ASSIGNMENT-01

SUBJECT-THEORY OF DESIGN-II (ART-236)

TOPIC-“A Home is not a House” By Reyner

Banham

SUBMITTED TO- SUBMITTED

BY-AR. SHRUTI SIDHU MUKUL
SHARMA 198BAR10 2
18BAR1029

ABOUT THEORY-
Peter Reyner Banham, (2 March 1922 – 19 March
1988) was an English architectural critic and writer
best known for theoretical treatise Theory and Design
in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971
book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
He was also known for new brutalism. Banham worked
in London, but lived primarily in the United States from
the late 1960s until the end of his life.

“A Home Is Not a House” It was an article by Reyner

Banham. Six drawings have been realized by French
architect and artist Francois Dallegret when asked in
1965 by Magazine Art in America to explain the article.

Francois Dallegret was an French architect, done his

architecture at the Ecole National Superior des Beaux-
arts de Paris, François Dallegret began to focus his
research and creativity where literature, fine art and
architecture all interact with technology. His work has
shown a continual evolution as a result of a close
collaboration with writers, programmers, architects,
engineers as well as with fabricators of both electronics
and luminous world.

This article published in April 1965 in the magazine, Art

in America, Reyner Banham, the architecture critic and
theoretician of mega structures and Pop Art, took aim at
the American house. In A Home is Not a House, Banham
attacks the North-American houses, His main criticism
of Americans was that they think of their dwelling as a
hollow shell that was built without a proper protection
from cold and warm weather, based upon a widespread
use of heating pumps, a general waste of energy and the
production of an “environmental machinery” into their
homes than people of other countries do.
He illustrate that When your house contains such a
complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets,
outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi
reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters –
when it contains so many services that the hardware
could stand up by itself without any assistance from the
house, why have a house to hold it up. When the cost of
all this tackle is half of the total outlay (or more, as it
often is) what is the house doing except concealing your
mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the
sidewalk' Once or twice recently there have been
buildings where the public was genuinely confused
about what was mechanical services, what was
structure-many visitors to Philadelphia take quite a time
to work out that the floors of Louis Kahn's laboratory
towers are not supported by the flanking brick duct
boxes, and when they have worked it out, they are
inclined to wonder if it was worth all the trouble of
giving them an independent supporting structure. No
doubt about it, a great deal of the attention captured by
those labs derives from Kahn's attempt to put the drama
of mechanical services on show-and if, in the end, it fails
to do that convincingly, the psychological importance of
the gesture remains, at least in the eyes of his fellow
architects. Services are a topic on which architectural
practice has alternated capriciously between the brazen
and the coy-there was the grand old Let-it-dangle
period, when every ceiling was a mess of gaily painted
entrails, as in the council chambers of the UN building,
and there have been fits of pudicity when even the most
innocent anatomical details have been hurriedly veiled
with a suspended ceiling.

The two ideas behind this are to give everyone a

standard of living package containing all the necessities
of modern life (shelter, food, energy, television) and to
do away with all the permanent structures of building,
and men would not be constrained by past settlements.

The advantage of pushing present tendencies to such

extremes is that the extremes indicate possibilities not
otherwise exploited and present alternatives in a clear
light. Perhaps the furthest limit in increasing
ephemerality is either religious mysticism, or a mood
controlled environment which is induced entirely in the
mind – through drugs, and electrodes implanted on the
brain. in this situation, all artifacts would disappear
entirely and the only thing left would be a contemplative
trance having much the same advantage over tangible
things that st. bernard pointed out over eight centuries
ago.

Drawings by Francois Dallegret named as:

ANATOMY OF A DWELLING - With very little

exaggeration, this baroque ensemble of domestic
gadetry epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious
living-in other words; this is the junk that keeps the pad
swinging. The house itself has been omitted from the
drawing, but if mechanical services continue to
accumulate at this rate it may be possible to omit the
house in fact.

Super-Coupé de Long Week-End- Dallegret’s 20-20

hindsight and foresight produced this historical
capriccio from the First Machine Age well before the
present article was first mooted. In the mode of its time,
services are in a separate outhouse instead of being a
mechanical clip-on.

Trailmaster GTO Transcontinental- The present mobile

home is a mess, visually, mechanically, and in its
relationship to the permanent infrastructure of
civilization. But if it could be rendered more compact
and mobile, and be uprooted from its dependency on
static utilities, the trailer could fulfill its promise to put a
nation on wheels. The kind of mobile utility pack
suggested here does not exist yet, but it may be no
farther over the hill than its coming attraction style
would suggest.

Power-Membrane house- The goal of present trends in

domestic mechanization appears to be ever-more-flimsy
structure that is made habitable by ever-more-massive
machinery, and the power-membrane house then
pushes this idea to its logical/illogical conclusion- the
open plan to end open plans, a well-less, garden house
sheltering under the spreading arms of the ultimate
appliance. Architecture-world faint hearts who fear
this total conditioner as the leviathan that will trample
down their ancient art should observe how near
Dallegret has come to making a monument of the power
membrane, like true blue breeding. Architecture will
out, even in the most unlikely circumstances.
Transportable standard-of-living package- to the man
who has everything else, a standard -of-living package
such as this could offer the ultimate goody - the power to
impose his will on any environment to which the
package could be delivered; to enjoy the spatial freedom
of the nomadic campfire without the smell, smoke, ashes
and mess; and the luxuries of appliance-land without
those en- cumbrances of a permanent dwelling.

He suggests that the solution is to develop

“environmental machinery.” In Anatomy of a Dwelling,
Dallegret paints the portrait of this American drift
where the house is reduced to an immense network of
tubes and cables, and a giant plumbing system
stretching between the sky (with a TV aerial) and the
earth (a septic tank). The text described it as a “baroque
ensemble of domestic gadgets,” which could take over
the home if these “mechanical services continued to
accumulate.
In the drawing Un-house, Transportable standard-of-
living package, Dallegret proposes a counter-project of
transportable equipment that could be kept in an
inflatable bubble, designed to be more respectful to the
environment (including, for example, solar cells). Shown
naked and seated on the ground around equipment that
looks like a robot-totem, they seem to be advocating
architecture for the dwelling that is both hippie and
ultra-technological. Here, the dwelling is linked to the
environmental dimension of space that Reyner Banham
was advocating to make architecture “disappear within
environmental technology” (The Architecture of the
Well-tempered Environment, 1969). Banham’s theories
continue to inspire many contemporary architects and
their research on the interaction between architecture
and its environment through digital technology.

WORK BASED ON THE THEORY-

THE ENVIRONMENT BUBBLE-
For Performa 17 (New York), François Dallegret’s
provocative, unrealized structure initially designed to
challenge architecture is brought to life for the first time
by architect François Perrin, setting it free to roam
around the city and host public dance workshops with
choreographer Dimitri Chamblas.

A widely influential blueprint designed in 1965 by

Canadian architect François Dallegret, “The
Environment-Bubble” is brought to life for the first time.
Initially envisioned as a flexible, temporary dome that
would transform our modes of living, the “Bubble”
became a reference point for generations of architects
questioning their discipline and seeking a radical
dissolution of public and private spaces. For Performa
17, Dallegret collaborates with architect François
Perrin and choreographer Dimitri Chamblas, to turn
the inflatable structure into an active site of intellectual
and physical engagement with free daily dance
workshops, open to the public.

The Environment-Bubble by François Dallegret, a

collaboration with Dimitri Chamblas and François
Perrin. Co-curated by Charles Aubin and François
Perrin. Supported by Canada Council for the Arts,
Robert M. Rubin, the Performa Commissioning Fund,
and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the
United States. Presented in partnership with CalArts
Dance.
French-born Canadian architect François Dallegret (b.
1937, Morocco) studied at Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts
in the 1960s before exhibiting his work at Iris Clert
Gallery with the likes of Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and
Arman. His early “mechanical drawings” took the form
of industrial design sketches that playfully explored the
relationship between man and machine by depicting
cars, rockets, and spaceships, as well as hardware
stores and futuristic kitchens as cybernetic interactive
mechanisms.

 
In Dallegret’s early drawings, architecture was
conceived as a customized environment in a constant
state of flux able to be regulated by various devices.
After being introduced to the influential architecture
critic Reyner Banham, Dallegret moved to the United
States in 1965 and collaborated with Banham on his
seminal text “A Home Is Not a House” published in Art
in America that same year. In 1967, Dallegret was
invited to take part in Montreal’s Expo 67 and afterward
remained in Canada. His work in Montreal is
epitomized in the club, “Le Drug,” a hybrid venue
featuring a restaurant,

discotheque, bookstore, drugstore, and gallery,

conceived as an organic, sensual environment.
Dallegret’s work has been shown internationally
including the CCA in Montreal, V&A Museum (London,
UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), and the Walker
Art Center (Minneapolis, US). Other recent exhibitions
include the Architectural Association in London and the
most recent Istanbul design biennial.
PRESENT SCENARIO-
François Perrin (b. 1968, Paris) is a French-American
architect and curator who lives and works in Los
Angeles. His architectural practice focuses on site and
climate-specific projects, and as a curator Perrin
explores the interaction of art and architecture. He
previously taught at Art Center College of Design, Cal
Poly Pomona, Sci-ARC and UCLA and has lectured at
Columbia University, MAK Vienna, Jan Van Eyck
Academie, Université de Montréal, and Paris Ecole
Spéciale d’Architecture. Perrin received his
professional degree. from Ecole d’Architecture Paris La
Seine. He has exhibited his work at the FRAC Centre,
UCLA, and MOCA. He has organized the exhibition and
edited the publication Yves Klein: Air
Architecture (Storefront for Art and Architecture, New
York, 2005), Xavier Veilhan’s Architectones project, and
a retrospective on architect François Dallegret. His
work is included in the 2017 Chicago Architecture
Biennial.
Born in 1974 in Saint-Didier (France), Dimitri
Chamblas is the newly appointed Dean of the Sharon
Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute
of the Arts. Trained in dance at Paris Opera’s ballet
school, Chamblas co-founded the dance company edna,
in 1992 with Boris Charmatz, as a way to explore new
experimental dance formats. Together, they
choreographed and danced the duet À bras le
corps (1993), and shot the film Les Disparates (1994).
In 1993, Chamblas began dancing for choreographers
including Régine Chopinot, Emmanuelle Huynh, and
Mathilde Monnier. Throughout his career, Chamblas
has collaborated with various artists including Jean-
Paul Gaultier, and Andy Goldsworthy, as well as
composers such as Heiner Goebbels. Chamblas joined
the Paris Opera under Benjamin Millepied’s leadership,
where he directed “Troisième Scène,” a digital platform
dedicated to commissioning films by visual artists,
choreographers, actors, and writers. Among others,
participants include Bertrand Bonello, Bret Easton Ellis,
and William Forsythe.