Question 11

I think that hygiene is so important in this house because of the time period and the mindset of the people at that time. The world had just seen two world wars that had taken many lives, inflicted much economical damage, and torn apart many families and countries for good. The second world war saw the introduction of a power that could produced worldwide destruction: the atomic bomb.

So, in response to this, man (the architects) sought to return to a place free of the contamination of illness, war, and famine, and all the things that were associated with them. So, they in turn modeled a house after the Garden of Eden. The house, what is a single loop of spaces wrapped around a glass-enclosed "lung" of unbreathed air that one simply viewed and could not inhabit. From everything to mail slots that could be accessed from the inside to a process of admitting guests that involved a "decontamination" of sorts with a grille that send out a burst of air to remove dust. The house is a bomb-shelter, a hermetically sealed bubble that discourages against "the outside".

To me, it is interesting that the architects sought to protect themselves from the "outside", and create an idealized outside within the building. I think that the architects were not trying to protect themselves from the harms of mother nature, but protect themselves from the harms of a world that had been contaminated by man itself, and return to purity. That is exactly why the patio space could not be inhabited.... so that man could not contaminate it once again.