‘One House Per Day’ Catalogs an Architect’s Ongoing Social Media Experiment
Review: ‘One House Per Day’ by Andrew Bruno
“I had been trying to get into the habit of drawing daily on a number of occasions,” architect Andrew Bruno explains. “But I’m not someone who has a lot of discipline. Posting on Instagram to a public audience was a way to keep me accountable.” Bruno’s new book, One House Per Day, collects the first 365 drawings from his self-initiated social media experiment to design, sketch, and share a single dwelling every day. Since his first post in January 2020, Bruno’s account (@one_house_per_day) has amassed a following of over 47,000—and the drawings keep coming.
Given the project’s original medium, the book fittingly takes the shape of a 7½-by-7½-inch square. Opening with a foreword by Keith Krumwiede and two thoughtful written contributions by Malcolm Rio and the duo Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro, One House Per Day then launches into a steady stream of drawings—each page represents one post, composed of an axonometric, plan, and section of a single domestic design—before closing with reflections by Clark Thenhaus and the author.
The collection of illustrations, supplemented by an index of succinct descriptions, reads like a diary of Bruno’s daily musings. House no. 150 was inspired by Reyner Banham’s 1965 essay “A Home is not a House,” which the author happened to be reading. About a month later, when Bruno first learned of Anni Albers’s work with textiles, he set himself the task of scrawling a house that used fabric extensively (House no. 185). Reinventions of well-known house types—the courtyard, the saltbox, and the A-frame—pop up, and, as readers leaf through the pages, they might even see entire genealogies begin to unfold.
Some of the houses, like those of endlessly matrixed rooms, seem terrifying to inhabit. Others are quirky and imaginative. A few, simply put, would not work well as abodes. Or would they? This unpretentious compendium is a welcome reminder that novel ideas, and the occasional solutions left in their wake, start with the stroke of a pencil.
Looking for quick answers on architecture and design topics?
Try Ask RECORD, our new smart AI search tool.
Ask RECORD →
Looking for a reprint of this article?
From high-res PDFs to custom plaques, order your copy today!
