The Owner Built Homestead – Volume 4, Chapter 3: Free Form Archtecture

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Free-form house in Belgium, 1962.
Free-form house in Belgium, 1962.
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Free-form architecture: floor plan and home designed by architect Andre Bloc.
Free-form architecture: floor plan and home designed by architect Andre Bloc.
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Illustration and floor plan of a free-form house designed by Kiesler in 1929.
Illustration and floor plan of a free-form house designed by Kiesler in 1929.
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The table displays materials, mixing proportions, and application of plaster.
The table displays materials, mixing proportions, and application of plaster.
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Floor plan of an adobe dome tri-foil house.
Floor plan of an adobe dome tri-foil house.

Ken Kern, author of The Owner-Built Home and The Owner-Built Homestead, is an amazing fellow and everyone interested in decentralist, back-to-the-land, rational living should know of his work. Back in 1948 he began collecting information on low-cost, simple and natural construction materials and techniques. He combed the world for ideas, tried them and started writing about his experiments. We’re excerpting chapters from Owner-Built Home and Owner-Built Homestead. In this chapter from Homestead, he discusses the application of concepts pioneered in free form architecture to houses. — MOTHER EARTH NEWS


During World War I architect Gaudi was busy developing a new curving free-form architecture in Spain; architect Rudolf Steiner was independently establishing metaphysical credence to the curving free-forms of his famed Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. At the close of the war a group of architecturally disillusioned German designers formed a discussion group for purposes of exploring the problems of establishing an improved house. Gaudi and Steiner were searched out, and a “round-robin” correspondence began which lasted for some 20 years. Mendelsohn, Kiesler and Finsterlin continued in their search for an entirely new free-form building style, but most of the original group were wooed into the more prosperous International Style.

In more recent years a group of younger architects are building upon what was learned from the German pioneers. Foremost among these are the Italian, Leonardo Ricci; the Americans, Paolo Soleri and Bruce Goff; the Brazilian, Oscar Niemeyer; the Mexican, Juan O’Gorman; and the Britishers, Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler.

There is a great deal about the free-form house that is applicable to owner-builder construction. This type of building is not a mere freeflow art form or a return to nature, but, as Kiesler states, “it derives from living a life dedicated to fundamentals rather than to mechanized equipment and interior decoration.” The measurements of the final form and shape of the house are determined by actual requirements in height, width, and depth of the various areas designed for eating, sleeping, living and working. Every defined function can be closed off from other areas or opened up, making one continuous space. Finsterlin talked of the New House as being organic: a person inside such a house would be as inside an organism, wandering from organ to organ, “the giving and receiving symbiont of a giant fossil mother body.”

  • Published on Mar 1, 1972
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