Miller, Henry F., House

History

The house was designed and built in 1948-1949 by Henry F. Miller as a thesis project for a Master of Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture. The house was one of the areas first modern houses and was featured in the New Haven Register as "The House of Tomorrow". It was open to visitors for a few weeks after completion to raise funds for the New Haven Boy's Club. It was viewed with "wild anticipation," and about 25,000 people paid a small admission to see it. The house was also covered in House Beautiful as part of a series on "The New American Style.".

This house embodies many characteristics of the International Style, as adapted to the single-family suburban house, including an open plan with movable walls, flat roof, inclusion of modern conveniences, careful attention to environmental and functional considerations, avoidance of ornament, and extensive use of glass. The house was designed to take full advantage of its unique site on the side of a hill. Connecticut has an unusually large concentration of international style houses, including the most famous, Johnson's Glass House. Originally developed in Europe as a new system of building that took advantage of modern technological advances and embraced an unornamented, machine-made esthetic transcending regional or national characteristics, the International Style absorbed some natural materials and regional features in the years just before and after World War II.

The following information was a portion of the National Register of Historic Places application form compiled by Christopher Wigren, Architectural Historian, Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, Vice President.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The official nomination form is linked under Sources.