House masters.

The best individual houses distill many aspects of architecture, society and culture. They express relationships of human beings to each other and to nature, to ideals of freedom and power, to the past and the future. They can be the test-beds of architectural ideas later used in different ways in larger buildings. They always repay study.

Are individual houses designed by architects ever anything other than toys for the rich? With very few exceptions,(1) the canonical houses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been built for people who were by usual standards exceedingly well-off. Most of us could no more afford to commission a Tugendhat House, Fallingwater or Villa Mairea than live the rest of our lives in the Ritz. So, if they are made for people who, by definition, are different from the rest of us, have architect-designed houses any relevance to architecture or society in general?

In at least a couple of ways they do. They can be experiments in new architectural ideas, funded by brave people who believe in the talent and vision of their architects. And they are always social and professional experiments because, as Deyan Sudjic remarked in a recent book, the 'design of the individual house is based on a far closer relationship between the individual occupant and the architect than is now common for almost every other category of architectural commission'.(2) The intensity of the relationship ensures that such houses are portraits of their occupants' lives: portraits which in most cases age with their subjects, though occasionally, they become the reverse of Dorian Grey's picture, and are miraculously restored to their pristine state when their original owners are long gone. The drawings of a good house can be read like a novel - well, at least a short story for they tell how the original inhabitants lived with each other, how parents and children saw each other (or at least how the parents, who paid, saw their children), how (as was usual in such houses) owners thought of their servants, how they related to their friends, and how they thought about nature and their connections to the rest of the world. Sometimes the portraits worked very well; sometimes they were caricatures, but they have always been moving narratives which present the nature of domestic life with the staggering clarity of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.

Incidentally, it is no coincidence that when the Dutch created those images of their serene domestic lives they were the richest people in the world. The paintings are left to us as a wonderful and quite unpredictable by-product of a brutal empire. Similarly, many of the finest country houses of the last three centuries have been built with fortunes made in the most exploitative forms of industry. This is not an argument like the ones which rattle on in certain parts of academia - that for instance the work of Jane Austen should be eschewed because both she and her characters depended to some extent on the sugar industry, worked by slaves. Her novels, like the tales told by the houses, are great works of art because they touch the common humanity of us all, though they may be about early nineteenth-century minor aristocrats, or (in the case of the houses) ruthless twentieth-century capitalists.

James Ackerman has summed up the nature of the model house down the ages in his excellent study of the villa, for it is the country house that has, on the whole,(3) provided the model in the twentieth century. 'The villa', he said, 'inevitably expresses the mythology that causes it to be built: the attraction to nature...the dialectic of nature and culture or artifice, the prerogatives of privilege and...power, and national, regional or class pride.'(4)

The tales told by the houses are made more intense by their materiality: their tectonic qualities, their spaces, their handling of light, their smells, their sounds. Just as a house is a portrait of a patron at a particular time, it is also a statement by the artist, a moment in a career, distilled then frozen. One of the reasons that we are impressed by the Villa Savoie or the Farnsworth House is that they seem to have focused their architects' preoccupations and talents, and become unforgettable moments in the evolution of our art. In the Robie House or the Villa Mairia, we see (with the benefit of hindsight) the joyous birth of new maturity, in which themes and disciplines to be explored in many later buildings (mostly non-domestic) are used with heart-wrenching force, just because they are first demonstrated on an intimate and personal scale.

And yet, it is clear that there is a question to be asked about the heroic houses built after the First World War. They are not replicable. Before 1914, the houses of people like Voysey, Wright, Greene & Greene, Baillie Scott, Muthesius and Mackintosh were models for mass-produced developers' speculative housing. The early twentieth-century suburbs of every rich city are made of copies (sometimes cartoons) of country houses by great architects. They are none the worse for that: the market often knows a good thing when it sees it. But most of the houses we celebrate today are not reproducible in such ways. You cannot imagine a suburb of Farnsworth houses. This does not mean that Mies's Farnsworth House is worse than Voysey's Broadleys: but that there is a huge schism between the high art of architecture and making houses that ordinary people can afford. A schism far wider than ever existed before. A schism that Modernism, (or perhaps modern technology, with its big sheets of glass, wide spans and new materials) finds it very difficult to bridge.

In the post-Modern age, with its pluralistic acceptance of influences, approaches and techniques, there are signs that the schism is being bridged. You can imagine suburbs modelled on the Gehry house for instance, and on Murcutt's bush villas. Perhaps this is because they are both based on vernacular models, just as architects as different as Palladio and the designers of the great Arts and Crafts houses, who also drew on traditional sources and whose work swept the world.

Sudjic suggests that 'the fashionable domestic architect [has] turned into a court jester for the affluent'.(5) Of course, this has always been the case. (Palladio was not working for innocents), and maybe it is necessary to have jesters on the edge of the game. Ridiculous as Rem Koolhaas and van Berkel & Bos (p47) houses may be, perhaps they are needed to enrich the scene.

1 Notably people like Walter Segal, who evolved a system of self-building for houses which worked brilliantly and allowed owners a great deal of freedom in making their dwellings (AR March 1987). Unfortunately, they looked clumsy. The much more elegant explorations of the California Case Study Houses, which produced the marvellously elegant Eames house, had little continuing effect. More recently, Shigeru Ban's cardboard houses (AR September 1996) designed for the homeless after the Kobe earthquake, have shown how cheap construction can still be elegant.

2 Deyan Sudjic, with Tulga Beyerle, Home, The Twentieth Century House, London: Laurence King Publishing. 1999. p8.

3 There are one or two exceptions like Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre in Paris. And many modern masterpieces are in the suburbs, such as Gerrit Rietveld's marvellous Schroder-Schrader house, standing at the end of a dim suburban street looking point-blank at a railway embankment.

4 Ackerman, James S, The Villa, Form and Ideology of Country Houses, London: Thames & Hudson. 1995. p30.

5 Sudjic, ibid.