Project Description
1973 P/A Award
The House of the Century was built in the wrong century. Designed and
built by Doug Michels and Chip Lord of the avant-garde San Francisco
design collective Ant Farm, with architect Richard Jost, this lakeside
retreat near Houston, commissioned by an art patron, has an evocative,
organic shape, with round living and kitchen spaces flanking a
ladder-accessible tower that contains a bathroom and stacked bedrooms.
Constructed from steel mesh and layers of chicken wire that were
plastered, waterproofed, and coated with the cement, sand, and water
mixture known as gunite, the structure has large porthole windows and an
interior of wood floors and built-in wood counters and tables. A
fireplace with an exposed flue was used to heat the house; the TV
antenna atop the tower poked fun at a then-popular, Pop Art reference.
The structure lasted about a decade, when a flood in the mid-1980s
largely destroyed the interior, leaving the structure in its current,
semi-ruined state. Like all great architecture, this one evokes several
interpretations: as an homage to Houston’s Apollo program, as the front
of a 1930s Ford, and even as a phallic symbol of the 1960s
sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll era. It also foretold 21st-century
interests, such as the creation of biomorphic forms now done on the
computer, the construction of buildings using design/build methods, the
experimentation with low-cost materials borrowed from other industries,
and the reduction of a dwelling’s size for sustainability and
affordability reasons. Well-documented in several YouTube videos by
Richard Jost, this house is as much, if not more, of this century as the
last one.
1973 P/A Awards Jury
Arthur Erickson
Hugh Hardy, FAIA
John Johansen
William LeMessurier
Edward Logue
Rai Okamoto
Archibald Rogers
Donald Stull, FAIA