At once ‘essential and derisory’, the mansion is a field of experimentation for architects. In December 1978,  AA dedicated its 200th issue to ’The Great House‘, featuring built villas and paper projects by architects from all over the world. From Robert Mallet-Stevens’s Villa Cavroix to a ‘House on a Defunct Skyscraper’ designed by Claude Parent, and various in the United States by Richard Meier, Venturi and Rauch, and Peter Eisenman, among others.

On the occasion of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, latest release on ‘The House. Revolutions of a model’, here are exerpts from this archive.

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House on a Defunct Skyscraper, Claude Parent

Before 2002, the year of grace when vertical architecture (skyscrapers and other incongruities) will have disappeared from the face of the earth, or will remain only as relics and historical monuments,
I’d like to…
build a house on a defunct skyscraper.
To do this, I would build an artificial ruin or, better still, I would ask for an existing vertical building to be demolished and then, above it, in it, through it, I would build a stretched arch bridge that would re-establish the continuity of the ground that the previous construction had improperly interrupted.
On this platform, elements of ascending and descending ramps would link usable spaces and habitable rooms.
Three areas for sleeping and active living combined like three hills, with a more remote area for work and relations with the outside world.
In such a dwelling, the places are constituted by the knots that the architecture creates. The rest is mere indifference. C. P.

House in the Roman countryside, Franco Purini et House in Berlin, Robert Krier

Reconstruction of a Romantic Villa, Gaetano Pesce

House in Kratigos, OMA et Elia Zenghelis et Solar House. Raimund Abraham

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