Hooper House

Well, this is a classic courtyard house back to postwar period;Hooper House or Hooper House II, designed by Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard.It is located in Bare Hills in Baltimore County,Maryland.


The most significant feature of this home is its central courtyard which divides the functions of the rooms of the house. I cannot find the architectural drawings so far that we will just study from its description and the pitures we have here.

The Living room,dining,cooking and entertaining are at the south wing of the house and family/bedrooms are at north wing and thus have the central courtyard devides the wing.

Every room except for two bathrooms, the 'family room', and the kitchen are located along the home's periphery and thus have the entire wall of made of glass, half of which is a floor to ceiling sliding-glass door.The living has two such doors because of there is so much glass.

The house has the view to Lake Roland to the east.The front door(facing west) faces the center of the courtyard and glass doors and large rectangular gap in the stone of the rear wall has an unbostructed view literally through the home and the lake(to the east).

There is a stone wall which blocks the noise on the side of the family wing facing courtyard combined with a relatively narrow doorway connecting to the front entry hall.The west wall is a long wall of Maryland fieldstone and only broken only by the front door.

An interesting note is that, when this home was built, insulated glass was not as common as it is today - especially for windows as large as 8-1/2 by 10 feet - and so all the glazing in the house is 1/4" plate glass, with an R value of 1. Replacing it all with insulated glass to save energy would have a payback period several times the warranty for the new glazing - which has a perimeter seal between its two or more panes, subject to eventual failure. The original glass, which has no such failure mode, remains clear after 50 years.

Dining room, Dining chairs designed by Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer was an Hungarian-born modernist architect and furniture designer who was born in early 20th century.I also find his concept of binuclear house is very interesting.

The Geller House I of 1945 is the first to employ Breuer's concept of the 'binuclear' house, with separate wings for the bedrooms and for the living / dining / kitchen area, separated by an entry hall, and with the distinctive 'butterfly' roof (two opposing roof surfaces sloping towards the middle, centrally drained) that became part of the popular modernist style vocabulary. A demonstration house set up in the MOMA garden in 1949 caused a new flurry of interest in the architect's work, and an appreciation written by Peter Blake

Main Sources:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooper_House_(Baltimore_County,_Maryland)
http://www.dwell.com/articles/marcel-breuer-hooper-house-ii.html