Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Two

In the early twentieth century, during the Machine Age, the house became "a machine for living." That was how Le Corbusier saw it anyway. There were machine-like designs for houses and other buildings during the 1920s and '30s. I think that's what fictional architect Quintus Teal means when he brings up the modernistic "Service Station School" in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", originally in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941.

The house as a literal machine for living became a popular idea after World War II when people thought that science was going to solve all of our problems. I won't make a distinction here between the house as a machine for living, the house of the future, and the house of tomorrow. All were based on ideas about science and progress that began in the early 1900s and continued into the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Inasmuch as science fiction is the literature of progress and science, that genre contributed to the development, as concepts, of the machine-house, the automated house, the robot-house, the house of tomorrow, and the house of the future. There were houses of the future at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and, if I understand things correctly, the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle and the 1964 World's Fair, again in New York. The future was in the air at all three fairs, but it was during the 1939 World's Fair that the first World Science Fiction Convention was held. The convention-goers also went to the fair. They probably saw the house in which they might have imagined they would one day live.

Warner Brothers made at least one animated cartoon about the house of the future. Entitled House Hunting Mice, it was directed by Chuck Jones and released in 1947. Tex Avery followed suit with a cartoon called The House of Tomorrow, released in 1949. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," in which the house of the future goes about its work even after its inhabitants have all been killed off in a nuclear war. The late Mr. Bradbury's story was published in the May 6, 1950, issue of Collier's magazine. It also appeared as a chapter in his novelized collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles, also published in May 1950. In the book version, "There Will Come Soft Rains" begins on August 4, 2026, a date that has just passed. I wish I had remembered the date. If I had, I would have written something here in observance of it.

Wally Wood drew a comic book adaptation of "There Will Come Soft Rains" for Weird Fantasy #17, published in January/February 1953 by EC Comics. (Illustration below.) The house of the future, complete with a robot maid named Rosie, reappeared in the animated TV series The Jetsons, originally broadcast in 1962-1963. Now I learn that the architectural style shown in The Jetsons has a name. It's called the Googie style. The first Googie-style building was designed in the 1940s by architect John Lautner (1911-1994). It was a popular look in the 1960s and '70s. I seem to remember that Howard Johnson's had restaurants built in that style. I remember seeing Googie-style signs for shopping centers and bowling alleys, too, even into the 1990s. You can still sometimes see signs and buildings in this style, but I think they're mostly gone now. What a shame.

The machine-house or the house of the future was in art and in the real world from as early as the 1920s to as late as the 1960s and '70s. But the "future" of real life couldn't quite keep up with the future of the imagination: despite all of the hopes and promises of the past, the house of the future has never really arrived. Several years ago, I read that the last major household appliance that was developed was the microwave oven. That was in the 1960s. There have been refinements to that and other appliances since then. There are even house-of-the-future-type vacuum cleaners in existence now. Yesterday (August 23, 2026), I saw a robot lawnmower going about its boustrophedon work. (I hope it wasn't being paid for the subpar job it was doing.) But there aren't any of the houses of the future, and the house has not become a machine for living. If it is anything other than a house, the twenty-first American house is actually an investment. Don't live in your house too hard, and definitely don't personalize it in any way. That might damage its resale value.

Concurrent with the mid-to-late house of the future--i.e., the house of the 1950s to the 1970s--there was another kind of house that became more prominent in our culture. This one was far older, and it was the kind of house against which the architects of the futuristic house were rebelling. This was of course the Gothic house, or the house of the past. Gothic fiction or the Gothic Romance goes back to the 1700s, but in the 1960s and '70s, there was a kind of Gothic revival in popular culture. I have never read a history or chronology of this Gothic revival. (That's my own name for it. I wonder if there is another.) I don't know when it began. The immediate origins of it may have been in Universal monster movies and the original Weird Tales magazine of the 1920s to the 1940s. Monsters had their own revival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially on television. In the early to mid part of the century, there was of course Southern Gothic fiction, but there was also an Eastern or New England Gothic. Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), who lived in New York and Vermont, was an exemplar. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), among other works. As I wrote not long ago, Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious (1924-1964) also has Gothic elements and may be considered a Gothic fiction. The Peyton Place of the title is an abandoned castle. Tom Tryon (1926-1991) was another New Englander who wrote Gothic fiction about his native region. He had a book called Harvest Home (1973), but that title refers to a festival, not a place. Stephen King (b. 1947) is a current practitioner of New England Gothic. His second novel, 'Salem's Lot (1975), is about an old house called the Marsten House. These fictional houses can be counted among the houses of the past.

To be continued . . . 

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part One

A long time ago I watched the movie The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The screenplay by Ayn Rand was based on her novel of the same name, published in 1943. It's kind of a ridiculous movie, mostly to do with the plot and the dialogue. Real people do not talk like the characters in this movie, in which every extended piece of dialogue becomes a speech of great weight and seriousness--a manifesto, a valediction, or some other kind of heavy, even bombastic, address. The acquittal near the end of the architect Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, is completely unbelievable. It carries the movie away into the territory of a bizarre Randian fantasy. Today I read that Barbara Stanwyck wanted the role of Dominique Francon for herself. If she had been cast in that role, The Fountainhead would have been a better movie. I'm certain of that, for Barbara Stanwyck is always worth watching. The plot and the dialogue wouldn't have been any better, though, because Ayn Rand was by accounts uncompromising in those respects. The movie had to be made by her design.

There is something about The Fountainhead that has never quite worked for me. It seems incongruous. What I'm talking about is an apparent inconsistency between the supposed conservatism of the screenwriter and the evident progressivism of her artist-hero. Roark was not intended to be a progressive-type hero. He is supposed to be an individualist against a prevailing and powerful collectivism and conformism. And yet he is determined and uncompromising (like his author and creator) in his modernistic rejection of older and traditional forms, including Gothic forms. He even goes so far as to blow up a housing development that is being constructed contrary to his design. He wants to strip his buildings of all ornament, to build them in effect on the model of Le Corbusier, the German Bauhaus, and other modernist European architects. If I understand Ayn Rand and her philosophy correctly, she could not have sympathized with European modernism in architecture. And in fact she didn't, according to quotations from her in Wikipedia, taken from an essay by Donald Leslie Johnson, published in 2005. I guess the blame for the European-modernist designs of Howard Roark was laid on production designer Edward Carrere. Ayn Rand's original model was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was neither a traditionalist nor a European-modernist. If his style of architecture had made it into The Fountainhead, I don't think there would have been an incongruity. The movie would still be kind of ridiculous, though.

A teller of weird tales referred to European modernism in a story of the 1940s. He was Robert A. Heinlein and it was "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941. (Illustration by Hubert Rogers below.) Heinlein's story is about architecture and four dimensions of space. (It also mentions himself, to whom the author refers as "the Hermit.") I would hazard it was the first place most people who ever heard of the tesseract or hypercube actually read about that crazy shape. Heinlein's fictional architect, Quintus Teal (five is an odd number, a teal is a duck, so "Odd Duck"?), mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and "the Moderns," i.e., modernist architects. He even quotes (or paraphrases) Le Corbusier: "A house is a machine for living." Teal is full of complaints. He says of the Moderns:

all they've done is to abandon the Wedding Cake School in favor of the Service Station School, chucked away the gingerbread and slapped on some chromium, but at heart they are as conservative and traditional as a county courthouse.

The "Wedding Cake School" and "gingerbread" refer to nineteenth-century Gothic architecture, while the "Service Station School" and "chromium" parts presumably refer to the Art Deco or Art Moderne style of the early twentieth. The Chrysler Building in New York City is a quintessential Art Deco construction, but even it has gargoyles as on a Gothic cathedral of yore. Like Howard Roark, Quintus Teal is a visionary. One difference is that he doesn't sabotage his house. Instead, his house sabotages itself.

Heinlein was also a visionary. He perceived that there was a clash between architectural modernism and traditionalism before Ayn Rand did, or at least before her novel was published. His illustration of it was more visionary still, as he carried modernism into the ultra-futuristic territory of science fiction rather than the near-futuristic territory of the real world. I will add that "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'" is a very fun story to read, and it's very funny. You might get more entertainment out of it than you will out of almost two hours of The Fountainhead.

* * *

Modernist architecture was in the news recently when the Barack Obama Presidential Center was opened in Chicago. I say "modernist" but actually "Brutalist" is probably a better description of that construction. Modernism and Brutalism aren't the same thing, but Brutalism grew out of modernism. Brutalism is associated with fascist Italy under Mussolini, but Brutalism was also in the architecture of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe under the communists. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he communist newspaper Daily Worker deemed The Fountainhead to be 'an openly fascist movie.'" I can't say one way or another, but if modernism is a progressivist style, Brutalism originated in modernism, and Brutalism is also a modernist-progressivist-fascist-communist style, then I'm not sure where the ideological lines are drawn when it comes to twentieth-century architecture. Anyway, the Brutalist Obama center looks like it could have come from behind the Iron Curtain. When I first saw pictures of it, I thought of a gun tower on the surface of the Death Star. So, if you go to Chicago and pay your fee, you will be able to witness the workings of this fully operational presidential center.

* * *

On the opposite end of the century from the founding of the Bauhaus, Tom Wolfe wrote a critique of it and modern architecture in general. His critique is called From Bauhaus to Our House, and it was published in book form in 1981. The people on the receiving end of his critique did not like his critique. Go figure. No word on the opinions of Howard Roark and Quintus Teal.

* * *

I was going to close with a gag cartoon that was in The New Yorker in the 1920s or so. Alas, my books are in storage. The cartoon is of Little Red Riding Hood approaching a Bauhaus-style house that looks like a wolf. I don't remember who was the cartoonist. "Little Red Riding Hood" and stories like it are Gothic, Romantic, or folkloric. Modernism, Brutalism, and futurism are more nearly science-fictional. So in that cartoon, the Gothic or Romantic past encounters the science-fictional present and future. Does the wolf of the present-future devour the Little Red Riding Hood of the past? Or does she escape for another day?

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley