A warning: Don’t bother hunting for it because it’s on a private lake about an hour outside of Houston, and if you venture onto the property uninvited, the caretaker is liable to shoot you before you get close. He might be the least of your problems, anyway. That lake is patrolled by hungry alligators, the weedy shore is rife with venomous snakes, buzzards circle overhead, and even if you do manage to get inside the house, the welcome committee will be a swarm of angry bees and spiders the size of your fist.
It was not always this way. When the so-called House of the Century rose from the swampy earth back in the early 1970s, it arrived as a vision of the future, a biomorphic experiment in modern living. Back then it was a bright white jumble on the shoreline, and depending on your angle of approach, it looked like either a man's erect genitalia or a giant schnoz.
Although it seems inconceivable, the phallic house was commissioned by a female arts patron as a retreat for her family.
And if the house were not striking enough on its own, the first sight of it came across a small decorative pond with 100 old television sets poking above its surface, a flock of otherworldly electronic ducks migrating to some fantasy techno universe.
Today, this futuristic house is a decaying relic of the past, and its future is a subject of concern and conjecture. Its white surface has long peeled off, leaving a bunkerlike gray cement shell, with vines climbing up its bulbous forms. The 50-foot Plexiglas tube walkway through which you entered, traveling over a beam of light, is gone, its only remnant a concrete foundation strip that peeps up out of the grass leading to the boarded-up front door. Most of the windows are boarded up, too, shot out by daring locals. The decorative pond is dried up, and the TVs are nowhere to be found.
Inside, the thick foam padding that once coated the walls has been ripped out, along with its upholstered covering. The furnishings are gone, too, though the built-in dining table remains. To eat at the curvy chunk of molded wood, you sat on the floor, with your feet in a recessed trough beneath the table. Good luck if you want to climb the rusty metal oil-rig ladder to the bedrooms upstairs. But then, even when the house was new, few bothered to make that trip.
The idea was always to do something a little bit radical, but the woman who built it had not planned for such a brazen experiment in the avant-garde. Her name was Marilyn Oshman, and she had told her architects she just wanted a lake house where she could relax with her husband and kids on weekends.
“They knew the family,” she says now. “There was a man and a woman and two children. I said do what you want. Never in a million years did I think they’d come out with a penis.”
But that is what she got, and she adored it from the start, even if her husband didn’t approve, and even if it was less than functional. In truth, she knew she would be getting something unconventional, even if she didn’t realize just how unconventional it would be. That was why she had commissioned an experimental architecture collective to design and build it. They called themselves Ant Farm.
The group is best known for Cadillac Ranch, the 1974 roadside installation outside of Amarillo, in which 10 vintage Cadillacs are half-buried nose-first at a rakish angle. The founders were Doug Michels and Chip Lord, and they had come together in San Francisco in the summer of 1968. It was an anti-authoritarian moment of underground art, underground theater and underground literature. They, in turn, would do underground architecture, the phrase suggesting both their radical ideas and their organic sensibility. “Like an ant farm?” a friend asked.
The name stuck. It made them sound like a rock band, and that was exactly what they were, but they made architecture, not music.
A weird eye
Marilyn Oshman wasn’t quite a radical, but she was always a bit different from the typical Houston debutante. In 1917, her father, Jack Oshman, founded the sporting goods chain that carried the family name. He liked to fish and he liked to shoot, and he expected the same of his two daughters.
That was unusual for a nice Jewish girl, and it was definitely unexpected when she went off to Finch College, the tony school for women on New York’s Upper East Side. Her friends snickered. “They would say, ‘I never heard of a girl like that, who would go out fishing with a boy,’” she says. The boy she liked to fish with was Alvin Lubetkin, a Harvard-educated stockbroker. They married and moved back to Houston, where he joined the family business. He was good at it, transforming her father’s local chainlet into a national sporting goods giant.
Life was good, but she was not content. “I had a nice house, a wonderful family life,” she says, “but I was getting bored.” Back in college, she had developed an interest in contemporary art. Finch emphasized art education, and one of her teachers was Ivan Karp, who introduced her to the work of artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whom he represented at the Leo Castelli gallery.
When she tried to convince her mother to buy a Johns sculpture of a bronzed Savarin coffee can, she was shot down. “My mother said, ‘I am not spending $5,000 on this.’ I had a weird eye from the beginning.” Weird, perhaps, but also sharp. Today that piece is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York. And Oshman, after gaining her independence, built a collection that includes works by artists ranging from Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera to John Chamberlain and Edward Kienholz.
But back in 1970, Oshman was volunteering at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum when a group of young men with long hair and ripped jeans walked in and asked to speak to the director. He wasn’t there, and nobody else on the small staff was interested in hearing about their work. But Oshman was intrigued by their strange car — a customized Austin-Healey painted school-bus yellow — and their outlandish projects for inflatable objects and nomadic buildings.
“She was just a little bit older than us, from our same generation, but from a very different cultural milieu, because we were cultural renegades,” says Lord, who now lives in San Francisco and is a professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“The guys and I talked for a few minutes and they were surprised that I knew a few things,” she says. Her colleagues at the museum weren’t so impressed. “One of my friends said, ‘What are you doing in a room with those horrible looking boys?’ And that was the beginning of a huge turn in my life.”
Space cowboys
That encounter was instrumental for the members of Ant Farm as well, and in particular for its two founding members, Michels and Lord. They had first communicated as architecture students — Michels was at Yale, Lord at Tulane — when their design work was each included in an architecture magazine. Michels had sent Lord a teasing note, making fun of his project. Lord responded by inviting Michels to lecture at Tulane.
They remained in touch, and reunited in San Francisco, where they had moved independently, drawn to the city that was the epicenter of the American counterculture. Their generation was tuning in and turning on, and Ant Farm was there to build the environments in which they could do so. Or they would help their fellow travelers build for themselves. Their Inflatocookbook was a catalog of designs for inflatable structures, a plastic architecture that was a literal and figurative rejection of the rigidity of conventional building.
The inspiration, or one of them, was the Whole Earth Catalog and its founding editor Stewart Brand, who commissioned them to build a giant plastic pillow, 50 feet on each side, that served as a lounge pad for the hippie set. It debuted on the first Earth Day, in 1970.
Oshman was no hippie, but when Michels and Lord walked into the Contemporary Arts Museum she was charmed, and wanted to support them. She found an opportunity in a benefit for the museum held at the Alley Theatre. For the event, she arranged for the group to mount an installation in one of the theater's darkened rooms. They called the piece Space Cowboy Meets Plastic Businessman, and it called for attendees to be ushered into a chamber festooned with American flags, while members of Ant Farm, decked out in white jumpsuits with miner's lamp helmets, cavorted to Steve Miller's hit single "Space Cowboy."
What did it all mean? Ostensibly, it was a commentary on American consumerism, media, conformity and the space program, though the exact point wasn’t quite clear. But intellectual precision wasn’t the point. As the architect Robert Venturi, one of their primary influences, had written, “I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.” Richness they had covered, and spectacle too. It was as if they had channeled P.T. Barnum through Marshall McLuhan. “They were out there swinging in the ozone, they were so radical,” says Oshman.
Ant Farm’s work was up in the air, and they were often high themselves, though Oshman could be naïve on the subject. One evening, Michels asked her if she “turned on,” and she replied that the electrical outlets were in the living room.
The Alley piece was successful enough that she sponsored their next project, TruckStop, a proposal to put inflatable shelters in rest areas around the country, spaces where travelers could groove out on the nomadic journeys that would define their Age of Aquarius lifestyle.
‘Good Taste’
It was another year and a half before Oshman would commission them to build a house. In that time, Michels took a trip to find himself in India, and Lord returned with the other Ant Farm members to San Francisco. When Michels stopped in Houston on his return from abroad, he found Oshman sick in bed. To cheer her up, he painted her room bright yellow. When he learned that she was interested in a lake house, he suggested Ant Farm take on the commission.
“It was really about their relationship, initially,” says Lord. “It wasn’t a romantic relationship, but there was seduction involved in getting her to trust this group with a substantial project.”
Over the next few months, as Michels traveled back and forth to San Francisco, she received a series of colorful drawings and sketches, each more fanciful than the last, many stamped with the Ant Farm mantra that was also Michels' vanity license plate: 42MARO.
One looked like a giant chicken, another like a turtle and another still like an amoeba. One version had legs that lifted it off the ground. In another it was part buried, with a submarine bubble room that projected out under the lake, so you could watch the fish and the alligators. And then there was the version that looked like some kind of monster that had emerged from the muck, draped with vines and with yellow domes for eyes.
“We called it the swamp creature, but we didn’t think that would go over well with Marilyn,” says Lord.
The shapes were imaginative, and so were the details. A proposal for the front door listed specifications including: electrified amber spheres; chrome hinges; teak wood; mirrored and yellow Plexiglas bubble windows; a moose antler doorknob; and a revolving built-in globe. This was all labeled under the rubric “Good Taste.”
The inspirations were many. Automotive styling; the Apollo program; the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi; and above all Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome and honorary captain of what he called Spaceship Earth. Michels and Lord were so enamored with Fuller that they quite literally kidnapped him. Fuller had been scheduled to fly in to deliver a lecture for the engineering school at the University of Houston. Michels and Lord rented a limo, then called in to the school, impersonating Fuller’s assistant, to cancel his ride from the airport, and picked him up themselves. (They eventually took him to his lecture, and Fuller was unaware of his own abduction.)
When Michels and the rest of the team finally landed on the final scheme, a cheeky shaft with biomorphic globes at its sides, they presented the model to Oshman — in the form of a cake.
A bulbous boat
How they would turn that cake into an actual building was another matter. Neither Lord nor Michels had any meaningful experience building. They sent it out for bids to local contractors, and there were no takers for such a bizarre project.
But there just happened to be someone in Houston with home building experience, and he shared their radical sensibility. His name was Richard Jost, and he was the son of a California home building contractor. When he wasn’t building houses, Jost played basketball and earned a scholarship to the University of Houston to play for the legendary coach Guy Lewis. Then the war in Vietnam intervened. He was drafted into the Army before he could graduate, spent two years in Army intelligence, and then returned to Houston to study architecture. While back in school, he won a commission to build an exhibit for a home-building convention. His project: a 40-foot-tall structure made entirely of Styrofoam.
Yet even Jost didn’t think what Michels and Lord had come up with was plausible. “It was crazy,” he recalls. “I thought it would be amazing, but how the hell are we going to build something like that?”
The answer was to construct it out of ferro-cement, a technique borrowed from boat building. That meant creating a frame of curved metal pipes set 3 feet apart, covering them with eight layers of chicken wire, and then filling that shell with cement.
They did it all themselves, with the help of their friends, beginning work on Jan. 1, 1972. They lived out of a rented house in nearby Angleton, and subsisted to an unhealthy degree on Texas barbecue. “There was a lot of dope smoking during the process,” says Lord. “Working during the day and smoking weed and designing at night.” The initial budget was $40,000, though it cost well more than that in the end. Alvin Lubetkin agreed to pay them $5 an hour for labor on what he dubbed, tongue-in-cheek, “The House of the Century.” The Ant Farmers called him their “jovial archenemy.”
When they were done it was truly something to behold, a glowing visitor from a more libertine galaxy. From that Plexiglas tube entry, with its light-beam catwalk, guests crossed into the house on a surreal bridge in the shape of an enormous human tongue. The swampy climate outside gave way to a womblike sense of comfort and enclosure. There was warm wood flooring (they repurposed the formwork that held up the metal frame as they were building), padded walls (like the interior of a 1950s Cadillac) and an orangey glow from tinted windows.
In plan, it was divided into three sections, a central tower flanked by the two bulbous sides. In the left bulb was the kitchen, with a television installed above the sink — something unheard of, then — and the right bulb was the living space, with swoopy built-in furniture and a large eye-shaped picture window looking out onto the lake.
The three-story central shaft held the fireplace and bathroom on the ground floor, and the bedrooms above. That bathroom was outrageous in its own way, with a tub of molded wood and a toilet tank that was translucent yellow. All of the pipes were clear plastic, so as to illustrate the operations of the body, both human and architectural. As a whole, it looked more like a Dr. Seuss character than a work of design.
Above, there were two stories of bedrooms; for the kids on the second story, and for Marilyn and Alvin on the third, the floors all covered over in vinyl, and the beds built into the floor. Large porthole windows looked out. At night they appeared like giant headlights.
To cap it all off was a spire sticking out above the roof, like a submarine’s periscope, with a chimney for the fireplace, cameras, floodlights and an intercom system.
“It was basically an acid trip about what a car turned into a spaceship could be,” says Jorge Otero-Pailos, director of Columbia University’s architectural preservation program, who has investigated the house.
Leaving reality
It was, inarguably, a fantastic vision, something entirely unique. There was just one problem: You could hardly live in it. “It was not comfortable, to be honest,” says Oshman.
There were any number of issues. The bathroom sink drained into the tub, for instance. The ship-style ladder to the upper floors was a bigger problem. To climb up 30 feet on its curving rungs was more of a circus act than something you could do with any kind of regularity, and if you were trying to carry something up with you, it was all but impossible.
If you did make it up, there was another problem: the heat. As any physics student knows, hot air rises, and the house’s meager air conditioning didn’t reach the upper floors. “It was hot as hell up there,” says Oshman. “I slept there once.”
But that didn’t mean the family didn’t use it. Oshman’s sister had built her own conventional house on the lake, so the House of the Century could be the place they’d gather during the day, and at night they could decamp to more comfortable sleeping quarters next door.
The kids loved it, and it was great for throwing parties. “It didn’t look like anyone else’s lake house,” says Oshman’s son, Andy Lubetkin. “You can imagine the impact it had on my 10-year-old friends.”
The house was childlike, but there was also something adult about it, and that too was an attraction. “It was a place where people would let themselves go, because you had left civilization — and you may have left reality,” says Lubetkin.
When news began to filter out about the house, it became a local sensation and then a national curiosity. Magazine editors and fashion directors loved shooting it. Woody Allen wanted to use it as a setting for his futuristic comedy Sleeper, but that didn't work out. Inevitably, Playboy arrived to document this most erotic of houses, featuring it in December 1973. It called the house a "time machine," but due either to profound naivete or extraordinary restraint neglected to mention the fact that it looked like a penis.
That pictorial was an unexpected embarrassment for Oshman, not because she had any problem with the magazine, but that people seemed to think she was the petite brunette pictured in the tub, with soap bubbles not covering much of anything. (No, it wasn’t her.)
But she was never embarrassed about the house, and never regretted building it, regardless of its functional infelicities or the flak she took from her friends. “Her peers in the early 1970s considered [it] not only a folly but a foolish and contemptible waste of effort — and told her so in front of other people,” says Stephen Fox, the dean of Houston architectural history.
Ant Farm was an experimental collective, and the house, in its own way, was an experiment for Oshman. “The reason I wanted to do this was to find out how hard it would be to get the best from an artist. What does it take to get an artist to give his all, and let’s assume finances are not part of it,” she says. “You can look at it any way you want. My mother, my father, my husband all thought I spent too much on it. It’s just a work of art. I never knew what to call it, but I loved it.”
But in allowing Ant Farm to realize their ideas, Oshman was making her own statement. “It was also my mom’s personal self-expression at the time,” says Lubetkin, "her way of saying, ‘This is what my house looks like.’”
The house gave Ant Farm a bit of notoriety, which they would redouble with a series of art performances masquerading as stunts. The most prominent was Media Burn, in which Michels and Lord drove what they called a phantom dream car (in fact, a modified 1959 Cadillac Biarritz convertible, with a Plexiglas bubble over the seats and a giant tail fin, into a stack of televisions. The whole thing was captured on video. A postcard of the car rushing into the flaming sets became an iconic staple of the period, a 3x5-inch commentary on America's obsession with media-driven pseudo-events.
They followed that up with something even more provocative: a filmed re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. They had the audacity to stage it in Dealey Plaza, and on the anniversary of the event in 1975. The piece, done in collaboration with the art troupe T. R. Uthco [i.e., Truth Co.], was titled The Eternal Frame. They even purchased a 1963 Lincoln convertible limousine, which they modified for maximum verisimilitude. Michels, in pink Chanel, played the first lady.
“Somehow the idea came up after a dinner and it was just kind of frightening to think about doing it,” says Lord. “I think we had a naïve idea that the only way to get to the truth of the assassination was to re-enact it.”
There were other projects, most famously Cadillac Ranch, but Ant Farm’s run was short. They broke up in 1978, exactly 10 years after Michels and Lord had founded the group. “It was like a band. There was a woman involved,” says Lord. But the real blow was a fire that destroyed their Sausalito studio. The members moved on, but remained friends, and then Michels died from a fall while hiking in Australia in 2003.
A beautiful relic
The golden years were similarly short for the House of the Century, brought to an abrupt halt when Marilyn and Alvin split in the late 1970s. It was one thing to put up with a house that was less than functional, but the added psychological weight of a divided family was too much for its ferro-concrete shell to bear.
“The house was a casualty of the divorce,” says Lubetkin. “That really reduced the amount of time we went down there, and it started to fall into disrepair.”
That familial trauma was redoubled by natural calamity in 1985, when a flood of the Brazos sent lake water pouring in, submerging the house in several feet of water. That standing water ruined the interiors, which had to be ripped out.
Even before that there had been problems. Condensation from the metal formwork and upholstery staples seeped into the foam of the padded walls. In 1978, Oshman had spent some $35,000 to put a “moisture shield” on the building. That entailed covering it in layers of rubber and polyurethane, and then spraying over that with a coat of gunite. And so the house today, once a relatively simple shell, is now the architectural equivalent of a Russian nesting doll.
That is no small irony. The house, conceived as an extension of Ant Farm’s ideas about an inflatable, nomadic architecture, had become a veritable concrete bunker, a brutal monument of solemnity and solidity.
Even in this transformed state, it is an undeniably special place. “As a relic, it’s beautiful, and that’s the way I think about it,” says Jost, who now lives in New Mexico. “What’s left is wonderful.”
The question is what to do with it.
A time capsule
It seems fitting that this challenge confronts Oshman, as she has become a kind of guardian mother of Houston folk architecture. In the early 1980s, with the encouragement of her friend and mentor Dominique de Menil, she founded a nonprofit to save and maintain the Orange Show, a loopy environment of found objects built by a local mail carrier, Jeff McKissack, between 1957 and 1979.
To that she added another Houston landmark, the Beer Can House, a bungalow covered in flattened beer cans between 1968 and 1986 by a retired railroad worker. The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art now manages both of those monuments, along with Smither Park, a sprawling landscape of winding paths and whimsical mosaics created by 300 local artists, and Houston’s annual Art Car Parade.
The House of the Century is a more difficult project than those Houston houses. It is a preservationist’s conundrum, as much a test of philosophy as it is of practicality. Is it a house or a work of art? Should the building be restored to its original condition or should it remain a relic, either cleaned up or left alone? Should it stay where it is, or should it be moved to a place where it would be more accessible to the public? Or maybe some museum could just build a replica — it would make a neat cafe — and let the original rot in place.
If there is any consensus, it is that the house should be saved. “As fragile, flawed, and useless as the House of the Century is,” says Stephen Fox, “it marks a milestone in American architectural culture as a materialization of the countercultural, hippie, liberated ethos of the 1970s.”
The house exists in a trust controlled by Oshman and her children. They would like it to go to some institution, preferably in Houston, that would make it accessible to the public. Rising waters in the lake are now an existential danger. “Within five to 10 years it could be flooded,” says Oshman.
“Moving the house off of that land makes a lot of sense, and to a place that has water, where you can re-create that swampy environment,” says Otero-Pailos. “You try to make it into a cool environment that people could enter into and appreciate that moment in time, like a time capsule.”
Moving it would also be a realization of Ant Farm’s original dream of a nomadic architecture.
But for Lord, moving the house away from the lake would mean losing too much of its identity, which is so closely tied to its place. “I think it’s very important that the site on the lake be maintained,” he says. “I’m not in favor of moving it to Houston.”
It’s well past time to begin these discussions, but it might be premature to answer them.
Because of its unorthodox design and construction, there are no proper technical drawings of the house, nor are there comprehensive records of its interiors. “As a first step towards a full restoration, I would recommend that the house be properly documented,” says Otero-Pailos.
That seems only right. From the outset, the House of the Century was a kind of retro-project, taking on America’s postwar history as it suggested new directions for the future. Now, to secure the house for another century, it’s time to look back at its past.
It’s quite a view.
Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News, a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Architecture.
