ABSTRACT
William Morris’s houses are cultural constructions, since they are not only places where the choice of materials is charged with a high symbolic value, but also “recipients for ideals”; they are houses embodying a strong tension between the public and the private sphere, between hospitality and separatism. My working hypothesis is that the architecture of both Red House and Kelmscott Manor expresses Morris’s utopian thought; more precisely, the two houses are experiments inextricably connected with the development of his socialist ideals. My enquiry into the structural elements of his houses is aimed at pointing out dialectical, even controversial issues connected with his utopian socialism; interestingly enough, such issues come out prominently from his lectures, essays and utopian romance, News from Nowhere (1890). The architectural features and planimetry of the two houses can thus be regarded as visualizations of his theoretical views on the living space. Nevertheless, they enclose a series of contradictions, which reveal not only how Morris strenuously attempted to overcome Victorian stereotypes on the concept of the house and on hospitality, but also, and inevitably, how deeply tied his views were to the tradition of vernacular dwellings and country houses. 1 Far from rejecting established notions of the English tradition, Morris tries to revitalize them by injecting his ideas on the Gothic revival and the Arts and Crafts movement. 2 In this perspective, Morris’s houses can be re-considered as the embodiment of various cultural memories which he tries to inter-fuse, but which sometimes clash with each other. These two buildings are icons to be decoded, since they no doubt present original elements which mark the development of modern architecture in England, 3 but they also lend themselves to be read as sites that consolidate some conservative views and myths of an eternally medieval, rural England.
