THE LABYRINTH HOUSE
The experience and meaning of a labyrinth has endured from early times and in many cultures: that of adventure through a life of fortune and misfortune, in pursuit of life’s purpose, its source and its uncertain outcome.
The curved, textured walls of the Labyrinth House, built of heavy cast concrete and extending to various heights, occasionally budged into other rooms, expressing the pressure of functions and furnishings in the adjoining room. Floor to ceiling glass walls joined one concrete wall with another.
The walls of the 3,130-square-foot home were formidably rough on the outside, while the inside surfaces (which are those that the organism - marine or human - lives against) are covered with handmade glass tiles, cushions, and hand-painted Fortuny silk fabrics. Walls sometimes bulged into other rooms,expressing the pressure of functions and furnishings in the adjoining room (an ideas employed earlier in the Spray House and later in the Mechanic Theater). A “cave-hearth” room and “tower-mood” room with a crow’s nest are developed more expressively than in earlier houses. - John M Johansen
Willis Mills, president of the Connecticut Society of Architects, said that architects made pilgrimages from all over the world to see the house's curved forms and revel in "its rich juxtaposition of surfaces" - the contrast of its rough concrete exterior and its seamless seashell-smooth interior. This one-of-a-kind house, bought and then subsequently destroyed by its new owner, TV personality Phil Donohue, is considered by many to be one of the great losses in Modern Architecture.
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Commenting on the destruction of several of his buildings, including the Labyrinth House: “The reward is in the doing; I won already for having created it. I offer finally a more forceful reference: forgive them, for they know not what they do.” - John M Johansen
A house for Dr Howard Taylor in Southport, Connecticut is known in symbolic terms as the Labyrinth House. It was built in 1966 facing Long Island Sound near New York City. The heavy cast concrete walls, which extended to various heights, were curved in plan and were textured against rough-sawn boards. No windows existed; all of the glass panels occurred as enclosures between one wall and another. One moved throughout the house as among layers of shells.