Red House and Modernization

Red House was co-designed and built by life-long friends, co-workers Philip Webb and William Morris in 1860. It is located in a quiet neighbourhood in Bexleyheath, Southeast London. Being served as a private, non-commercial family house, the Red House was built in a mixed style of Gothic, vernacular and Classical, sometimes a Neo-Gothic or Gothic revival style since Webb himself was a Neo-Gothic architect by definition. In response to a rapid industrial society in England, Romanticist Morris and Neo-gothic architect Webb had located the house in the countryside of London with its maximized intimacy with nature, the orchard.

Had been heavily influenced by medievalism he saw in Oxford University, Morris was a romantic architect in the sense of utopian, whereas Webb was practical and vernacular, and Red House is a complex fusion of both of them. Though for decades scholars, artists and architects have been discussing, It is hard to define the genre of the Red House since Webb, who had been trained in Gothic-revival tradition, refused to confine his work within any form. However, whether the romanticism or the vernacular sense of life was both on the same track against modernization.

However, unlike radical social movements in today’s world, there was no declaration of battle between Red House and the industrial world, Morris and Webb’ modest and poetic personal traits showed on their Red House. The house is located in the centre of a symmetrical botanic garden. Today if a person enters the yard through the door, the view can immediately…