List of 21 iconic houses

Kaufmann House / Richard Neutra

One of Neutra’s several iconic projects is the Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, California. Completed between 19461947, the Kaufmann House was a vacation home for Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr. and his family to escape the harsh winters of the northeast.

Eames House / Charles and Ray Eames

The house is situated on a three-acre site on top of an 150-foot cliff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. The site is a flat parcel on otherwise steep land that creates a retaining wall to the west. The response to this condition was a concrete retaining wall that ties together the two boxes separated by a courtyard that make up the part of the residence.

Tugendhat House / Mies Van Der Roche

The Tugendhat family home was built according to the design of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his collaborators in 1929–1930. The uniqueness of the Brno villa lies not only in its formal architectural purity and its interconnection of rooms, but also in its technical and structural design and use of materials.

Gaspar House / Alberto Campo Baeza

The house, defined by four enclosure walls of 3.5 meters, is based on a 18 x 18 meter square which is subdivided into three equal parts. Only the central portion is roofed. The white color of all the parameters contributes to the clarity and continuity of the architecture. The double symmetry of the composition is emphasized by the symmetric placement of four lemon trees, which produce contemplative reflections.

MA House / Cadaval & Solà-Morales

The MA house is set up in the outskirts of Tepoztlán, a small picturesque village of prehispanic origins, that has a colonial urban center. Located at 60 Km from Mexico City, Tepoztlán is well known for its sunny days, a comfortable temperature all year long, and its lush vegetation. Water is a key actor over the rainy season, time when nature demonstrates its intense vitality.

Goldstein House / John Lautner

Angular, dramatic and sleek, the Sheats- Goldstein House perches on the edge of Benedictine Canyon in Beverly Hills, offering jaw-dropping views from every room. Designed by American architect John Lautner in 1963 for Paul Sheats and his artist wife Helen, the home’s bold geometry, vast concrete roof, broad frameless glass walls and striking interior belie its 56-year heritage and give it an intrinsically contemporary feel.

Rietveld Schroder House / Gerrit Rietveld

Designed in 1924 by Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht is a UNESCO World Heritage site, considered the architectural masterpiece of modern art movement De Stijl. An icon of modern architecture, built in 1924 to the principles of the De Stijl art movement.

Frederick C. Robie House / Frank Lloyd Wright

Designed and built between 1908-1910, the Robie House for client Frederick C. Robie and his family was one of Wright’s earlier projects. Influenced by the flat, expanisve prairie landscape of the American Midwest where he grew up, Wright’s work redefined American housing with the Prairie style home.

The Farnsworth House / Mies van der Rohe

The Farnsworth House, built between 1945 and 1951 for Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a weekend retreat, is a platonic perfection of order gently placed in spontaneous nature in Plano, Illinois. Just right outside of Chicago in a 10-acre secluded wooded site with the Fox River to the south, the glass pavilion takes full advantage of relating to its natural surroundings.

Villa Roche / Le Corbusier

Designed 1925-1925 as a residence for Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, Villa Roche is the quintessence of Le Corbusier’s modern approach to housing.The Villa acted as an exhibition space for Mr. Roche’s collection of avant-garde artwork, and is a pure assemblage of spatial volumes that interlocks the dual programs of domicile and gallery.

Vanna Venturi House / Robert Venturi

Located in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania on a flat site isolated by surrounding trees, Venturi designed and built the house for his mother between 1962 and 1964. In testing his beliefts on complexity and contradition (for which he also wrote the book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture), Venturi went through six fully worked-out versions of the house which slowly became known as the first example of Postmodern architecture

Gehry Residence / Gehry Partners

The house Frank Gehry created for himself and his wife, Berta, in 1978 on a highly visible street corner in Santa Monica, and which he renovated and updated again in the early 1990s, helped make his reputation as one of the most potent creative forces in 20th-century architecture. An assemblage of glass, plywood, corrugated metal, and chain-link fencing enveloped an old Dutch Colonial style.

Two houses in Ponte de Lima, Eduardo Souto de Moura

Very close to the frontier with Spain, the Portuguese municipality of Ponte de Lima is the holiday destination of a large number of families who spend weekends or longer periods there. On the outskirts of this tourist site, named after its Roman bridge of twenty-seven arches and with many wellpreserved natural spaces, two members of the same family purchased two adjoining plots in a terrain with a steep slope, excellent views and an east-west orientation, with the purpose of building their respective summer residences.

Maison Bordeaux / OMA

With the ability to make even the simplest and straightforward programs spatially dynamic and in a constant state of redefinition, Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA have redefined the term that “a house is a machine for living” in their design of Maison Bordeaux. Completed in 1998, Maison Bordeaux sits on a small cape-like hill overlooking the city of Bordeaux.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater in 1935 for his friend Edgar Kaufmann, and completed it three years later. The client asked for a holiday home for his family that faced the 30-foot (nine-metre) waterfall of the Bear Run Nature Reserve in rural Pennsylvania.

Lovell House / Richard Neutra

The Lovell House was designed for the active, health conscious Lovell family in the hills of Los Angeles. The house is an early example of the International Style in the United States that evokes principles that were developed by Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Once inside, there becomes a clear understanding of the spatial interplay between public and private spaces. Typically, the living spaces of a house are relatively private, closed off, and rather secluded. Yet, Le Corbusier situates the living spaces around a communal, outdoor terraced that is separated from the living area by a sliding glass wall.

Paraty House / Suzana Glogowski + Studio MK27 - Marcio Kogan

Two boxes of reinforced concrete, rest fixed connected on the mountainside of one of these islands; two modern prisms between the large colossal stones of the Brazilian coast. The volumes project outward from the mountain, almost abreast of the beach, in a 8-meters cantilever. The house, of structural ingenuity, finds balance in the topography of the land, constituting an extensive open doorway and living space in the practically-untouched nature.

The two-bedroom, 2,200 square foot residence is a true testament to modernist architecture and the Case Study House Program. The program was set in place by John Entenza and sponsored by the Arts & Architecture magazine. The aim of the program was to introduce modernist principles into residential architecture, not only to advance the aesthetic, but to introduce new ways of life both in a stylistic sense and one that represented all lifestyles of the modern age.

Elrod House / John Lautner

The residence sits on an elevated site in Palm Springs’ Araby Cove neighbourhood, facing north to overlook the city and Coachella Valley beyond. Lautner completed the house in 1968 for American designer Arthur Elrod, who created the interiors for the home himself. The layout is centred around a circular living room that measures 60 feet (18 metres) in diameter with an indoor-outdoor pool.

The house is located on a sloping plot with a landscape of distant horizon none other than Madrid’s western mountain range viewed from Camarines. At ground level it doesn’t appear to be anything special, but as we go up we feast our eyes on a panoramic view of the urban landscape of the east of Madrid. From the four towers to the left to the Madrid tower to the right. Beautiful, and curious also. Logically the more public parts of the house will be at the upper levels to frame and enjoy the stunning views.