Until the French Revolution stripped the aristocracy of its traditional privileges, only members of the nobility were allowed to keep pigeons.  “To house the birds, magnificent castle tower-like structures were constructed. From the 13th century until the 1789 French Revolution, ten [of] thousands of these pigeonries existed in Northern France, yet today only a few hundred remain. After the French Revolution, many ‘pigeonniers’ were destroyed as symbols of the feudal past.”

Those that escaped destruction still dot the French countryside — large, imposing, nearly windowless towers whose interiors are filled with hundreds of small niches.

Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, visited the house, taking notes for the construction of her own folie at Versailles.

Thomas Jefferson, who visited the house while he was Minister to France, was said to have been particularly taken by it. “How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column!” Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway, the painter with whom he visited the house.

In its prime, the house was spectacular:

It was a false ruin 50 feet high in the shape of a truncated section of a gigantic Tuscan column, evoking the glories of ancient Rome. One of the few examples of 18th century visionary architecture to actually be constructed, the Column House contained a ground floor and three upper stories. The interior of Column House was divided into oval rooms whose walls were decorated with Toile de Jouy. Upper floors were reached by a spiral staircase illuminated by a glass skylight. Rare plants and flowers were hung along the banisters; visitors thus felt the experience of exploring a real ruin that had been invaded by vegetation.

By the 1950s, falling apart, the house still drew admirers like surrealist poet André Breton. John Harris, a writer on architecture, visited the house in 1952, describing its sad state of neglect:

The door to the Column House was broken down, the vestibule derelict. Fallen plaster, splintered wood battens, lumps of stonework, dusty bricks formed piles to be climbed over to get to the spiral stair, which at first glance appeared to defy ascent, not so much from its precarious condition as because of the rubbish blocking the way and the nursery of cats that scattered at my approach. Much of the upstairs decor had survived, however. The reception salons were on the third floor, for the view across the gardens through oval windows, and here, as Siren had discovered, the pretty Louis Seize chimney-pieces were still intact. There were also the unpleasantnesses all too familiar to me from my explorations of empty English country houses: broken glass bottles, human excrement, paper rubbish–all the evidences of temporary and alien refuge.

In the 1980s, with the help of French government subsidies, the house was renovated and revived.  The house and its gardens were reopened to the public on June 13, 2009.

This photo shows the house around 1910, when it was owned by the Frédéderic Passy family -

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.

Built between 1926 and 1928, it was closed in 1967 and now serves as a museum.

Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century British philosopher who proposed the panopticon concept, described its design as follows: “A building circular… The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference — The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed … from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence — The whole circuit reviewable with little, or … without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.“

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.

The houses’ open layout, while appealing to modern tastes, “may have posed too many questions for buyers more than 60 years ago. How do you place furniture in a round room? What if you want an addition? …. Ultimately bubble houses couldn’t compete with conventional housing of the era.”

Neff himself lived for several years in an Airform house in Pasadena, one of the few that remains standing today. Despite the houses’ tepid reception among the US public, Neff was convinced of their aesthetic and practical advantages.  “Beautiful flowing lines and curves come into being without effort …. The absolute absence of girders, columns, and jigsaw trusses, startles the imagination,” he wrote.

“I always thought people would come rushing in by the thousands to buy [them],” Neff said later. “But it never happened.”

Outside of the United States, the Airform house found a more receptive audience.  Bubble houses were built in Mexico, Senegal, Angola, Cuba, Portugal, and Brazil, sometimes in great bubble tracts. In all, some 2,500 were built in more than 15 countries. the majority of them in the global south.

Non-Americans liked that bubble houses were cheap, sturdy, and could be built in two days:

The airform construction technique is relatively simple. It requires inflating a giant, rubber coated balloon and then spraying it with gunite. Once the gunite is set, the balloon is deflated and removed though a door or window. The house is then insulated, reinforced with rebar and covered with another layer of concrete.

But the houses’ aesthetic virtues have finally gotten attention, too.  Seventy years after its conception and forty years after Neff’s death, the bubble house has a growing list of admirers. “It’s like living in a sculpture,” one of the owners of the Pasadena bubble house asserts.

To learn more about Neff’s “rebellion against the cube,” pick up a copy of Jeffrey Head’s No Nails, No Lumber: The Bubble Houses of Wallace Neff, published in December 2011.

The piece was a temporary installation in Kadriorg Park near Tallinn, Estonia.

The author, architect Gérard Tissoire, described a small round house, presumably of his own design, in exhaustive detail, from the entryway to the windows to the bedrooms to the closets.  He responded first to the claim that such a house was impractical -

Good people will say, “A round house isn’t ‘livable.’  How are you supposed to arrange furniture when you have round walls?” These good people forget that round houses are divided up by walls and partitions that form flat surfaces; that in general the rooms will be in a nice fan shape, with windows in an arc toward the view; that where necessary a cupboard can conveniently and usefully correct an irregularity, and that one can even, exceptionally, build furniture with cylindrical backs.

Tissoire went on to laud the beauty of the round form -

 A round house is so harmonious on a nice site!  The ancient Romans and Renaissance architects understood this well.

. . . . Here more than elsewhere, sobriety in lines and colors is required. This house is not suitable for those who dream of jagged shapes and screaming melodies. But it can combine, in a small package, modern comfort and antique nobility.

This very unusual house has since been torn down, unfortunately.