The Bridge House by Craig Ellwood
What happens if you put Mies van der Rohe’s famous Farnsworth House over a river, instead of beside it? Craig Ellwood asked and answered that question in 1968, with his unbuilt Bridge House design.
In this second half of his career, Ellwood seems to have been much preoccupied with the possibilities of bridge buildings, as well as with the mathematical simplicity and minimalism of Van der Rohe’s designs. In the same year, he designed the Weekend House in San Luis Obispo — an exercise for his students, and a materials experiment for steel company Kaiser Steel — which spanned a canyon using a similar construction. The concept was further developed with his 1977 Hillside Campus for the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (drawing this time on Van der Rohe’s design for Crown Hall, another college campus).
All these structures employ Ellwood’s trademark glass and steel, and show the “clarity and logic… [of] materials and structure” that he held up as the “spirit of architecture” in an article in LA Architect (May 1976). There is nothing in the Bridge House to interfere with the house’s purity of line: strong horizontals emphasizing the bridge structure, and strong diagonals continuing from the supports up across the window walls.
Like the Farnsworth House, it is essentially a long rectangle enclosed in glass — almost nothing is added to the essentials of the flat floor and roof; the only interior walls and doors are those to the bathrooms and utility room. Everything else is designed for maximum openness, both to the outside world and the rest of the house. In Van der Rohe’s design, this invites a sense of communion with the surrounding trees. In Ellwood’s, perched over a creek with the constant movement of water beneath, it would create an illusion of flying.
Though the house was never built, its influence can be seen in a 2008 Australian house by Max Pritchard, which uses the same diagonal struts to place a long, thin rectangle over a creek. That house, however, has a more conventional interior arrangement, as well as plenty of steel cladding to protect from the sun. Only through Archilogic’s 3D model can we experience this design as Ellwood imagined it: with uninterrupted views right from and through the glass house.
