mcmansionhell
patreon
Good House of the Yearbook: 1977
🕑 Added 2020-10-27 18:12:42 +0000 UTCBehold, the UFO house, nestled all unassuming-like amidst the normalcy of suburban Illinois! It has a two car garage, and it's oozing out like some underground machination while simultaneously descending menacingly towards earth. In the throws of this static motion, it somehow manages to be cute.
The house is a combination of Frank Lloyd Wright's wedding cake-esque twilight years and a particularly creative municipal auditorium. It's the past's future, swooping and rising, modern and yet charmingly antiquated, round and flat at the same time depending on how you look at it. It's the kind of house you could host a flea market in.
Like a Marimekko dress, a house of this vernacular can't help but be groovy. It spills and drips, winds and unwinds in a languid mid-century casualness, cool as hell despite all the stodgy formalities of architecture and the unflattering informalities of everyday life.
Of course the decor's nothing to write home about. How does one even decorate a house like this? Every attempt comes out either weird or stolidly dull, so you just put whatever you have in it, and the result is a cross between unsettling and amusing. You're okay with that because you live in the UFO house in suburban Illinois.
In the UFO house in suburban Illinois, the future is form and the form of the future is seamless, edgeless, the more rounded a corner the more forward-looking it is. Ergonomics is a science and the UFO house is its main practitioner, long-tenured, a soon-to-be emeritus.
What's the point of having a sunroom if you can't feel like you're rotating high above Seattle or careening into the vast unknown after your strange little vessel has gotten the best of you? Oh the hubris of it all, the hubris of looking forward so early on in that sublime modernity! What is modernity if not mass-produced lawn furniture resting gently atop a mildewy gray carpet gazing out on what little green space this part of town has left?
But in all of it, there is still a future right? At one point in time, we saw the future in curved forms suspended on spiders' legs, crawling and spilling into a world that's not quite ready for it, and perhaps never will be. The UFO house is that future, and I, personally, think it's a pretty good one.
Link to Listing: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1000-Hoffman-Ln_Riverwoods_IL_60015_M84978-83470
Comments
Have a look at Kendrick Bangs Kellogg's 'Atoll House' on Blackgold Road in La Jolla, right across the street from UC San Diego and a hair south of the Salk Institute. It's 1972 and somewhat in the spirit of this one.
Mandi
Oh. My. Gosh. What I wouldn't give to see this house in person!!
