In the article, ‘A Home is not a House,’ Banham looks at the history of building in the United States as primarily concerned with the shell structure, which does little to protect the user of that interior space from the environment and as a result requires constant energy, service and upkeep. Hence in his opinion, architecture is just providing a shell – a shell that houses all those mechanical utility equipment. He proposes a new way of living on the American frontier instead. The intention involved is to create a new paradigm for how architects in the twenty-first century think about program by looking at various shortcomings in function and aesthetics resultant from the variety of modernist and post-modernist manifestos.

‘A Home is not a House,’ does a good job of diagnosing the general problem in America (poor quality, lots of upkeep, iterations) by looking at the history of housing in the states. Banham states that the home in America has been a shell to conceal and monumentalize the environmental controllers and technologies. Because of this lack of appreciation for interior space, he makes the case that America’s true space of monumentality has always been its exterior and its frontiers. Banham proceeds with a step by step account of how to wean Americans off of shell homes and into frontier homes which become flexible monuments to the natural living where minimal environmental adjusters are used in conjunction with an ever movable power source (the automobile) in order to bring families closer to the natural. The most powerful aspect of the argument for the exterior living condition is that of the variable camp fire where a spectrum of complex conditions are produced by the interactions of the wind, fire and light. Because of its simplicity and ubiquity of the campfire, Banham believes is the next move in American living, while relying heavily on new technologies of control.