Henry F. Miller House - Background

Background

Miller was an architecture student at Yale and chose to design a modern house for his thesis project. Upon completion, Miller and his wife lived in the house. As their family grew the Millers added a new master bedroom, study, and playroom in 1959, but the addition carefully followed the lines and style of the original.

In the New Haven area, George Kreye, a professor of German at Yale, had designed an international style house in 1935. Of the postwar houses, the Miller house was one of the first, but others soon joined it. Also in Orange was the Clark house, designed by Marcel Breuer and completed in 1951, utilizing the rough fieldstone and binuclear plan that were typical of Breuer's work at that time. In other New Haven suburbs, modern houses were built by young architects like Peter Hale, Carlton Granberry, King-lui Wu and Robert Coolidge or by established architects like Douglas Orr who adopted Modernism. Vincent Scully designed his own house in Woodbridge.

The Miller house helped the spread of Modern architecture in Connecticut and the United States. Yale was one of the leading architecture schools in promoting the Modern movement, and its faculty and students made the New Haven area a center of post-war Modernism in Connecticut and the United States.

In the House Beautiful article on the Miller house as part of that magazine's ongoing coverage of what it called "the New American Style", the article stressed economy and technology in addition to aesthetics. Its opening also suggests the difficulty of convincing average Americans to consider Modern architecture:

The American Dream: — as much luxury as possible — for as little money as possible. Like all dreams, this one won't come true by just wishing. You have to do what this Connecticut family did — work at it. They parked their prejudices, studied all the advanced techniques in home building, and applied them. Result: 2,152 sq ft (199.9 m2). of luxury for $25,000.

In 1985, the Miller house was included in an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture called "Ten Years Out." The exhibition showed buildings designed by alumni of the school in their first ten years after graduation. The Miller house was the earliest work in the show.