ABSTRACT

The presentations in the foregoing chapters of this book have concentrated on houses of the Modern Movement, especially the semi-detached and terraced houses of the inter-war period. A wide variety of houses have been encountered, ranging from the uncompromisingly Modernist, such as Lescaze’s housing for workers at the Dartington Estate (Chapter 5) and Ward’s semi-detached house at Ruislip (Chapter 11), to the more restrained designs at, for example, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Chapter 11) and Petts Wood (Chapter 12). With some justication, these latter examples could equally well be classied as Art Deco rather than Modernist, but dividing lines between Modernist and Art Deco architecture have become blurred in recent years, as witnessed in a number of important books on the subject, for example Bayer (1992), Craneld (2001), Hines (2003) and Powers (2005). It may be useful, nevertheless, to consider some of the eye-catching dierences between the purist Modernist houses and their Art Deco counterparts, including the Suntrap houses. The illustrations in Fig. 15.1 show examples of the three categories: Modernist, Art Deco and Suntrap. The following paragraphs will explain the background for the introduction of the Art Deco style to at-roofed houses, and the concurrent emergence of its hipped-roof variant, the Suntrap house.