Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home! There's no place like home,' the quote written by Payne shows how dear a home is to a person. Whereas a house is referred to as a place of dwelling, a home is more than that. A home is what a person makes of it; a home is given life by the dweller, making the home part of him or her. A home is more than just shelter or a place to eat and relax, it offers security and comfort to the dweller, it allows the dweller to personalize it, to customize, making it his or hers.
The bulk of architecture evident in 1975 centered on one major theme, the environment. Although there were other topics that surfaced throughout the year, they were minor ones compared to how often issues dealing with the environment showed up. More specifically, two particular themes were evident, recycling and the use of natural energy.
Some may ask why the sudden interest in the environment? The answer is simple; looking back a couple of years an energy crisis crippled the nation in October of 1973. People not only did this to aid nature, moreover people wanted to be more independent in case future energy crises should arise.
In addition to just reusing old building materials, recycling was executed on a large scale by renovating old buildings instead of knocking them down and building from scratch. Besides recycling, steps were taken in the creative and high-tech arenas to permit the use of natural energy. As mentioned before, these two issues were not the only ones that were covered during the year, but they were by far given the most exposure.
There were of course different styles of housing employed that year. But what most people focused on were barns, and ingeniously designed vertical houses that provided large amounts of living space on small plots of land. Other than that, a few horizontal houses were built to allow more area for solar energy panels.
While most of the projects dealing with barns were renovations, the first project presented that year in House and Garden dealt with an easy to construct pre-fabricated barn house. Barn houses were popular back then because they provided a vast open living space. This allowed its dwellers to organize the room in a variety of ways to suit their tastes. This particular barn house however offered more, it was economically viable, allowed for easy expansion, and allowed the owner to easily position it in anyway desired on the property. (January 46)
Later on in the year, a barn built with recycled materials was featured. The new barn was built on a plot of land that was long left abandoned. It used old wood from other old barns for its walls, roof and siding. Other barns that year did not go to that extreme of building an entirely new barn from old materials. Rather, most of them were just renovated. In various articles in the same year four barns were renovated into a house, a studio, a guest cottage, and a dance studio.
Barns were not the only buildings renovated, in addition the same owners who transformed one of the barns into a dance studio renovated a gardener's cottage into an art studio. (July 50) One couple went as far as to totally renovate an old inn into a weekend house by themselves with help from a local contractor for major jobs. However, in that particular project, it was ...