Prior to the 1960s, houses were generally built in conventional ways and contained surprisingly consistent psychological archetypal spaces. Most homes were still constructed one at a time, even as kit homes from companies like Sears, Roebuck and Company and postwar developments like Levittown began introducing new forms of mass-produced middle-class housing.
Although architectural styles differed, houses still tended to fulfill certain deeply familiar psychological roles. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard explored these ideas in The Poetics of Space, describing archetypal domestic spaces such as the hearth, the attic, the basement, and intimate alcoves. The attic became associated with imagination and dreams, while the basement connected to the darker, hidden subconscious of the home.
What’s interesting is that these spaces weren’t originally symbolic at all. Roofs pitched to shed water created attics. Foundations extended into the earth created basements. Porches lifted occupants above mud, rain, and snow. These function-driven houses evolved rationally, and economically. A house was understood as shelter first, expression second.
Then suddenly, architects like John Lautner, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, Mickey Muennig, Bart Prince, Bruce Goff and others began producing houses that seemed to come from somewhere else entirely. Space unfolded theatrically instead of predictably. Living rooms wrapped around boulders. Roofs disappeared into hillsides. Pools hovered overhead. These did not feel like ordinary homes. They felt like the secret headquarters of people operating outside ordinary reality altogether.
“THAT is a house??!!”
Of course, these houses made for perfect James Bond Villain lairs. For many people, the public definition of domestic space had just been fundamentally rewritten – radically altering the experience of being inside a home. Suddenly, these houses looked like they belonged in science fiction.
At its core, science fiction is rarely just about technology. It’s about different realities, different rules, different possibilities. It awakens the imagination by presenting worlds that operate beyond the ordinary expectations of daily life. That is precisely what these architects achieved. Dr. No wouldn’t live in anything else.
Lautner, Kellogg, Prince, Muennig, and others no longer treated houses as styled and ornamented containers for domestic routine. Their houses behaved more like immersive worlds. These houses no longer separated people from landscape. Nature became an active participant in living itself. Boulders entered interiors. Roofs dissolved into terrain. One reached the front door by walking across concrete pads over a koi pond. Subterranean bedroom windows peered into the sidewall of a swimming pool. Walls opened toward vast horizons. Rooms expanded vertically, diagonally, unpredictably.
Even gravity began to feel negotiable.
One can almost hear the slow swivel of a white leather chair turning toward Bond.
By challenging typical house conventions and boundaries – these houses suggested that human life itself could unfold differently inside them. A life that’s more adventurous, more playful and inevitably more sensual. Like the best science fiction, they expanded the imagination of what reality could be.
Sure, the same Bachelard “house” principles were at play – but now they were executed hyperbolically. The basement was no longer just metaphorically tied to the subconscious. The walls themselves became rock, turning these spaces into literal caves: dark, grounded, primal, protective. At the same time, rooms began defying gravity. Spaces hovered in treelines or projected heroically from cliffsides, transforming the act of dwelling into something almost dreamlike. The thresholds between functions also began to dissolve. Living rooms peered diagonally into kitchens, floating mezzanines, and distant circulation routes. One became constantly aware of movement, sequence, and anticipation. Skylights, clerestories, and hidden light lanterns layered illumination from mysterious and often unseen sources.
All good houses have a narrative quality to them – but these houses were like fever dreams. The best kind.
Further, what made these spaces so psychologically electric was the collision of opposites. These new houses were simultaneously cave and observatory, bunker and treehouse, primitive and futuristic, hidden and theatrical, grounded and weightless. It’s almost as if a higher truth or understanding comes from the juxtaposition of these contradictory and archetypal experiences. Truth, memory, curiosity, imagination – all of it seemed heightened inside these oppositional spaces.
Why does any of this matter?
Why do we need architecture that engages us in the present moment? Why should a house do anything more than efficiently shelter us? 18th century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel perhaps explained it best in The Philosophy of Fine Art with one of the greatest run-on sentences ever written (inserted at the end for your reading pleasure should you wish). In essence, Hegel argues that art awakens the full spectrum of human experience: emotion, imagination, fear, wonder, delight, longing, beauty, mystery. 
Not merely so that we understand life better, but so that we participate in it more fully and in communion with one another. Or, as he put it far more beautifully, art exists:
“to start the imagination like a rover among the day-dream fields of fancy.”
And honestly… if that is not the experience of walking through a Lautner or Kellogg house, I don’t know what is. One look at Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein House, Kellogg’s Doolittle Residence, or Bart Prince’s home for the Price family, and it becomes evident that this is exactly what these architects understood. These houses make us conscious of gravity, light, terrain, anticipation, weather, material, and mystery. They resist passive occupation. One is not capable of sleepwalking through them. They demand participation.
Can a house do that? Absolutely. In fact, it should.
This is why these houses became such perfect cinematic shorthand in films like the James Bond film series. Not because they looked modern or because they looked technological. These houses worked on screen because they represented a complete rupture in the public imagination of what domestic life could be. For audiences in the 1960s and 70s, these spaces did not feel like slightly more advanced houses. They felt like the future had arrived early -which is thrilling… right up until it lands in the wrong hands.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that many of these houses still feel futuristic today. That should not be possible. Most visions of “the future” age quickly. Yesterday’s futuristic architecture often becomes trapped in the aesthetic language of its era: gadgets, chrome, exaggerated optimism, technological novelty. But the houses of John Lautner, Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, Bart Prince, Mickey Muennig, and others continue to feel strangely ahead of us.
Why?
Because they were never truly attempting to predict the future stylistically. They were attempting to expand human experience. Awe does not age. Mystery does not age. Neither does spatial drama. The sensation of entering a hidden room carved into a hillside, crossing water to reach a front door, floating above a canyon, or watching light filter through a thousand pinhole skylights still activates the imagination in exactly the same way it did decades ago.
These houses continue to feel futuristic because imagination itself always feels futuristic.
