5 Outstanding Mid-Century Modern Homes That You Need To See

5 Outstanding Mid-Century Modern Homes That You Need To See – No matter the year, mid-century modern homes never seem to go out of style, in fact, they are still influencing home design today. Prepare to be amazed, because I am about to show you 5 mid-century modern homes by famous architects.

Lovell Beach House

Year built: 1926
Architect: Rudolph M. Schindler
Location: Newport Beach, California
Must know: In this residence that R.M. Schindler designed for Philip Lovell, he raised the house on five sculptural columns to gain ocean views over neighboring buildings. The bravado structure also responds to seismic considerations and survived an earthquake five years after completion, one that destroyed a nearby school. Schindler worked for Frank Lloyd Wright previously, and that influence can be found in some details, but with this house, the architect crafted his own personal modern style.

Farnsworth House

Year built: 1951
Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Location: Plano, Illinois
Must know: Mies van der Rohe emigrated to the United States before World War II, arriving in Chicago and heading the Illinois (then Armour) Institute of Technology. His influence on postwar architecture is massive, but mainly on the design of office towers and other urban buildings. Next to the Fox River, west of Chicago, he designed a raised glass box that turned out to be his last residential commission, after Edith Farnsworth sued her architect.

Villa Mairea

Year built: 1939
Architect: Alvar Aalto
Location: Noormarkku, Finland
Must know: Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was given almost total freedom by Harry and Maire Gullichsen for the design of their summer home. Aalto strove for a design that was Finnish but modern. The resulting two-story, L-shaped house is an idiosyncratic design that expresses what British architect Colin St. John Wilson called “the other tradition of modern architecture,” which placed humanism above ideology.

Villa Savoye

Year built: 1931
Architect: Le Corbusier
Location: Poissy, France
Must know: This weekend house near Paris for Pierre and Emilie Savoye has become one of modern architecture’s key icons, residential or otherwise. It perfectly encapsulates Le Corbusier’s five points that he developed in the 1920s: raising the building on pilotis, a free facade that was independent of the structural system, ribbon windows based on a similar logic, an open floor plan, and a roof garden that regained the ground lost through the building’s occupation of the landscape.

Glass House

Year built: 1949
Architect: Philip Johnson
Location: New Canaan, Connecticut
Must know: Philip Johnson was as much, if not more so, a proponent of architectural styles as a designer of them. His Glass House, influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House but completed two years before it, is the first of many structures Johnson designed and built on his New Canaan estate. Many of the later buildings embody other styles, but this house is explicitly and unabashedly modern.