There are some unconventional qualities about Wallace Neff's Bubble Houses from the 1940s and 1950s that immediately grab one's attention. They aren't square, anywhere, and they have bubbly white ceilings. Furniture cannot be pushed up against the walls unless it, too, is curved.

The book No Nails, No Lumber documents these Bubble House experiments, and it's Character Approved first and foremost for reminding us that architecture, and homes, can be made out of almost anything. And in the middle of the last century, Wallace Neff was experimenting with a way to make them out of something completely new.

The houses were made by spraying a form of concrete onto a shell temporarily held in place by a room-sized balloon (a construction technique that is, of course, not normal for suburban houses). After more than 70 years of conventional and highly standardized suburban construction (2x4s nailed together, siding, pitched roof with asphalt shingles), the Bubble Houses are almost shocking to our sensibilities. Wallace Neff's designs are still new, and still unconventional, and the only thing that gives them away as antiques is the furniture in the photographs.

[Image: Flux]