Mid-Century Modern

Yes, the lush semi-tropical setting of this house by Gregory Ain places it securely in Southern California. And the mid-century modern style itself is one you’re unlikely to find in Iowa. But I can dream.

Last semester I worked with a student in a 5th-year architecture studio on the design of an MCM house. He was twenty-two or twenty-three, I’m guessing, and I, of course, more than three times his age, which may account for why it was more difficult than I had thought it would be. But that was my problem, not the student’s, because this was one of the architectural styles of my youth: I am, indeed, mid-century, if not actually modern. So, the earmarks of that historic style are more familiar to me than they would be to a twenty-something. Despite my hope that there is, in fact, very little other than age between me and my students, I’m living a life of quiet delusion.

Your Solar House

A 2008 article by A. Denzer, “The Solar house in 1947,” treats the significance of a book published that year, 1947, by Libby-Owens-Ford Glass Co., promoting L-O-F products and the design of passive solar homes — which one assumes would very likely have been done in an MCM design vocabulary. That was the first architecture book I can recall reading at my local public library some time in the mid-50s. So it became my go-to source for the state of mid-century modernism across the U.S. I bought a copy and gifted it to the student mentioned above — MCM has made a strong resurgence of late and he is far more likely to apply some of its principles than I am. But, for my current purposes, it raises the issue of when Agincourt might have received its first (only?) example of MCM single-family residential design.

Ain, by the way, proves to be a more interesting architect than I had recalled.