The undertones of America’s most widely celebrated houses read like a list of crimes:
some built by slave owners; others by hyper-wealthy tycoons; a widely celebrated house designed by and for a Nazi supporter; another by a man whose employee was driven to murder his whole family for unknown reasons; a pure white modernist house designed by man driven out of his own office after decades of sexual predation.
And on and on.
Potential counterexamples exist of houses less popular today that were popular in their own time and tell stories of kind designers, like a strong 18th-century house by a river, built by a father for his genius daughter, or two others houses by rivers, designed to facilitate the cultivation, nurturing, and sharing of plants. But there aren’t many, and America is waiting for more.
