Fountain House had no client or site, although it was designed with an artist couple in mind and possibly situated in southern California. Conceived as a commentary on the programmatic, functionalist, and rationalist concerns of modernism, it stresses instead the artistic and creative nature of architecture. The form begins with an image or a fiction; in this case, the section recalls a fountain and the plan a face. The architecture is meant to transform the real environment into a space that approaches the imaginary, a place where beauty is primary.
Publication excerpt from an essay by Bevin Cline and Tina di Carlo, in Terence Riley, ed., The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002, p. 140.
