William Morgan's Dune House
Two compact dwellings buried in an oceanfront dune at Atlantic Beach, Florida — an example of American earth-sheltered residential design.
Residential Design: William Morgan and modern homes
Explore William Morgan’s residential work and the ideas behind earth-sheltered, climate-responsive homes.
William N. Morgan (1930–2016) was a Florida architect whose houses set living space into the land rather than on top of it.
He schooled himself in landscape, terrain and climate — building into the ground decades before the word “green” attached itself to architecture. Paraphrased from the USModernist biography
Morgan, elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard in the early 1950s and worked for Paul Rudolph before establishing his own Jacksonville practice. Over a long career his firm is credited with more than two hundred built projects and Morgan himself with over a hundred design awards, alongside five books on indigenous architecture — an interest that fed his lifelong attention to how a building answers its site.
This address once belonged to that practice, and rather than erase the history we document it honestly. Where we describe the work we rely on published accounts — chiefly the USModernist biography and the archived original project page — and we neither reproduce their photographs nor claim any working relationship with the former firm.
The one project we treat at length is the small work that best explains his method.
Understanding earth-sheltered homes
The general design idea behind the Dune House — its appeal, and the moisture and site demands that make it harder than it looks.