“A Home is not a House”

By Reyner Banham

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.