10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture

These are mid-century modern homes that will inspire your life!

In all of the areas where mid-century style influences design, it’s time to shine the light on architecture. This style brings to life the mid-20th-century developments in style, roughly from the 1930s to the 1960s, and they are a joy to look at! These masterpieces of mid-century modern homes architecture are still influencing home design today — see if any elements appear in your own home!

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_1 (1)

The bravado structure also responds to seismic considerations and survived an earthquake five years after completion, one that destroyed a nearby school. Schindler worked for Frank Lloyd Wright previously, and that influence can be found in some details, but with this house, the architect crafted his own personal modern style.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_2 (1)

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was given almost total freedom by Harry and Maire Gullichsen for the design of their summer mid-century modern home. Aalto, inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, strove for a design that was Finnish but modern. The resulting two-story, L-shaped house is an idiosyncratic design that expresses what British architect Colin St. John Wilson called “the other tradition of modern architecture,” which placed humanism above ideology.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_3 (1)

This weekend house near Paris for Pierre and Emilie Savoye has become one of mid-century architecture’s key icons, residential or otherwise. It perfectly encapsulates Le Corbusier’s five points that he developed in the 1920s: raising the building on pilotis(slender columns), a free facade that was independent of the structural system, ribbon windows based on a similar logic, an open floor plan, and a roof garden that regained the ground lost through the building’s occupation of the landscape.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_4 (1)

One aspect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius was the need to constantly reinvent himself and his mid-century architecture. The Robie House can be seen as the apotheosis of his Prairie style, which he started to develop in the early 1890s and abandoned in favor of his democratic, Usonian designs.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_5 (1)

At first glance Gerrit Rietveld’s design for Schröder House is like a painting come to life. Traditional ideas of construction and enclosure, outside and inside, don’t appear; in their place are lines, planes and splashes of color.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_6 (1)

Walter Gropius, who had founded the influential Bauhaus School in Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1937. He taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and designed this mid-century style house for his family in nearby Lincoln.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_7 (1)

Although this house/studio for designers Charles and Ray Eames is simply two rectangular volumes made of off-the-shelf steel structures and windows, it is a colorful expression of their design sensibility and a suitable backdrop for their collections and creations. A true mid-century style.

10 Mid-Century Modern Homes That Will Grow Your Love For Architecture_8 (1)

Philip Johnson was as much, if not more so, a proponent of mid-century architecture styles as a designer of them. He and Henry Russell Hitchcock helped to define what people think mid-cenury architecture is, even to this day. His Glass House, influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (next) but completed two years before it, is the first of many structures Johnson designed and built on his New Canaan estate.