The Vision

LANDMARK HOUSES

The 'Landmark Houses' programme is envisioned specifically for the site at Lower Mill Estate, in the Cotswold Water Park, where we have invited a number of architects, such as Will Alsop, Eva Jiricna, Sutherland Hussey, Richard Meier and Partners, Roger Sherman, Sarah Featherstone, Alison Brooks, Piers Gough, Greg Lynn, etc. - an older generation at the peak of their inventiveness, but still in wonder at the world out there, and a younger generation in the process of re-invention as they gather a second breath - and asked each one to speculate on the architectural poetics and ecological considerations for the design of a 'landmark house' within such a context.

More by luck than judgement, we've started off with eight architects and eight designs, as did the celebrated 'Case Study Houses' programme of Southern California. This programme, initiated by John Estenza, a champion of Modernism and editor of the avant-garde monthly magazine, Arts and Architecture, started off in January 1945 when he commissioned eight nationally known architects, each to design their own answer to create a house "to fulfil the specification of a special living problem in the Southern California area". In addition there was a requirement that each house designed "must be capable of duplication and in no sense be an individual performance".

They had no clients - the clients came later when construction began. They started off with eight architects and eight designs and finished, in 1966, with a total of 36 individual houses by 20 practices, including the iconic Stahl House (1959-60) by Piers Koenig, perched miraculously on the hills above West Hollywood and Charles and Ray Eames' own house in Pacific Palisades (1945-49) - one of the great influences on English architecture from the mid 1960's. But the Case Study Houses were spread over a wide area of southern California from the north west of Santa Monica to the south east of Pasadena, whilst the 'Landmark Houses' here are located entirely in one 550 acre site in the Cotswold Water Park.

In addition, unlike the 'Case Study Houses', the 'Landmark Houses' programme is concerned with the design of one-off houses, that act architecturally as 'focal points' within the simpler building vernacular of the development. If anything, these buildings are an 'individual performance' and bring to mind the recent architectural development of Venice California. Founded by Abbot Kinney of the Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company in 1905, the six miles of canals and intersecting streets and single storey timber frame houses aligned along tree lined canal banks, were part of his programme for a wider cultural renaissance. The community, characterised by a high degree of individuality which determines its openness, was the place where the Beat poets later hung out and where, in more recent years, the young avant-garde architects of LA, including Frank Gehry, began to cut their teeth on a series of adventurous house designs.