the house has about 1,017 square feet of floor space. The pedestal is extended for hillside applications and eliminates much of the normal site preparation needed on difficult terrain.”

The owner of Round Structures, Dennis Torres, who had bought the company from its founder, told the Times: “The aesthetics of it (the building system) never really appealed to me when I first saw it. It was the practicality that made so much sense.”

But apparently the structures weren’t practical enough to attract the customers necessary to keep the company going.  A 2010 Google search found the owner running a Malibu-based dispute resolution business.