‘Deconstructing’ Architects' Houses

‘Space syntax’ analysis is used by architecture students to investigate the relation between composition and configuration in the houses of four influential modern architects whose work betrays a preoccupation with the formal decomposition of the cube. Analysis reveals that the houses permutate the morphological properties of depth and rings differentially to embed domestic functions within the home and to interface household members. Two of the houses are judged to be well composed but configurationally banal; two appear more inventive in relating compositional principles to space configuration, to create a measure of subtlety and richness in life-style which is lacking in the examples where form is manipulated in the abstract. The students discover that knowledge of both the internal laws of form and the social logic of space is required to generate the practical conjunction of formal rigour with functional ease which we recognise in the houses of great architects.