When architects design for themselves: 15 signature homes

Wright lived and worked in his home studio in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, for 20 years. The project’s final definition was formed through two main phases: the first was the construction of the volume of the private residence, to which the studio was then added in 1898. The project represented a moment of free experimentation and development of the famous Prairie style and planimetric organicism for Wright. From here came the several projects that, starting from the same suburb, would then range throughout North America, bringing modernity into private homes. The volumes alternate bricks and dark wooden shingles, while the various bodies are punctuated by openings that mediate light through decorated glass. The entrance gable marks one of the most recognizable elements of the project, together with the octagonal volume in which the house‘s library is housed.

The Immeuble Molitor is a Parisian building designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, where Le Corbusier created his painting studio and home on the top floor. The 240-square-meter apartment is divided into three main rooms: the first, intended for artistic activities, is flooded by natural light, and features a vaulted ceiling and the predominance of white color for all surfaces. The second consists of the space for writing and opens up to a view of the surrounding urban landscape; the third includes the various services and accessory spaces, such as closets, bathrooms, etc.
Through large openings, pivoting walls, and large free spaces, the project could recall the idea of a summa of Le Corbusier's poetics, encapsulating the poetics of light and the continuity of space.

The studio house where Aalto lived until his death in 1976 is an example of his romantic approach to the pragmatic nature of architecture. Unlike the Villa Mairea, which precedes it by a few years, the Casa Aalto is an intimate and welcoming environment characterized by warm interiors and a brick finish.
Positioned on a slight slope, the house defines a stone and concrete base, onto which some simple volumes are grafted, interspersing white-painted walls with dark wood cladding. Inside, the residence distributes some brighter and larger spaces on the ground floor, with the function of an atelier, while placing the service spaces in sequence and inserting the bedrooms on the upper floor.

Having arrived in America, Gropius started the design practice with his private residence. The project sensitively merges a “regional spirit with a contemporary approach to design”, as the architect wrote a few years later, a house that he claimed would never have built in Europe.
The house is a light construction in which light passes through the space, and the distribution follows functionalist logic. A series of rooms, corridors reduced to the minimum size, living rooms and open spaces define a continuous living sequence, where the interior layout generates the façades on the outside.

The home studio of the great Mexican architect is a complex system of rooms generating together the inhabited body, with a void acting as a counterpart, and a large garden with lush vegetation defining an oasis within the urban chaos. The project is introverted, closing towards the outside, with which it communicates through a few openings that cut through high walls. The large windows instead turn towards the courtyard's interior, revealing a direct relationship with nature. At the same time, the bright colors, typical of Barragán's architecture, resonate in the internal rooms and pure volumes.

Defined as Johnson's magnum opus, the Glass House takes clear inspiration from the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. The similar Farnsworth house was completed two years later, however Johnson was able to see the model during the 1947 exhibition at the MoMA.
The Glass House is, therefore, a pure volume; the steel structure is reduced to a minimum, while the windows unite the entire landscape with the interior. Here, the only volume is the brick cylinder – the bathroom – piercing the roof, while the other spaces are defined only by the furnishing elements. The pure volume is inserted within a vast property within which other buildings constitute a series of pavilions that complete the functions of the architect's living. From a painting gallery to the guest house to a sculpture gallery, each pavilion adds not only a volume but an ideal room within the park.

Designed for the first time in 1945, together with Eero Saarinen, the house consists of a simple glass-and-metal volume, next to which a second volume housed the couple's office, as tall as the residential volume but shorter in its longitudinal extension. The house is part of the couple's experimentation on the theme of living, remaining the most famous example, proving almost like a manifesto of their architecture. The explicit reference to De Stijl movement makes this work one of the most important examples of European influence in America. The geometric facades recall the proportions of a Mondrian painting, while windows and sliding doors become thin and light panels. Finally, the house's interior presents a large continuous space, which places the landscape and the house in continuity.

Referring to the project for his family home, Niemeyer himself said: “My concern was to design the residence freely and to adapt it to the irregularities of the territory, transforming it into curves so that vegetation could enter it without separation or deviation from the straight line”.
Casa das Canoas thus moves fluidly in the land on which it rests, with a curved-line roof that winds through the space and among the lush vegetation, while the inhabited volume recedes from the eaves line in a sequence of windows and plastered walls. A swimming pool acts as the counterpart to the house, while a boulder becomes the connecting element between the two figures.

One of the most important early works of postmodern architect Venturi, the Vanna Venturi House, is undoubtedly a manifesto house. Commissioned by the architect's mother, the house was home to her and Robert Venturi until his marriage to Denise Scott Brown in 1967. The project already reveals many of the architect's postmodern characteristics, and Scott Brown’s influences too. The various architectural elements are hybridized in a rejection of various instances typical of modernism, giving birth to a new language. The facade combines a large broken tympanum, an echo of mannerist architecture, with an architrave and arch. The windows, of various sizes, find a geometric harmony, which also breaks with the typical language up to that point. Although small in size, the house becomes monumental, already incorporating many of those concepts that will make Venturi’s architecture a mosaic of complexity and contradictions.

In the Gehry Residence, the American architect developed what is considered one of the first examples of deconstructivist architecture. Working with wood, glass, and metal, Gehry reinvented some portions of the facade of an old house built in 1920, which he bought together with his wife. Leaving the original facades almost unchanged, the new project wraps and incorporates three sides of the house, expanding the internal spaces. The resulting new building has its faces breaking, rotating, and disappearing at some points, transforming the newly added body into a fragmentation of walls. On the street front, the new metal-clad wall is extended with respect to the inhabited volume, generating a free-standing wall, already a sign of the architect’s future experiments.

The site on which Shigeru Ban designed and built his home had 27 trees. These became the key element that defined the development of the house, as well as the project's name, which aimed not to cut down any trees. To do this, the Japanese architect studied a structural mesh with a triangular base (4 meters on each side) capable of distributing a sufficiently large and stable space while respecting the existing trees. The resulting volume was then perforated at various points where the vegetation intersected it through circular and elliptical voids, characterized by the use of glass blocks. The regularity of the architecture is thus marked by continuous moments of vegetation, curvatures, and exceptions, generating a building in which the various apartments find a physical connection with nature.

The German architect Werner Sobek has established himself over the years for his sensitivity towards environmental and climate issues. His poetics, strongly linked to the technical aspect, is seen in the project for his private residence, R 128, a prototype of what has become a self-sufficient and sustainable design.
The four-storey building is designed as entirely recyclable, easy to dismantle, and fully self-sufficient from an energy point of view. Architecture becomes an essential skeleton, and the glass facades immerse the volume in the surrounding greenery, which is mirrored at the same time. The house then communicates with the outside through a suspended bridge on the fourth floor and a metal grid paving acting as an external walkway at the lower level.

The founder of Ensamble Studio, Antón García-Abril, designed his private residence in 2008: a project which, starting from the name, wanted to denounce an almost utopian search for architecture. The house is, in fact, built through the apparently momentary, unstable juxtaposition of enormously sized structures. Giant beams overlap each other, defining, together with notable overhangs, the house’s spaces. The project required considerable complexity regarding structural calculations and prefabrication processes, resulting in one year of engineering and just seven days for construction.
Hemeroscopium House materializes, in García-Abril's idea, the concept of gravity and the physicality with which the structure defines the full and empty spaces of the house itself. Yet, despite the size of the beams, the large overhangs and the cantilevered parts manage to give it an idea of lightness, in which the void seems to win over the solid.

On the outskirts of Barcelona, in 1973, Ricardo Bofill began a project destined for continuous transformation, regenerating an old cement factory into his private residence, and the house to his studio, Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura. Within the vast complex, combining industrial aesthetics with the individual sensitivity of the architect, a library, a modelling lab, an archive, and various parts of the private residence have been created over the years. A true cathedral, where the high ceilings of the pre-existing system act as the backdrop to multiple spaces.

Ricardo Bofill, La Fábrica, 1975, Barcellona. Domus n.1055, March 2021.

The architect Boonserm Premthada, head of the Thai office Bangkok Project Studio, has built for himself a house spread over three floors, which writes its own urban character through the frugality of the interiors and the rough impermeability of the exteriors.
Standing within a dense built fabric in the city of Bangkok, the house is recognizable for using artisanal bricks, where the mortar used overflows and creates a continuous plastic variation as an artistic expression. The raw effect of the architecture echoes also in the interiors, where the transparent openings seek contact with the nearby urban park. The simplicity of the house thus makes the building material its poetic principle, entirely filling the lot; another connotative element is the dematerialization of one of the walls, leaving room for a large opening towards the outside: an element that manages to emphasise the light passing through the house.