Useful information:
Many famous modern houses are worth studying for background, hints on details, and ideas for built-ins as you search for your perfect plan. Here's our top five list: Villa Savoye (http://villa-savoye.monuments-nationaux.fr ) of 1929 by Le Corbusier at Poissy near Paris. This is the most influential modern house in the world and became the symbol of Machine Age modernism: "the machine in the garden" and the "machine for living." Casa Luis Barragan (http://www.casaluisbarragan.org/ ) of 1948, by Luis Barragan, in Mexico City. Barragan was Mexico's most influential modern architect and his own house showcases abstract sculptural forms and deft interplays of light and shadow. Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater (http://www.paconserve.org/index-fw1.asp ) of 1936 at Bear Run, Pennsylvania was the architect's response to European modernism: he rooted his very International Style-looking horizontal planes in the rustic bedrock of the waterfall, an architectural version of "Take That, You Greenhorns!" It is the ultimate essay in contradiction. If, as he is reputed to have said, he just shook the design out of his sleeve - like a sort of architectural playing card -- then this was the ace of space. Philip Johnson's Glass House (
http://philipjohnsonglasshouse.org/ ) at New Canaan, Connecticut of 1949 took German modernist Mies van Der Rohe's concept of the open, all-in-one, so-called "universalist" space to an extreme: only the bathroom is enclosed and the glass walls incorporate the surrounding landscape. The steel and glass house in Santa Monica, of 1949, by and for the husband-wife team of industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames (http://www.eamesfoundation.org/ ), showed how to use structural geometry as an orderly and poetic frame for diverse interior elements. The house is really an elegant collecting box for cultural artifacts from around the world.
