Hanna House

The Hanna House is a house designed for Paul and Jean Hanna at Stanford by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was made in 1936, but it had a very modern feel.

It's often called the "honeycomb house" because the house was designed to be hexagonal rather than square. The floor tiles are all hexagons; the house as a whole is a hexagon; the rooms, the furniture, and everything else is hexagonal.

Since the Hanna House is famous-ish (well, it has a Wikipedia page), every picture that I took can also be found with a Google image search for [hanna house stanford], so I will refrain from using any more.

The house was designed with organic architecture in mind. That means that it tries to be a part of the landscape. It uses simple, local materials (wood, bricks, and glass, mostly), and it includes natural features in its architecture (there are trees sticking up out of some parts of the house).

It also uses horizontality -- most stuff is laid out horizontally rather than vertically. There is very fine detail in this. For instance, the horizontal parts of the wooden frames for the windows jut out to emphasize the horizontal lines, and the mortar in the bricks is flush with the bricks vertically but dug out horizontally, so there are clear horizontal lines in the bricks. Also, there aren't gutters (to avoid disrupting the horizontality of the roof), which would be kind of awkward if it rained. Thankfully, it's Stanford, so it's always sunny.

The house has high ceilings, but there are compression ceilings between most of the rooms (a low ceiling before a high ceiling) so that when you enter the new room, it feels dramatically big.

It was a very cool space overall -- if you're ever planning a trip to the Stanford area, I highly encourage getting a tour. It's free for Stanford students and $10 for other folks, but you might need to arrange it a while in advance.