Leaf through a coffee table book about famous modern houses and you'll likely see Le Corbusier's white box on stilts, Villa Savoye, near Paris; Mies van der Rohe's bungalow on stilts, Farnsworth House, near Chicago; and perhaps opuses by current starchitects such as Rem Koolhaas and Norman Foster. These are the most important houses of the past 100 years -- but not the most influential. Not influential, because they're not replicated in a neighbourhood near you. In other words, the houses architects see as seminal don't have much impact -- except on architects and other style mavens. Why do the young, hip and affluent -- those most likely to aspire to the style of one of these iconic homes -- most often buy or build a traditional house, similar to the place they grew up in?
Much like the progressive music found in concert halls that doesn't become popular, despite well-meaning music directors repeatedly inflicting it on audiences, daring residential architecture seldom penetrates the mass imagination, despite repeated exposure in books or lecture halls. Though the Villa Savoye was built in 1929, it still looks strange to most people. It certainly doesn't say warm and cozy, just as Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music is as unlovable today as when it debuted in the 1920s (it's not tuneful and we like a tune). Which is probably the reason why contemporary residential architecture isn't emulated-- we gravitate to the familiar, especially at home.
The modern houses people grudgingly admire are the ones that look different but give us familiar feelings -- the entry is welcoming, the views and light are nice, the bedrooms have a secure ambiance and so on. Houses that are high-concept, or merely sculptures you're expected to live in, get published but not popular. One of the few influential contemporary houses is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, completed in 1934. While dramatic, it still has a very human scale, i.e., it's cozy. In fact, it feels relatively small when you visit, certainly smaller than its memorable image of a daring cantilever suspended over a waterfall.
People don't build contemporary houses; they they want to fit into their community. Even those who claim to be rebels want to fit in. Those who sport tattoos have them because their friends do, it's conformity -- albeit of a younger generation. So, too, with houses. While rebels might paint their door a bright colour (or wear a discreet tattoo), that's about as far as they're will to go. They're not about to build a house that sticks out on the street, potentially lowering their neighbour's property values. Georgian, Tudor, Colonial or a mongrel version of any number of traditional styles, with bay windows and columned porches, are what the vast majority covet.
To be fair, contemporary houses usually have more custom components, which makes them more expensive than traditional to build. As well, contemporary homes are seldom off-the-shelf designs, and an architect is more costly than a contractor who's building the same plan for the 10th time. A contemporary house can have good resale value when the right buyer comes along, but most seem to languish on the market while the traditional houses sell quickly. There are exceptions. For instance, the classic modern houses designed circa 1935-1950 by Richard Neutra, in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, fetch very high prices. In a culture obsessed with celebrity, these homes are celebrities. The irony is that while a Neutra house might be worth buying for its status value, his style doesn't get replicated in new suburbs, even in California.
Robert Venturi designed a house for his mother in Philadelphia, in 1962. He took the classic language of traditional architecture (peaked roofs, front porches, centre stairs) and subverted them by changing their expected scale or otherwise making their combination more contradictory and complex, to quote the title of his landmark book Contradiction and Complexity in Architecture. Venturi became identified with postmodernism, a design approach that eschewed the Bauhaus-originated classic modern style.
More than the difficult-to-live-in homes of Le Corbusier, Mies or Koolhaas, the post-modern house seemed like it could be popular. It had identifiable house parts but was a bit different: high art meets the mass market. But it didn't catch on and didn't change the way houses look today. It's just another style in that coffee table book of great houses we admire but don't live in.