1960's Vacation houses

Karl Kaspar




Vacation Houses


An International Survey


"From San Francisco to Scandinavia, from Cape Cod and Long Island to the French and Italian Rivieras, an increasing number of vacation houses is being built. Greater affluence and more leisure time are among the factors responsible for this boom in vacation-house building and for the increasing elaborateness of the "second home."

For VACATION HOUSES: An International Survey, Karl Kaspar has selected fifty houses that demonstrate the wide variety and versatility of these "second homes". The styles range from weekend cottages to villas, the architects from Marcel Breuer to Affonso Eduardo Reidy and I. M. Pei. One house, an Italian prefabricated miniature holiday hut, can be used as a ski hut, then easily moved to another place. There is an A-frame house perched on the bunes of Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, designed to be "hurricane-proof"; a summer house at Teiski, Finland; a timber mountain lodge high up in the Australian Snowy Mountains; and a Fire Island fortress-structured beachhouse, designed to ensure privacy in a congested beach area.
In order to clarify the problems of form and function in designing vacation houses, Karl Kaspar discusses individual houses according to type and size. He shows how the economical basic box-shaped bungalow, built on a rectangular plane, can be adapted to fit a sloped site, one in the woods, one near the water; how it can be changed to an L-shape or cruciform, or adjusted to a T-form so that it provides a view that might otherwise be limited to the narrow end of the house. Among the numerous other compact houses shown are those based on the triangle, square, classic pyramid, and hexagon, which are particularly appropriate for ski huts, having the advantage of rapid even heating from a central source. Among the more lavish designs is one designated as the ''house undertwo sails.'' Actually two transparent houses connected by a stone stairway, its construction includes raw concrete, dual-curvature shell roofs, and rubble walling. It stands 1,000 feet above sea level at the tip of Sorrento Peninsula, facing Capri.
In relating house to location, the choice of treatment and of materials is often dictated by the climate or local tradition. VACATION HOUSES offers a wide-ranging sampling of homes for almost every type of terrain or climate. Some of the houses are suitable for year-round use; others fulfill no more than needs for weekend living. All, however, present unusual and exciting approaches and solutions to the problems of vacation housing, whether in the United States, Europe, or Latin America."