Indulge me while I dream of living in a round house that looks out over the ocean in Hawaii –
modernism
casa higienica
For these surreal times, a house that has been compared to the sought-after bathroom item many are stockpiling: Casa Barría, Panama –
Designed by Mallol & Wolfschoon in 1986, it was built in 1990.
crumbling communist icon
A striking circular structure, Bulgaria’s communist-era Buzludzha Monument has been allowed to fall apart.
a concrete mushroom
Designed by architect George Bissell in 1963, this house was a demonstration model for a nationwide association of cement companies. It was meant to show that concrete homes were modern, inexpensive, fashionable, and easy to maintain.
A “concrete ‘mushroom,’ of unsurpassed strength and stability,” said the house’s advertising brochure, “it is a major step forward in the development of minimum-maintenance housing, as well as a satisfying esthetic achievement.”
The first house in the new master-planned community of Laguna Niguel, in Orange County, California, it was visited by thousands of people when it was first built. All concrete and glass, with a floating, scalloped concrete roof, it was unlike any other house in the neighborhood, either before or since. While it didn’t spark a craze for round, all-concrete homes, as its developers may have hoped, it did manage to find sympathetic owners who didn’t tear it down or renovate it beyond recognition.
no front door
“The boundary between inner and outer space no longer exists,” explain the designers of this tiny, round, mobile, convertible house –
wright’s round house
The New York Times has some nice photos of the round house (actually, double-round house, with super-cool round carport) that famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed in 1948. It’s now on the market for $1.5 million.
romanian circle house
In Bucharest, Romania, a circle house from architects Razvan Barsan & Partners –
battersea mews
In London, just off Battersea High Street, an oval house for sale –
a labour of love
She practiced alternative medicine; he was a doctor. But despite his conventional facade it was he — and decidedly not she — who dreamed of living in a circular house.
The doctor, property-owner and soon-to-be-round-house-builder explained his thinking on an episode of the British television show Grand Designs. His architect sent him a drawing, he said, that was a perfect circle. “I took one look at it, and thought, that’s great; it’s what nature would do: nature doesn’t grow squares … it just grabbed me.”
The story of how this man took a compelling idea and made a house out of it — and how he somehow managed to convince his reluctant spouse to stick with him during the process — is unexpectedly moving.
At the end of the episode, narrator Kevin McCloud speaks about the house’s structure, but he could just as easily be describing the couple’s relationship: “the contradiction between the square and the round is completely resolvable. A building can take opposite ideas and synthesize from them something new and exciting.”
round houses 