Sex and the single building: The Weston Havens House, 1941-2001

Building and Landscapes

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 82-97

  Adams, Annmarie ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455232267     PISSN: 19360886     EISSN: 19346832     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/bdl.0.0032     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. John A. Loomis, "UC Berkeley Gets Havens House, " Architecture 92, no. 9 (September 2003): 21.
2. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 63. Also cited in Nikki Sullivan, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 43.
3. Major publications on space and same-sex desire are Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Samesex Desire (New York: William Morrow, 1997).
4. Henry Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, DisClosure, " Assemblage 30 (Aug. 1996): 62-73.
5. Katarina Bonnevier, "A Queer Analysis of Eileen Gray's E. 1027, " in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar, 162-80 (London: Routledge, 2005).
6. Alice T. Friedman, "People Who Live in Glass Houses: Edith Farnsworth, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson, " in Women and the Making of the Modern House (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 126-59.
7. George Wagner, "The Lair of the Bachelor" in Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman et al., 183-220 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
8. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 33. Two scholars who discuss Butler's performativity in regard to architecture are Hilda Heynan, "Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions, " in Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar, 1-29 (London: Routledge, 2005).
9. Katarina Bonnevier, Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007).
10. Bernard L. Herman, "The Embedded Landscapes of the Charleston Single House, 1780-1820, " Exploring Everyday Landscapes: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7, ed. Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, 41-57 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
11. Dell Upton, "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, " Places 2, no. 2 (1984): 59-72.
12. Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1986), 205-19.
13. Ian Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 118-46.
14. Dell Upton, Architecture of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12.
15. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 9.
16. Angel Kwolek-Folland, "Gender as a Category of Analysis in Vernacular Architecture Studies, " Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V, ed. Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 8.
17. Studies of ordinary places that oppress women include Marion Roberts, Living in a Man-Made World: Gender Assumptions in Modern Housing Design (London: Routledge, 1991).
18. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
19. Leslie Kanes Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992). On how architecture shapes gender roles, see Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Women, and Housing, 1870-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996).
20. Annmarie Adams, "The Eichler Home: Intention and Experience in Postwar Suburbia, " Gender, Class, and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture V, ed. Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter L. Hudgins, 164-78 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995).
21. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs in American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
22. Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
23. I am grateful to Abigail Van Slyck for this insight, especially for pointing out how scholarly discourse supports patriarchy by assuming that gender is not an issue in building design. Personal correspondence, January 9, 2008.
24. The only real visual connection of the house to the slope is its retaining wall and planter boxes. See Architectural Forum 9 (September 1943): 80.
25. Germany claims that Harris discovered the benefits of the three-foot grid with the Lowe house. See Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 45. Also see John A. Loomis, "House on the Hill, " San Francisco Chronicle, July 17, 2004, sec. F-1.
26. The Studio 128, no. 616 (July 1944): 101.
27. Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 86.
28. Biographical information comes from John Loomis's unpublished book on the house, "HAVENS-HOUSE-HARRIS: The Weston Havens House by Harwell Hamilton Harris, " 9-10.
29. Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 1-13.
30. Loomis, "HAVENS-HOUSE-HARRIS, " 11-12.
31. John A. Loomis, "Power Rangers, " Design Book Review 40 (Fall 1999): 62-69. He characterizes Harris's changed reputation, following his move to academia, using the French term le second couteau, the second knife (roughly equivalent to second fiddle or second string in English). From 1962 until the time of his death in 1990, claims Loomis, "Harris had little of the drive that had marked his youth. "
32. On the detailed plans of the Havens house published by House Beautiful in 1944, the southern room on the lower level is labelled "Owner's Room. " See "How to Judge Modern, " House Beautiful (August 1944): 52.
33. Harris may also have designed houses for other unmarried men. These houses are cited as examples because their single clients were easy to identify in Lisa Germany's list of clients' names.
34. Max Jacobson et al., The Good House: Contrast as a Design Tool (Newtown, Conn.: Taunton Press, 1990), 100.
35. Personal correspondence from Jean Murray Bangs to Weston Havens, June 3, 1940. Alexander Architectural Archive, the University of Texas at Austin (Box 27, Folder 8).
36. Harwell Hamilton Harris, Harwell Hamilton Harris: A Collection of His Writings and Buildings (Raleigh: Student Publication of the School of Design, University of North Carolina, 1965), 48-49.
37. Beatriz Colomina points out that Adolf Loos's houses offered a convoluted distinction between exterior and interior, as the spaces encourage users to face the space they have just transgressed, and furniture is placed to force users' views inwards. See Colomina, Privacy and Publicity, 233-81.
38. Two queer readings of Eileen Gray's E. 1027 house engage this same approach. Jasmine Rault's doctoral dissertation shows how Gray resisted certain modernist norms and strategically deployed barriers and obstacles to visual dominance within the living space. See Jasmine Rault, "Eileen Gray: New Angles on Gender and Sexuality, " (PhD diss., McGill University, 2006) and Bonnevier in Negotiating Domesticity, 162-80.
39. Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, 17.
40. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 71.
41. Diana Fuss makes a powerful case for the inclusion of sensorial experiences in architectural analyses, in The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (New York: Routledge, 2004).
42. Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 12.
43. "Hillside House for Weston Havens, " Architectural Forum 9 (September 1943): 86-87.
44. Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, DisClosure, " 72.
45. I am grateful to Cynthia Hammond for this idea. She is using it in a forthcoming paper to look at spaces of ambiguity in terms of dissatisfaction with modernism, based on the presentation "'I Weep for Women': The Home '53 Design Competition, " Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Inaugural Conference, Concordia University, Montreal, October 4, 2008.
46. Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, DisClosure, " 70.
47. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, 153.
48. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, 153.
49. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, 153.
50. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, 153.
51. Franz Schulze, for example, describes Mies's client as a woman "whose formidable intellect compensated, but never enough, for a tall ungainly physical presence. " See Franz Schulze, The Farnsworth House (Chicago: Lohan Associates, 1997), 12.
52. Henry Urbach, "Peeking at Gay Interiors, " Design Book Review 25 (1992): 39.
53. Urbach, "Peeking at Gay Interiors, " 38.
54. Harris, Harwell Hamilton Harris, 46.
55. Architectural Forum 9, 78.
56. According to the "Chronological Record of Principle Transactions, " the drawings and specifications of the Havens house were issued for bidding on April 29, 1940.
57. Personal correspondence from Jean Murray Bangs to Weston Havens (n.d.). Alexander Architectural Archive, the University of Texas at Austin (Box 27, Folder 8).
58. Personal correspondence from Jean Murray Bangs to Weston Havens, July 10, 1940. Alexander Architectural Archive, the University of Texas at Austin (Box 27, Folder 8).
59. "San Francisco Houses, " Life (September 5, 1949): 44-63.
60. "One Hundred Years of Significant Building, " Architectural Record 121 (February 1957), 199-206.
61. Loomis, "UC Berkeley Gets Havens House, " 21.
62. "How to Judge Modern, " House Beautiful, 49-57, 70-71.
63. See Judy Attfield and Pat Kirkham, ed., A View from the Interior: Women and Design (London: Women's Press, 1989).
64. As Peter McNeil points out, it was not unusual for men to have an interest in flowers, decorative arts, and entertaining in the interwar period. Peter McNeil, "Crafting Queer Spaces: Privacy and Posturing, " paper presented at the conference Queer Spaces: Centres and Peripheries, University of Technology Sydney, February 20-21, 2007, http://www.dab.uts.edu.au/conferences/queer_space/proceedings/cities_mcneil. pdf (accessed January 6, 2010).
65. Telegram from Weston Havens to Jean Murray Bangs, June 12, 1941. Alexander Architectural Archive, the University of Texas at Austin (Box 27, Folder 8).
66. According to the "Statement of Account and Certificate of Payment" issued on December 29, 1941, the original contract sum for the construction of the house was $24,790.00 and was increased to $30,659.86 on August 27, 1941. Certificate No. 7, December 29, 1941. Alexander Architectural Archive, the University of Texas at Austin (Box 27, Folder 6).
67. Personal correspondence from Professor Neil Levine to Weston Havens, July 6, 1976. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
68. Personal correspondence from Louise Andrews to Weston Havens, August 6 (no year). Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
69. Personal correspondence from William W. Wurster to Weston Havens, August 14, 1950. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
70. Personal correspondence from Harwell H. Harris to Weston Havens, April 25, 1989. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
71. Personal correspondence from Frank Harmon to Weston Havens, November 3, 1986. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.
72. Personal correspondence from John W. Dixon Jr. to Weston Havens, January 24, 1986. Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.