Mike Kobeissi on Landmark American Houses

Mike Kobeissi’s June 2023 essay on American houses, published on WordPress and the same day in a shorter retelling on Medium, argues that a handful of residences have come to stand for the country’s history, its wealth and its changing ideas about design.

The author picks six and gives each a short portrait. The White House leads, described as the residence and office of every president since John Adams and a neoclassical building by the architect James Hoban whose white walls and porticoes have become a symbol of the republic. Fallingwater follows. The essay presents Frank Lloyd Wright’s house in Mill Run, Pennsylvania, as a building of local stone, poured concrete and glass set over a waterfall and meant to merge with the woods around it, an example of what Wright called organic architecture.

Two Gilded Age estates come next. Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina, was built for George Washington Vanderbilt II, and the essay counts some 250 rooms, a grand dining hall, a library of rare volumes and gardens by the landscape architect Olmsted. Hearst Castle at San Simeon, commissioned by William Randolph Hearst and designed by Julia Morgan, sits on a hill above the Pacific with 165 rooms and a large art collection; the author treats its Mediterranean Revival grandeur as a monument to the excess of its era. Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s house in Charlottesville, is offered as proof of his gifts as architect and inventor, and the essay notes its listing as a World Heritage site. Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, closes the list as modernism at its plainest, a transparent box whose walls dissolve into the landscape.

Two versions of one essay

The Medium retelling covers the same six houses in a different order and adds detail. It names Richard Morris Hunt as the architect of Biltmore and calls the house French Renaissance in spirit, dates the Glass House to 1949 as Johnson’s own home, and praises the dome and daylight of Monticello. Both versions end on the same note, that these houses record the social and political stories of their time.

What the list leaves out

Some context sharpens the essay’s picks. Wright, KCET notes, set out to build an American architecture free of European models, beginning with Prairie houses of open plans and natural colors and materials.² The grandeur at San Simeon extended to water, with both an indoor and an outdoor pool on the estate.⁴ Modern houses can join the same company as Monticello: in 2017 Richard Neutra’s VDL Studio and Residences in Los Angeles was named a National Historic Landmark.³ The National Park Service explains what that title means. Of the more than ninety thousand properties on the National Register, just over 2,600 hold landmark status, reserved for places whose story matters to the whole nation.¹