Art: Beautiful Bubbles

Americans are more directly affected by architecture than by any other art form. Treating the whole U.S. as their canvas, architects are steadily redrawing the U.S. landscape. Since the war, they have erected office buildings like aluminum sandwiches, put entire suburbs behind picture windows, built houses on stilts, stretched them out like boxcars, or looped them into rattlesnake coils. Last week Architect Eliot Noyes proposed to add still another shape to the landscape: a house made of a concrete bubble that promises 600 sq. ft. of living space for as little as $5,000.

Revolution at Harvard. Noyes first started thinking about bubbles last fall when he learned about Manhattan’s Airform International Construction Corp. and its bubble houses—large, plastic balloons reinforced with wire mesh and sprayed with concrete, then deflated to leave a concrete shell. A few such houses were built in the U.S., Latin America, Africa and Pakistan, but they were bulky, unattractive affairs. Noyes asked Airform to let him take a crack at redesigning the concrete igloo.

For a start, Noyes flattened the top of the bubble for better looks, then sliced out big, 16-ft.-wide openings serving as both windows and doors. Inside, Noyes put a central core with heating plant, bathroom, kitchenette and storage closet, divided the remaining space into a roomy living-dining area on one side, two bedrooms on the other. For large families, says Noyes, “you can just blow another bubble and connect it with a breezeway.”

Architect Noyes, 42, has spent 15 years looking for ways to make modern living pleasanter. After getting his master’s degree from Harvard (’38) in the days when Gropius and Marcel Breuer were revolutionizing the staid architecture department with their Bauhaus ideas, Noyes decided to tackle the whole field of design from industry to houses. He went to work for Designer Norman Bel Geddes, reshaping everything from jukeboxes to radios.

Revolution in Connecticut. Moving to New Canaan, Conn, in 1946, Noyes built himself a flat-roofed modern house, convinced a neighbor that he ought to have one too. Soon, modern houses were sprouting like dandelions in New Canaan, and Architect Noyes built a dozen of the handsomest—gay, roomy homes with lots of glass, flat, sweeping lines, and without the stark, cold look that makes many modern homes so forbidding. Prices: $15,000 to $150,000. Noyes likes to plan a whole house down to built-in furniture and faucets, does not believe in drawing a line between the architect’s and the interior decorator’s work. “If you design a house,” says he, “then why shouldn’t you be able to design the table, or the dishes on it, or the lamp over it?”

Noyes is currently busy building a modern $600,000 school in Connecticut and designing typewriters and time clocks for I.B.M., but the new bubble house is what excites him most. He sees a dozen uses for it: summer cottages, motels, gas stations, roadside shops, garages, big housing developments. Florida’s Kobe Sound Corp. will build a pair of Noyes-style bubbles to show tourists this fall. Noyes is also working on a $60,000 luxury model—a cluster of three bubbles, 45 ft. in diameter, with immense windows and five bedrooms. He admits it will take time for the bubbles to catch on, but he is sure the idea is sound. The big thing is to design them for beauty and comfort. Says Noyes: “You have to make a house a marvelous place to live in.”