Give every room in which people spend time daylight from at least two sides; plan the building in narrow wings so that this is possible.
Rules · Plans · Materials · Use
The Usonian house
Build the family house on one level on a heated concrete slab, on a planning grid, round a brick core of hearth and kitchen; wall it in wood towards the street and in glass towards the garden; roof it flat with deep eaves, and shelter the car in a carport instead of a garage.
The first Usonian house, for Herbert Jacobs at Madison, Wisconsin (1936–37), cost about $5,500. Wright dropped the basement, the attic, plaster, gutters and radiators; walls were prefabricated sandwiches of boards and battens; heat came through pipes in the floor. The L-plan wraps the garden, and the high clerestory towards the street gives privacy and light together. His second house for the Jacobses (1944–48) was a “solar hemicycle”: a concave arc of glass facing south, bermed with earth on the north.
Related rules
Shape the space between buildings as carefully as the rooms: make outdoor spaces partly enclosed and convex, like outdoor rooms, rather than leftover gaps around freestanding objects.
A thin curved shell carries load by the membrane forces in its surface, not by bending; so shape it to its loads and supports, and it can span great distances with a thickness of a few centimetres.
span ÷ thickness of a good shell ≈ 400–1000 (an egg: ≈ 100)
A fabric or cable-net roof is stable only if it is prestressed into an anticlastic (saddle) shape, curved upward in one direction and downward in the other, so that wind from either side meets a surface already in tension.
The outward form of a building should arise from, and express, what the building does and how it is made, as the form of every living thing expresses its life.
Show each material as what it is (brick as brick, timber as timber) and let the plan, rather than a symmetrical front, decide where the rooms, windows and chimneys go.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Usonian house”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/usonian-house. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.