Hooper House II

Marcel Breuer – Hooper House II, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 1958-1959

Located in Baltimore, Maryland, Hooper House II is a mid-century modern house, long and low, designed by Marcel Breuer and Herbert Beckhard and completed in 1959.
It is a visually impressive but also practical house, made of exquisitely laid field stone and large expanses of glass.
The plan presents the "binuclear" concept of a central courtyard that separates public areas from private ones.
Hooper II is the application of the Bauhaus concepts rigorously; a masterly delimitation of tense and open spaces that use local natural materials.

What is particularly special about this modern house is the courtyard, which is located in the center of the house and divides the house into two separate wings. When you enter the main door, you can see past the glass walls, through the courtyard, past an opening in the stone wall, to an unobstructed view of Lake Roland.

Each wing has separate functions. In the north wing of the house there are the bedrooms, the bathroom and the children's playroom; while in the south wing of the house there is the living room, the dining room and the kitchen. As Breuer observed, "You want to live with children, but you also want to be free of them, and they want to be free of you." The thick stone walls even have an impressive noise management system, so that adults can entertain guests in the south wing without disturbing the children in the north wing.

The exterior is mainly composed of stone and metal, but almost every room has an entire wall made of a glass door sliding from floor to ceiling. The construction period was the first era of insulating glass, the doors are made of 1/4 inch flat glass and remain clean and transparent even after 50 years. Overall, the house integrates perfectly with the surrounding forest.