Description

“What is a house?” asks Ettore Camesasca,[1] and his answer, summed up in brief here, is “a place to live and a refuge for man” and “everything that has four walls and a roof”. We now have to ask whether these simplified definitions describe the way we live today accurately and adequately. The present analysis of selected houses or buildings makes no claims to be complete. It presents residential accommodation from all over the world, and the ‘house as a place to live’ will be in the foreground. It is difficult to define the term clearly: is the ancient hut already a house, can Laugier’s “primitive hut” after Vitrivius[2] count as a house, as it is essentially a roof made up of twigs between existing trees, instinctively constructed by human beings? Does the term require dimensional limits, so that houses from the feudal period can be excluded as ‘castles’, for example? Are we not already afraid to use the simple term house for the country house type that reached its heyday in the Renaissance as a “villa” (Ital.: ‘house’)? Is it possible that fixed, clichéd ideas about houses and the notions of living associated with them are deeply anchored in our consciousness? And are criteria about houses as strictly defined units still valid in the early 20th century on the large housing estates, a new building type emerging in the wake of revolutionary changes of social and societal living conditions?

Adolf Behne defined the house as a ‘tool’[3] in 1923, and thus associated himself with a general euphoria about technology, not confined only to architects. The generally accepted idea of a fixed unity of progress and technology that drove society in the early 20th century permeated architects’ consciousness world-wide and led to new variations on formulae about the house. The house was to be rethought from the foundations upwards; this meant that new terminologies were needed. Behne stressed the ‘relative’ quality of this tool character[4], in the sense of the rational and functional purpose of an everyday object. So the functional quality of the house was also ascribed to a (‘progressively’) functional spirit, freed from the ballast of outmoded aesthetic ideals with which the pure meaning of the building had become encrusted. Of course, in this context it is essential to mention Le Corbusier’s provocative new formula of the house as a ‘machine à habiter’,[5] though this much misinterpreted concept[6] is intended here only to illustrate the intellectual closeness of critically thinking architects of this period, Le Corbusier being one of the spokesmen. Living in or with the machine, a radical image, throwing overboard the overladen, late 19th century living room, utterly, bombastically plushy, in which everyone felt compelled to feel like a prince. This metaphor illustrates both a lively, clear mind, cool and rational, and also the precisely-tuned thinking of the coming Taylorized Henry Ford Age.

But it was not in the first place technological developments with an eye on American engineering achievements that were responsible for the emergence of a new awareness of the house, but another American, Frank Lloyd Wright. His country-house ground plans were first seen by European eyes in Wasmuth’s famous biography of Wright’s works[7] as they developed freely into the outdoor space, away from axis and symmetry. Here was the root of a new way of living from functional points of view, discovered and developed by the major architects of the day like Behrens, Gropius, Mendelsohn, Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Oud and Le Corbusier. It can be assumed that Wright’s ground plans opened up the functional ground plan for European architects. Le Corbusier repeatedly emphasized its crucial importance for the overall design of a house. Walter Gropius was influenced by Wright and Le Corbusier. Gropius–like Le Corbusier– was enthusiastic about Taylorism, the efficient enhancement of human performance in working life. His Törten estate in Dessau, Germany, was a prototypical attempt to combine the aspects of housing construction that were most discussed at the time: serial prefabrication, precise working procedures dependent on the machines used, highly economical ground plans and–essential here–retention of the house unit despite terraced arrangement.

One dilemma remained for Behne in the purist and functional house concepts that had emerged since the 1920s and that reflected one of the 20th century’s most important cultural achievements, abstract thought, in consistent architectural terms for the first time: “Academic and historical styles have been abandoned and the concept of the façade has been disposed of. Yet the ‘house’ is still standing.”[8] Hence there was scarcely an architect who was still prepared to apply this old-fashioned term, laden with associations from the past, to his work, and so it is clear to us today how people were struggling to find new terms at the time. Basing himself on Wright, Behne then stated: “No longer a house, but shaped space”,[9] intending to exclude any–possibly prefigurative–formal approach as a determining aspect of the design. Of course, Behne was wrong to be so dogged about this, as we know: the idea of the façade was still current, and people did not think exclusively in functional terms. On the contrary, the premises of pure functionality were increasingly aestheticized, out of dogma came virtue, and so the designed house as object ultimately developed out of the composite space again. Here principles that could be called entirely classical like composition and proportion played a key role, as in the work of Le Corbusier, for example, Gropius, or especially as almost autonomous figurations in the Dutch ‘De Stijl’ group around van Doesburg, Mondrian and Rietveld. The ‘non-façade’ (according to Behne) developed itself on to a highly complex, abstract plane of refined disposition of aperture and surface, and the ground plan into tension-filled, dynamically proportioned spatial assignments, decidedly beyond mere definition of function. This absolutely must be pointed out in our context, as today’s housing, as presented in selection here, is still permeated to a considerable extent by the design principles of that day, ‘classical Modernism’, as will be established more precisely later.

Earlier housing

‘Living’, as life in clearly delineated private surroundings, as we think of it today, found its first ideal in the industrialized countries in the early 19th century bourgeoisie. The cell unit for dwelling was the family, whose sacredness as an aim in life was unchallenged in society, praised by church and state, and subject to the strictest of laws about living together. Husband and wife dutifully followed social statutes about customs, order and morality. Women started to voice their first hesitant critical and emancipatory ideas around 1850,[10] and this was to affect the way people lived in the next century in particular. After the nobility with their feudal residences, the ideal home for upper-class citizens was the prestigious family house with up to 25 rooms, whose vocabulary was often derived from a historical, romantic-mediaeval formal repertory as a castle with towers and battlements or an expressively grand style. In every case, being ‘surrounded by solid walls’ was seen as the image of being socially secure and established as occupants. And the exuberant abundance of the interiors of these houses in the late 19th century was almost like a theatrical performance in its stagey stylistic pluralism. The urban upper middle classes lived in so-called town houses, usually lavish villas on their own land with garden, or in apartments with up to 16 rooms in dense inner-city areas, of course with appropriate accommodation and usually separate entrances and stairs for the servants. But in contrast with this, a large proportion of the population lived in different circumstances: the socially exploited working class (Marx’s proletariat), compelled by industrialization to work a 16-hour day, were crammed together in tenements, often with up to ten people in one room, without their own sanitary facilities and heating, and above all without the luxury of privacy. The upper working classes fared rather better, with their prosperity unmistakably expressed in that housing phenomenon known as the ‘parlour’. This was a living room used for prestigious purposes only, usually unheated, and with the best furniture people could afford, or on hire purchase. This ‘alibi room’ sustained the illusion of belonging to a different, higher social stratum provided a refuge. At that time the rural population, largely peasants, were no better off than the lower working classes housed in the most primitive dwellings, and with a living culture that developed as a ‘culture of poverty’.

In our context, this class society with such clearly visible external features will be illustrated only briefly, to demonstrate the important epoch of emergent stylization and simultaneous negation of dwelling as a background for our present perceptions. The aspect of privacy in particular, which is absolutely taken for granted today, was not greatly heeded even in so-called private bourgeois rooms, rooms for purposes of prestige and the private invitations that were by no means so private. In the lower classes privacy simply did not exist.

Private living in a family unit for the ordinary population, for a couple or an individual, was possible only with the economical mass housing construction that started in the early 20th century after the First World War in the wake of a profound social transformation and generally changed awareness. High-density housing was created on a large scale to accompany increasing population figures, inflated costs and the need to achieve a higher standard of living. Outstanding examples of this period in Germany were Bruno Taut’s large ‘Hufeisen’ (‘Horseshoe’) and ‘Onkel-Toms-Hütte’ housing estates in Berlin, Siemensstadt by Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring and others, and Rudolf Salvisberg’s Reinickendorf, both of them also in Berlin. They were built under the highly committed building councillor Martin Wagner, and offered the socially disadvantaged population the possibility of independent living in a private house for the first time, free from sub-tenants, ‘bedfellows’ and intrusive neighbours . Even though the house, as an additive, almost anonymous unit, offered accommodation of only 48 to 72 m²., it had its own sanitation, usually a balcony and a great deal of light. After a long period of neglect, these estates now offer highly regarded, restored evidence of the first high-density housing, whose architectural and urban quality has outlived fashionable changes, and whose form is a rare and powerful reminder of housing shortages and political and economic instability, but also of the visionary vigour of those who planned and built them.

Contemporary Housing

The housing categories described above, evidence of the markedly class-ridden society of the pre-modern period, with its clear distinctions and forms of self-presentation, no longer exist in this polarized form. Not just social change, but the language of 20th century architecture itself, developed a new image for housing. Hence this collection of contemporary dwellings is not intended to illustrate any qualitative social or architectural classes, but categories following criteria that are as neutral as possible, and do not relate primarily to the quality of the accommodation. So, dependent on the location of the building, the pure usable space available has been divided into three categories in terms of dimensions: firstly, ‘living in a small area’ whose maximum size of 100 m² seems positively luxurious in comparison with the living conditions described above; secondly, ‘classical living’ with a maximum area of 250 m² and the spectrum of average house sizes for the largest section of the population, and thirdly ‘villa living’ with over 250 sq.m., a definition that already suggest a lavish standard for a private home. Finally, a fourth category was added, ‘high-density living’, to show houses that are closely linked and have tight communal qualities. It was important to keep the house as a unit intelligible–to the largest possible extent–as a continuous theme. These categories mean that private living in a house can be related to the earlier conditions described, so that the new values of contemporary living can be demonstrated in their entire spectrum and within entirely fluid limits given the chosen mode of differentiation.

In the buildings in the living in a small area category, the occupants‘ status is definitely not illustrated directly to the outside world, as would overwhelmingly have been the case in former times. Campo Baeza‘s Gaspar House is the most compelling example here of refusal to illustrate, in other words to present itself in terms of prestige. The smooth, unstructured walls do not even evoke the ‘house’ as a recognition pattern, so that it is only possible to assume that there is a place to live in behind them. Although the roofed usable space remains inside our set limits, the courtyards surrounding the living space are part of the living area. Outside is inside at the same time, creating a hybrid figure. Kaufmann’s ‘A+B house’ model tries to interpret living as something more nomadic: his minimal house with only one room, somewhere between a tent and a container, can easily be transported to somewhere else. His elegant standardized design could come from a Fordist conveyor belt, but also does not give anything away about its occupants. Of course, it is impossible to ignore the criticism of housing that is being made with discreet irony here, which takes offence both at the house as an architectural object and also at the anonymous random product that is to be found in so many cases. But it does illustrate a contemporary trend very clearly: an extreme form of individualism, living for oneself, and above all on one’s own.

As early as 1952 a miniature house caused some astonishment, though its owner, Le Corbusier, became famous for some more spectacular buildings. His hut (‘le cabanon’) on the French Riviera consisted of a 16 m² room for two people with fitted wooden furniture and rough pine cladding. Kaufmann’s concept follows Le Corbusier’s plan in its almost spiritually archaic quality, its restriction to a minimum, but not in its uniqueness as an individually designed house, almost with an emphasis on craftsmanship. In our sub-category of ‘urban living’, it becomes clear that small dimensions for a house do not first result from scarce resources, but primarily from lack of space. It is not surprising that all the examples are in Japan, a country whose lack of space led to very densely packed cities, in which the maximum space has to be developed on the smallest possible area. So the architects start to be inventive, and have to create generous spaces vertically, even with the smallest of air spaces in the case of Manabu’s T-Set House and light loggias for Kitayama’s TN House. Despite very cramped circumstances, Ando successfully creates important private outside space as an integral part of living.

The classical living category includes dwellings that meet an average family’s current needs. But the buildings presented certainly do not represent an average in their spatial interpretation and form; on the contrary, they question the house as a classical type. With the Carter/Tucker House and the Peninsula House, the Australian architect Godsell invents new spatial configurations and relations, almost making the interior independent of the external envelope as a spatial structure–a long way from merely additive box-like spaces. In fact he develops homogeneous envelopes in which wall and roof become one in material and form. Thus the classical elements wall and roof acquire a new significance as components to be considered as of equal value. In Souto de Moura’s House in Moledo the house becomes a natural object, subordinating itself to the dominant landscape, expressing a high degree of sensitivity to the genius loci. The building retreats into the dramatic rock formation on the slope, becomes one with its surroundings without abandoning its identity, and also opens up the space to nature on both sides. Here it is not so much the contrasting dialogue that so frequently occurs that is to the fore, but an empathetic togetherness.

In the village context, we find a group of houses that try to interpret the house archetype as a block with a steep roof. This includes Liverani/Molteni with an association-rich ‘barn’ building, taking up the rural house form that has developed into a standard type and illustrating the appropriately clear separation of functions. But its polygonal ground plan organization as a kind of distortion then unmistakably evokes the interpretative plane. Bernhard responds to the surrounding village structure provocatively and impudently, with the pyramid roof withdrawing from the standard type like an asymmetrical pointed cap. It is not just the shape of the roof that homogenizes wall and roof to make a kind of stone pelt, but above all the outer skin of the house, making it possible to form an idea of integrated quality of the interior from the outside. Schlude + Ströhle on the other hand convince with a surprisingly simple solution in the context of anonymous neighbours. Here the gable roof is used consistently classically, to emphasize timelessness by rigid simplification as a design principle. But unusual façade materials and generous interior spaces ultimately make the house seem definitely ‘modern’.

Although the entirely unusual but yet still conventional basic house shape was chosen, ground plan solutions emerge here that shape family life in particular more diversely, and make it more open and richer in the experience offered. Architects like Campo Baeza (Ascencio House and Turegano House), Correa (Gobhai House), Jubert + Santacana (Jordí Cantarell House and Peréz House), Manabu (House in Black) or Sakamoto (Hakuei House) pursue the language of classical Modernism in accordance with the official party line, so to speak, and yet in a very personal way. The continuity of Modernism has developed so expressively and innovatively in Spain in particular in the last twenty years that it can stand as a model for Europe, and indeed beyond. Its influence on the most recent German and above all Japanese architecture cannot be overlooked. It is not just the external, usually white, smooth rendering that indicates such origins, but above all the spirit of Modernism in a liberated ground plan and a wide range of links between spaces, with air spaces and generous apertures. The fact that this timeless Modernism can completely hold its own inside a naturally evolved structure is proved by Morales and Mariscal in Seville (Herrera House), where traditional elements and materials are used extremely skilfully and elegantly.

The living in a villa category, provides an international survey of large houses over 250 m². In open countryside, House on Maui, House in Reno, and Cabernet House by the Legorreta & Legorreta practice present a particularly impressive example, discreetly mingling the abstract-sculptural language of Modernism with typical local features. This group of buildings naturally presents the house as a usually self-referential object, designed in detail, achieving harmony through contrast with nature. This distanced living celebrates loneliness as a principle for living, taking privacy to extremes. Ground plan organization extends from additive, grouped, clearly defined rooms in the case of the architects who have just been mentioned via rooms that expand dramatically into exterior space for Woodard (House in High Bridge) and on to terrestrial hall living for Perrault (Villa St. Cast). His link with nature is expressed in close physical contact through an embedded building on sloping terrain. Here concealing and emphasizing the built substance go hand in hand, the architecture is absorbed, but even in this example distance from the nearest neighbour has to be guaranteed. In contrast with this, Barani (Villa in Southern France) integrates nature in a different way: his building asserts itself proudly in the natural space. Its glass walls can be lowered, which means the occupants can choose whether to live indoors or outdoors. In buildings by OMA and Kruunenberg/Van der Erve, the material quality of the appearance dominates with unusual combinations and a markedly tactile covering, architecture to be felt. OMA’s villas in both Paris (Villa dall’Ava) and Bordeaux (Villa Floirac) display an architecture of sensuous surfaces, often changing with the rooms, providing strong contrasts, and not always mere flattery. The glass house by Kruunenberg/Van der Erve tries to enclose space in a new way with glass as a construction material and to redeem the occupant from his lonely enclosure with the ‘transparency of freedom’. Space and material are dependent in these examples, the wall dissolves, merges, stimulates and challenges, roofs start to move, light reflects, diffuses and blurs boundaries, architecture as an adventure. Overall the group of buildings in the ‘living in a villa’ category impressively illustrates dwelling as living out hedonistic individualism, with the desire for the greatest possible privacy being demonstrated in the great exterior distance from the next building.

The high-density living category consists of buildings that provide an exemplary summary of new ways of living in a group in both landscape, village and urban contexts. Here it was important to choose examples in which the house as a unit remained recognizably communal. Despite largely classical apartment living, the occupants’ ability to identify with their house was to be shown in these house communities. This is still very clear in Pekin’s group houses in Izmit and Sapanca, a living model of a special kind in which the detached house and the apartment block remain in terms of dimensions, but exist in a close group association of limited extent. Thus individual living is combined with social interaction, and living at a distance and in isolation is abandoned. The Indian buildings by Rewal (National Institute of Immunology Housing and British High Commissioning Housing) and Correa (JNC Jawaharlal Nehru Center Housing and JNIDB Housing Group) try to shift the idea of community even more to the fore, appropriately to the mentality. The climate makes it possible to live outdoors; courtyards, balconies and gardens play a key role in communal life, so that neighbourly features are included as well. The Bob 361 architects from Belgium operate similarly to Correa. Their houses are linked together to form living courtyards, though the units themselves are clearly separated by the same process (Patio Houses in Lebbeke). An unusual model for high-density living is to be found in Weimar, Germany, with a master plan for new inner-city living combined with the character of detached houses (Am Horn House, Hopp Houses, Bergmann House). The dimensions of the house are presented in three different versions, to ensure unity within the quarter. As well as this, there is a special homogenizing aspect in the foreground, taking up the language of classical Modern architecture as a traditional continuation of the important Bauhaus tradition in its home town. In contrast, Baumschlager & Eberle (Housing Complex Waldburgstraße, Achslengut Residential Complex), Post und Welters (Herdecke Housing Estate), Léon Wohlhage Wernik (Biesdorf Housing Complex) and Migdal Arquitectos (Paseos Urban Quarter) use the principle of the additive, multi-storey yet almost identical building to achieve an urban character for their city ensembles. Gigon/Guyer (Three Homes in Susenbergstrasse, Broëlberg 1 Residential Development, Broëlberg 8 Residential Development and Two Buildings in Zürich) developed the idea of compactly condensed living to preserve nature in the surrounding area, though the apartment block in the group is still recognizably a house, despite limited dimensions. Koolhaas with OMA surprises us in Japan (Nexus Housing) with perhaps the most unusual concept. Here the density is increased to such an extent that only dwelling directed vertically towards the inside is possible, living around a light-shaft. Here large, two-storey roof living areas provide compensatory space for a wide view of the sky.

To sum up, it is possible to say that living nowadays consists mainly of a wide range of ways of being alone, representing the occupants’ individual life-styles. The individual with his own, distinctive personality, his own clear ideas, but also limitations, unfolds in the space without forcing himself into a socially dictated prestige aesthetic. Spatial conditions today also demonstrate a kind of living that is liberated from the socio-political ideals from former times, and thus freer and more relaxed. Even in high-density residential quarters or places where people live in groups the individual is given enough space to pursue his own ideas about living, often in combination with spaces intended for encounters and communal activities. Space is now transformed in many ways in houses; it flows, dissolves, becomes glassy, extends outdoors, into the sky, is perforated, floats, is compressed and rises. An ‘emptying’ of living space, probably linked with this virtuoso treatment, is to be observed, sparse furnishing dominates, often to the point of starkness, there is no more oppressive, over-full forcing out of space, but a celebration of space. Spatial boundaries can be experienced in their linear form, the liberated space comes to illustrate inner freedom. Space is shaped, as Behne had already remarked, but without falling into a defined functional form. Certainly our current ideas of space and form, and thus of living, are based on the pioneering achievements of the early 20th century, but they have moved away from the associated dogmas. Classical Modernism continues, but it is expanding, being interpreted in unexpected ways, and even transforms the unchangeable, constant, solid elements of the house. And so of course the simple definition–a place to live–introduced at the beginning becomes porous: often a house does not consist of four walls and a roof any longer.

---

Originally published in: Klaus-Peter Gast, Living Plans: New Concepts for Advanced Housing, Birkhäuser, 2005.