In the introduction to this beautifully designed and highly readable book, Alice Friedman asks: “Why were independent women clients such powerful catalysts for innovation in domestic projects?” (15). The most compelling answer she provides is that these clients’ goals were a close fit with the designers’ desire to completely rethink the home, “a redefinition of domesticity that was fundamentally spatial and physical” (16). Friedman outlines a variety of housing that women clients sought when turning to modern architects: some as showplaces for artistic, political, or social activism; others as experiments in non-traditional living, such as single women, lesbian couples, and various cooperative schemes. The core of the book is six chapters focusing on six houses that pivot on the client/architect relationship. Presented in chronological order are the Hollyhock House, the Schröder House, and the Villa Stein-de Monzie, which were built for women with families, in addition to the Farnsworth House, the Perkins House, and the Vanna Venturi House, which were designed for single women.

These houses’ functions were addressed by shifting the balance between public and private spaces, designing rooms for work and leisure activities freed from traditional family living patterns. Friedman argues in the introduction that when a household did not include men, “social behaviors so deeply structured by hierarchies of class and gender” could be dispensed with—the result often being a freer, more informal pattern of living and entertaining that meshed well with the flowing spaces and openness to the outdoors that were hallmarks of the Modern Movement (20). References to women architects, including Eileen Gray and Eleanor Raymond, remind us right away that women, too, designed modern houses, although none are featured in the following chapters.

Aline Barnsdall used wealth from her businessman father to support theatrical productions with a social agenda, initially in Chicago, then in Los Angeles. She first approached Frank Lloyd Wright in 1916 to help her realize her vision of an arts colony, but it was not until 1919—after her father’s death, the birth of a daughter by her theatrical co-director, and the purchase of the thirty-six-acre Olive Hill site in Hollywood—that plans began in earnest.

Wright put his own twist on his interpretation of the program, which was in part a response to the client’s personality, Friedman argues. Barnsdall’s vision of an integrated art park comprising a theater, housing, a children’s kindergarten, and promenades was distilled by Wright in a design that used the open-air theater as the generative motif. A central courtyard closed by semi-circular seating evoked a Greek amphitheater; living spaces surrounded this core. Friedman writes: “Wright understood that Barnsdall had substituted emotional ties to her theatrical community for those of a conventional family” (50). Friedman attributes to Barnsdall’s mercuric personality the fact that little beyond the residence was built. Her plans were always grander than her attention span.

An icon of European Modernism, the Schröder House in Utrecht, Holland (1924) was designed in a deliberate way to attain specific effects: “to guide body and mind toward clearer and more natural actions and thoughts,” as Friedman describes it (68). Truus Schröder first met Gerrit Rietveld in 1921; two years later her husband died, and Schröder and Rietveld embarked on a lifelong relationship that included several architectural projects. Widowed with three pre-teenaged children, Schröder wanted a house that would encourage the free exchange of ideas among people of all ages. Friedman paints the marriage as having been constricting for Schröder, who was of a more progressive bent than her spouse. Thus the use of both fixed and moveable walls in the house’s design would ensure flexibility and openness—both spatial and social.

Rietveld later wrote that “a building is no longer a thing that exists in itself or that stands for something; rather it is in active relationship to human beings. . . . [who] will . . . have to adopt an active attitude towards it in order to be able to experience its qualities” (80). Performing a transaction with the house for every activity—creating privacy by moving folding panels, for instance—the occupant was intended to become more self-aware, while architectural qualities of proportion, scale, and light were to be stimulants, replacing the bourgeois emphasis on display and comfort. Freidman describes the Schröder House as “a new environment in which to redefine family life, women’s rights, and the responsibilities of individuals to themselves and to each other” (81). The tone of firm principles and higher purposes was rooted in a middle-class Dutch feminism that arose between the wars and that Schröder embraced and advanced through her patronage, her writings, and her collaboration with Rietveld. All of her activities emphasized freedom of movement and a rethinking of the traditional Dutch family. Married himself, Rietveld spent long periods of time at the Schröder House, eventually moving in permanently after his wife’s death in 1958. Moreover, drawing on their remarkable personal relationship, Schröder and Rietveld formed a design partnership that resulted in two apartment blocks and the conversion of a house into studio apartments for single women in the 1930s that were, like the Schröder House, laboratories for exploring new social realities.

Friedman’s theme is stretched a bit in the chapter on Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein-de Monzie of 1926–28, as the relationship between Michael and Sarah Stein, a married couple, and their housemate Gabriele Colaço-Osorio de Monzie appears to be known only sketchily. Indeed, we are told very little about de Monzie, who entered the Steins’ circle around 1914, became increasingly close to Sarah Stein after the war, and became “a permanent member of their household” along with her adopted daughter after separating from her politician husband in 1922 (106).

Rather, the overwhelming focus is on Sarah Stein. Her patronage of Henri Matisse and the Christian Science Church are focal points of Freidman’s study, linked by being “modern, accessible, and optimistic” (103). A great deal of space is given over to Sarah’s personality, yet little evidence is offered that she—or her husband or de Monzie—had much influence on Le Corbusier’s design for the house beyond their requirements for room allotments. Their choice of architect was a product of overlapping social contacts, the clients’ interest in modernism generally, and, as Friedman argues, a sympathy between Le Corbusier’s “highly legible, elemental architecture” (111) and the Christian Science emphasis on “perfect models of thought” (110).

Like Wright, Le Corbusier rarely let his clients’ wishes get in the way of great architecture. As Friedman observes, “[Michael Stein] and the two ladies were a bit old to fully play the parts that Le Corbusier envisioned for them” (116). A rooftop running track was abandoned; de Monzie was too fearful to venture up to a lookout. But as Michael Stein wrote in later years: “Having been in the vanguard of the modern movement in painting in the early years of this century, we are now doing the same for modern architecture” (116). And this is the nub of the matter. Unlike Barnsdall or Schröder, the Steins and the obscure de Monzie were playing roles more than they were engaging in meaningful discourse with their architect about a “completely original response” to their non-traditional household (119). It is hard to see how, as Friedman argues, the house could be both “a perfect response to the complexities of the domestic program” and also be one of Le Corbusier’s “type forms” (119).

Dr. Edith Farnsworth is a classic example of a client not paying attention to what the architect is doing, and then being upset by the results—well, not too upset, since she lived in her iconic Mies van der Rohe-designed house (Plano, Illinois, 1945–51) for twenty years. The strong point of this chapter is the linkage that Friedman makes between (the unmarried) Farnsworth’s response to the house and larger issues of gender and housing in the United States during the 1940s. As Friedman notes, marriage and home ownership were “virtually unchallenged prerequisites for success and social acceptance” (132). The spare, open “glass house” that Mies designed for this professional single woman became a cause célèbre in the popular and architectural press. Part of the story is the degree to which Farnsworth’s self-image became intimately tied up in the reception of the house. She began the process analytically, with a “sense of responsibility” to the site and to the idea of finding a solution to the problem of “an inexpensive weekend retreat for a single person of my tastes and pre-occupations” (133). She ended up rebelling against the psychic strain the house imposed on her. The control of appearances, Friedman suggests, was central to Farnsworth’s self-image. In interviews she gave, Farnsworth described the house as “transparent, like an X-ray,” and it made her feel “like a prowling animal, always on the alert” for things out of place and for nosy people who were drawn to the house by publicity (141).

Like Rietveld’s Schröder House, Mies’s design heightened the occupant’s awareness of her movements in the space. While Schröder reveled in the freedom that strict geometries and open planning provided her, Farnsworth was clearly uncomfortable with the same elements. Friedman quotes Grete Tugendhat, the occupant of another famous Mies house (Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1930), who argued, “it is precisely this being forced to do something else that today’s people, exhausted and drained by their professional work, require and sense as a liberation. . . . [as a result of architectural austerity] every piece of art seems more expressive” (143). One notes, however, that the Tugendhat House presents a rather closed face to the street, opening up only on the private garden side. Farnsworth was apparently supposed to depend entirely on acreage to maintain her privacy. Friedman notes that, at the Farnsworth House, nature rather than art was Mies’s focus. Raised on steel piers above a meadow along the Fox River, the house is a viewing platform more than a dwelling, and Farnsworth did not reckon on being the “viewed” rather than the “viewer.”

Friedman compares the Farnsworth House with a contemporary structure that was closely linked to the former—Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut (1949). The usual contrasts are recited: the Farnsworth House is white, raised above the ground, and the roofline cantilevers beyond the glass entrance wall; Johnson’s design is black, sits squarely on the ground, and has much less of a sense of the roof being a hovering plane. While Friedman seems to get off-track here by turning her attention from women to a gay man, “the pressure to conform” amid increasing concerns for surveillance and privacy were shared by both. The fact that both houses were weekend retreats for single adults contributed to their simplicity and transparency. Neither was to be taken as “a realistic solution to the problem of the modern American family home” (156).

As a client, Constance Perkins was the polar opposite of Farnsworth. A professor of art at Occidental College in Los Angeles, she had firm views about how she wanted to live and was able to communicate them cogently. And unlike Mies, her architect Richard Neutra listened and responded thoughtfully to his client’s desires. Perkins’s professional involvement with the arts gave her design ideas a stature to which the ever status-conscious Neutra could respond. Well-traveled, strong-willed, and confident in her aesthetic choices, Perkins was the ideal client for an architect interested in exploring the essence of modern Southern California living.

Perkins had grown up in a bungalow in Denver where she felt “confined and unhappy,” and she had dutifully brought her father to live with her in California until his death. At age thirty-nine, recently tenured at Occidental, she was finally free to live as she liked, and she turned to Neutra in 1952 to build her a modern house.

For Perkins, “the studio was the core of the house, and she challenged Neutra to think of her home in an unconventional way: as a domestic environment in which individual creativity and work, rather than family and leisure activities, were central” (163). She wanted close contact with nature—plantings nearby, views of the San Gabriel Mountains on the horizon—and logical, efficient spaces within a very small house that nonetheless needed to accommodate room for entertaining. Neutra responded with large expanses of glass, open planning, and—in a marvelous example of Southern California Romanza—a pond that extends under one of the plate glass windows into the living room. Perkins came up with the shape of the pond after looking through books on Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

Friedman notes that she interviewed Perkins several times before the latter’s death in 1991, and the tone of the chapter suggests that their contacts were warm. This is the least well known of the houses discussed by Friedman; but readers will come to love Perkins by the end of the chapter and wish they could have Neutra design their next home.

“The firstborn child of the Postmodern movement,” the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania (1961–64) was designed for the architect’s mother, but “conceived as part of an ongoing campaign” to rethink modern architecture (189). It was a research project, conceived in conjunction with the writing of Complexity and Contradiction (New York: Museum of Modern Art), the 1966 book in which Robert Venturi argued for the introduction of history and multivalent communication into modern design.

Vanna Venturi, a widow in her late sixties when the house was begun, had strong feminist and socialist beliefs, although these were less influential on the layout of the house than was the need to accommodate her collection of antiques. As Friedman notes, the house is experienced both as a space and as a series of architectural signs. Vanna Venturi’s lifestyle was influential on the former (e.g., her desire to live on one floor), but the latter was guided by her architect-son’s polemics. The exaggerated gable and oversized chimneystack spoke of domestic shelter in full Prairie House mode; the ribbon window could be read as a homage to early (and now firmly historical) Le Corbusier. Like Johnson’s Glass House, the insider references at the Venturi House are famously legion.

Arguing that the house was intended to be a demonstration of the ideas laid out in Complexity and Contradiction, Friedman liberally quotes from the book and then suggests how theory found its reflection in the design, as when she links Robert Venturi’s celebration of commonplace elements in American culture to early feminist validation of individual experience. If this section depends rather too heavily on Robert Venturi’s writings, Friedman balances it by showing how he built up a multilayered and rich image of domesticity inflected by his close relationship to his client. At the very least, she observes, the architect let his mother keep her furniture.

Friedman presents a wider range of architect/client stories than her book’s title suggests, some having little to do with women: Johnson and Venturi were essentially their own clients in the buildings under discussion here. This suggests the difficulty in “theming” the architect/client relationship.

The book ends by noting that “postfeminist domestic programs” have been the inspiration for recent houses by Morphosis and Frank Israel (217). In Friedman’s telling, these Southern California houses of the 1980s and 1990s share something of the fluidity of the Perkins House, and the clients—a poststructural philologist of ancient Greek and her son, a vascular surgeon with two children—seem to have forged a more equal relationship with their architects than did Farnsworth half a century earlier. Most telling, the replacement of the kitchen by the client’s study as the panopticon of the house reflects both American women’s shift to professionalism from housewifery, and the continued realities of single-parent childcare.

Architects often seek some (theoretical) ground on which to construct their designs. Client personality, Friedman shows, can be a fruitful source for this inspiration. Some of the architects chose to work closely with it: Rietveld, Neutra, and, surprisingly, Frank Lloyd Wright at Hollyhock House, if not elsewhere. Mies and Le Corbusier elected to treat it as simply a jumping off point. The choice was largely a matter of their personality. It would be fascinating to have a sequel that looks at women architects’ responses to similar concerns.