Description

Apartment access diagrams – Facade +

In residential architecture, the facade is often the only thing perceived as the
product of architecture. The building volume and the space that it shapes are
inseparably interwoven with the lives of its occupants. By contrast, the facade
can be regarded separately; one can stand opposite it. Because a residential
building – and even its facade – is not produced as fine art but rather fulfills
the needs of its developer and residents, it reflects in no small measure the
social and economic constitution of its society.

The commonalities between the disciplines of architecture and sociology are not
limited to the fact that they concern a complex object that always extends into
other disciplines as well but also, as Stefan Meissner remarked in his essay
“Die Architektur der Gesellschaft” (The architecture of society), include the
fact that this subject is not visible.[1]Society as the object of sociology can always only be observed as partial
aspects but not as a whole. The same is true of architecture, since its object
cannot be observed because it is not possible to define unambiguously what
architecture is.[2]The definitions are as numerous as the opinions about it one gets. One
possible definition of the term might be: architecture is whatever has a facade.
But what is a facade?

According to Lexikon der Weltarchitektur, “facade” (Lat. “facies”: external
appearance) means the

“display side of a structure, usually the side with the main entrance, in the
case of churches usually the west side. (…) A facade can reflect or conceal the
articulation of the building behind it.”[3]

In the encyclopedia cited here, the term “facade” refers, as is usual in the
history of architecture, to the main side from which a building is viewed. Thus
the word’s meaning can be derived from its etymology. The facade determines the
appearance of a building; it can be observed from outside like an image. As they
do with all images, viewers will compare it with their inner eye to other images
they know. In this way the door and the window will be recognized as what they
are. They will become aware that there is not just one space but also another
behind the image of the facade, even if it is not visible. Even if the facade
conceals the building lying behind it, it at least reveals that there are spaces
behind it being shielded from the eye of the observer. The perception of the
image-s marks the beginning of a complex transition between the space in front
of the facade, where the observers are standing, and the space behind the
facade, which the observers imagine with their inner eye. In the case of an
apartment building, the transition is generally one from the public space of the
city to the private interior of the apartments. Leon Battista Alberti described
architecture as a social art that connects citizen and state and hence the
private and the public.[4] The exterior wall with its openings is the element that defines the
quality of this connection. It can assimilate very different scales and meanings
and interweave them. It is part of a spatial sequence that begins with the
observation of the facade from outside and ends with the viewer observing from
inside the building. The essence of the facade is that it consists of an
interaction between outside and inside. The Palazzo Rucellai in Florence,
designed by Alberti in 1458, illustrates this attitude. Whereas a continuous
stone bench at the base speaks to passersby, the facade above it corresponds
with other prestigious buildings in the city. Anyone who studies the question of
the correspondences facade proportions have with the large window openings in
the interior will find that the latter do not so much follow an inherent,
functional logic of dwelling the way we are accustomed to today – namely, in
terms of scale and the sill height. Nevertheless, the outward form and
significance is connected to the inner world by the exterior wall. The scale of
the city and the scale of the inhabitant are brought into equilibrium by the
exterior wall.

The inside of the building is shaped by its surroundings. The facade is a
generator that helps determine the atmosphere in the interior through its form
and the nature and position of its openings. Gio Ponti made the classical view
from the window a critical element of his designs and made the exterior part of
the atmosphere inside. He created complex visual connections between the various
living spaces and between inside and outside: not just the framed view outward
but also integrating elements of the interior. He developed the “furnished
window”[5] as the fourth wall of a room and anticipated the tendency in Japanese
architecture today of tying the domestic to the urban in which objects from the
private life of the residents are placed in a sequence with views into the city.
When designing residences, Ponti built models that explored the view from the
residence into the city. The “furnished window” functions like a shelf on which
everyday objects such as vases and paintings are combined with the window
proper. The models are studies of different lighting situations and surroundings
for those situations.

The Door and the Window

The relationships between inside and outside are described by the openings of the
facade, of which there are two kinds: doors and windows. The openings enable us
to experience the demarcation and connection of the two spheres. Doors and
windows become the threshold spaces within the face. The door mediates, so to
speak, the immediate experience of demarcation and opening. For outsiders in
front of the house, the door is a boundary that cannot easily be overcome. For
the resident of the house, it represents connection to the world. The experience
of the door as an element of the facade is immediate and direct. It is different
with the window. The window itself is not observed and perceived but rather what
one sees through the window. The window serves primarily to ventilate and light
the apartment. Above all, however, it is a medium that conveys images between
inside and outside. Ideally, the window is placed in the facade such that from
inside it is directed at very specific points in the surroundings. The
surroundings then appear as an image in the interior of a room. In traditional
Japanese architecture, sliding wall elements are painted with landscape motifs.
When they are opened, the landscape is brought into the interior of a house as a
framed image. This abstraction of both the elements that form the room and the
view out into the surroundings is a recurring theme in the architecture of
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. In their residential buildings the
surroundings are often transferred into the interior of the building as a
collection of various images by means of a number of framed excerpts.

But the window also makes the interior visible from outside and makes private
actions public. The image of a young woman presenting herself at the window for
a young admirer waiting below is a universally internalized romantic image. Thus
the youth in Die schöne Müllerin sings: “O lass mich nur von ferne stehn / Nach
deinem lieben Fenster sehn / Von ferne, ganz von ferne! / Du blondes Köpfchen,
komm hervor! / Hervor aus Eurem runden Tor / Ihr blauen Morgensterne!”[6](O let me just stand at a distance / And look at your dear window / From a
distance, from a great distance! / Little blond head, come out! / Come out of
your round gate, / Blue morning stars). The unrequited desires of the journeyman
miller are manifested at the round window. The window describes a connection but
at the same time creates a distance between inside and outside and marks a
boundary that, unlike that of the door, cannot be overcome. The concept of the
door and the window is turned into a striking theme in the design for Slow House
by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio.[7]The weekend house by the sea tapers so much on the main facade that it
presents itself to those entering as a single door. On the side facing the sea
the house expands into a facade consisting of a single large panorama window
with a view of the sea. The facades of the house are reduced to their two
primary elements: the door for arrival and the window for the view.

Otto Friedrich Bollnow described this as follows: “Looking through the window
moves the world into the distance (since the path to it, which is after all
always present in the background of our consciousness, continues, only on
turning away from the window, to the door, which can usually be reached only by
a longer path). Window frames, mullions, and transoms underscore this effect,
since they transport what is seen through the window; they cut a certain detail
out of the environment and make it an ‘image.’ In that sense, the window
idealizes the section of the world that has been cut out and held together.” And
he continues: It is man’s relationship to the world in general that creates its
appropriate expression in the door and window.”[8]

I experienced myself the interaction between inside and outside while studying in
London. My furnished room in Crouch Hill had a large window that opened onto the
street. During the day the window marked a clear boundary between the interior
and this street. From my desk I had a beautiful view of the neighborhood. When
it was dark in the evening and at night, of course, the surroundings were not
visible. Because I had no curtains, however, I could probably be easily seen in
my room. The streetlamps in front of the house shone directly into the room. The
unusually patterned wallpaper on the walls combined badly with this light, and I
had the feeling I was lying on the street no matter how far into the room I
pushed my bed. Previously in Germany, thick walls, small window openings, and a
tree in front of the house had protected me from the exterior. In Crouch Hill,
the thin exterior walls and a large window turned my room into part of the
street at night.

Dressing the Interior: Concealing – Opening

It is the relationship of the individual to the community that is expressed in
the design of windows and doors in residential architecture. Thus our European
idea of the facade in residential architecture is still shaped by the perforated
facade and the closed wall. Since the nineteenth century, however, there has
been an effort in architecture to dissolve the exterior wall and with it the
door and window. Building shells combining glass and iron construction made it
possible to produce structures without solid walls. This was demonstrated for
the first time on a large scale with the building of the Crystal Palace for the
Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

One especially impressive example of the dissolving of the facade or rather its
formation as an opening is the Case Study House No. 22 in Los Angeles by Pierre
Koenig.[9]Embedded into the Hollywood Hills, the floor projecting over the terrain
and the floating roof produce a transition between interior and exterior that,
regardless of the lighting, makes it impossible to see a boundary between the
house and the city. The elements of door and window give way to a total opening,
which at the same time is staged to maximize the distance between domestic life
in the foreground and the city, recognizable from the sea of lights in the
background. The window is no longer necessary because there is no exterior wall
in the classical sense. The door is replaced by total distance.

As a rule the distance from neighbors in an apartment building is not great. The
more the facade is dissolved, the more it is necessary to mediate between inside
and outside, between private and public. When the facade is dissolved in an
apartment building, it should become transparent but not completely see-through.
Rather, it has to be built up in several layers, thus permitting residents to
protect their “privacy” and allowing a changing game of visibility and
concealment to play out. The path that extends from the closed wall with
individual openings, which already consisted of several layers for Alberti;[10]by way of the technical developments of building structures in the
nineteenth century, which were expressed not only in glass architecture but also
in the buildings of Gottfried Semper and Karl Friedrich Schinkel; to the efforts
to dissolve the exterior wall completely has increasingly made the facade appear
to be an autonomous element standing in front of the house, as the house’s
dressing. Alberti also saw the layers of the wall as parallel to clothing, with
its individual layers extending out to the protective coating. It is the
expression of the building’s suitability for its environment. As an autonomous
element, it is commonly called the “building shell,” although that term usually
points to a facade’s technical qualities. In its object hood, materiality,
color, visual effect, and haptic qualities, the dressing of a facade is,
however, above all a sensory experience. For example, the residential Tower
Flower by Maison Édouard Françoise is wrapped up in its facade as if in a winter
coat.[11]It consists of bamboo growing in white pots set into the continuous,
projecting balcony slabs. The plants grow to the height of one story and form a
filter between the building and its surroundings. From the inside this bamboo
rim provides privacy and sunscreen and demarcates and decorates the balcony.
From the outside it represents the building’s dressing, which influences and
invigorates its environment and conceals the scale of the individual.

By contrast, the facade of the Casa
de la Marina apartment building on the Paseo de Juan de Borbó in
Barcelona by Jose Antonio Coderch and Manuel Valls is like a protective screen
standing between the street and the interior of the apartments. The interior
lies hidden behind the slats of the facade, and residents’ view of the sea is
filtered both from their living spaces and their open areas. The slats cannot be
opened. Thanks to the full-floor design of these sunshades, they not only lend
the facade an elegant verticality but also homogenize its slightly undulating
layer in front of the setbacks of the loggias behind it. The staggering effect
of the building projecting over the receded ground floor further heightens the
autonomous effect of the facade as dressing.

Its relationship to the Vertixapartment building in Barcelona by Carlos Ferrater, built
fifty years later, is unmistakable. Here too the structure of the facade, with
its slats framed in sliding elements, surrounds the building like a dressing.
Nevertheless, a completely different situation results here, not only because it
lacks closed strips of wall but also because the structure of the building is
entirely different. The sunshade panels are arranged in several layers. These
layers are not parallel to one another but intersect along their folded course.
The front level borders loggias in front of the apartments; the rear level
protects the generous windows. As a result of the folding, sometimes one level,
sometimes the other moves into the foreground. The sliding sunshades play around
the grid of the facade. They turn the loggias into a spatial layer that can sit
thinly on the facade or reach deeply into the building volume. The facade
dresses the building in the image of a shell woven like a net. From inside, the
layers of the facade function like adaptable extensions of the living space
whose effect on the interior space results from the folds.

The facade of the Eichgut
housing complex in Winterthur by Baumschlager Eberle  is a shell that, even
though it can be opened, hermetically seals the building behind it. The double
facade shields the apartments from its urban surroundings. The silkscreened
windowpanes of the outer shell in front of the windows and loggias slide
individually and produce openings that reveal the facade as a space. Because the
look of the facade can be individually controlled by the occupants and is
constantly changing, a strong contrast results between the light, masklike glass
shell, which protects the building from outside influences, and the apartments
located in the heavy, deep building volume behind the facade.

The Casa Bianca in Osaka by
FOBA makes the idea of the protective screen even clearer, since it is
completely separated from the building. The volume of the building proper is
receded behind a transparent wall layer that separates it from the parking lot
and surrounding buildings. This three-story screen has two openings: a door and
a window. The window marks the upper end of the straight flights of stairs that
provide access to the apartments via the galleries. The small, tunnel-like
entrance at the lower end of the steps is the door. One enters through it from
the parking lot behind the facade screen. There one finds the access gallery,
which is connected via bridges to the entrances to the apartments. The building
proper is staggered such that each apartment unit moves further from the access
gallery. The facade is an autonomous structure between the apartment building
and its surroundings, creating an ambience independent of the urban context. The
surroundings are only perceived as filtered through the semitransparent screen.
During the day, when seen from outside, the facade looks like a closed wall that
reflects the light. At night the indoor and outdoor lighting convey the
impression of a semi-translucent curtain. It is still the perplexing effect of a
mask that produces its own image and reveals little about what is concealed
behind it.

The facade of the Thin Flats
Residential Complex in Philadelphia by Onion Flats is also described
by its architects as a mask in this sense.[12] It is based on the narrow, vertical articulations of the row houses
typical of Philadelphia but transforms them into an autonomous facade layer,
behind which a new type of stacked maisonette apartments evolves alongside the
row houses. The vertical stripes of the facade, some of which are less than a
meter wide, are clad by panels in various shades of gray with windows and doors.
They have openings that lead one to suspect there are spaces in the facade
level. The various elements of the facade are arranged irregularly in such a way
that not only the boundaries between the four houses but also the four stories
of the building are concealed. The scale blurs; the facade derived from a local
architectural type used for the surrounding buildings becomes autonomous and
transforms into something new that now stands between the building and its
environment. It is shaped from outside and inhabited from inside.

Surfaces in Context: City, Landscape, Cityscape

Like the choice of the right piece of clothing, the choice of a dressing for the
facade is a response to the circumstances of the surroundings: the climate, the
neighboring buildings, noise pollution, orientation, and more. In shape and form
the facade represents the specific reaction of the building and its users to the
circumstances of their urban environment. By connecting the building with a
place, it enters into a dialogue with the surroundings. Together with the
buildings adjacent to the facade, it describes the public space that it
delimits. In its nature of standing between the interior of the house and the
exterior of the city, between the circumstances of the place and that of the
user, every facade is not just part of the building it clads but also part of
the city. It is thus in equal measure the surface of the public urban space and
of the body it surrounds. The reciprocal influences that architecture
experiences between individual and society is primarily evident from the facade.
There architecture becomes a medium that surrounds society.[13] That is because architecture has an effect on society that at the same
time takes form in it. The facades are mirrors and projection screens of the
lives that play out in front of them.

Looking at architecture communicates images to us that combine with the images
inside of us to become an experience of architecture and space. By means of the
facade architecture develops a relationship to the viewer that is not arbitrary
but rather triggers specific ideas and produces specific images. It is a
relationship that already begins in the design stage. The example of the
Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg by Herzog & de Meuron shows how powerful
architecture’s visual effect and ability to establish an identity can be. The
Elbphilharmonie was already famous as a new landmark for Hamburg even before
construction was begun. The relationship of architecture and the viewer develops
primarily in space and consequently takes into account the viewer’s movements
and standpoints. As the painting The Ambassadors[14] by Hans Holbein the Younger impressively demonstrates, the content and
effect of a painting can change according to the observer’s standpoint. The
anamorphic technique used by Holbein results in certain elements of the painting
only being legible when viewed from an extreme angle – in this case, one sees a
skull. In the frontal view, the skull is highly distorted. Anamorphosis has been
used since the sixteenth century, not only in painting but also in architecture.
Facade paintings and reliefs come together into coherent images or perspectives
only when the viewer adopts certain standpoints. The relationship of the surface
or picture plane of a building to the observer’s standpoint and angle of view is
integrated into the design of the facade, which changes as the viewer moves. For
example, the facades of Giovanni Michelucci’s famous church by a highway, San
Giovanni Battista in Florence, play with the movements and speed of the cars
that race past.[15] Its complexly curved surfaces change constantly as drivers approach and
move away from it until it disappears from view in the rear mirror. As they
approach, the building is revealed not from one side but only as they move
around its volume. It has no clear face, no clear facade. The idea and the image
of this church – its facade – result from and change with movement.

The situation is similar with the Zaida apartment building in Granada by Álvaro Siza, though with the
difference that the main facade facing the square initially appears to be the
representative face of the building. The building’s true complexity and
multilayered quality only become evident when the viewer approaches from
different directions. That is because the building makes reference both to the
perimeter block development that it closes off as its end building and to the
prominent Plaza Puerto Real, of which it is the southern termination and visual
focus. A towerlike section of the building looms over the edifice and at the
same time causes it to fit in with the six-story buildings on the edge of the
square. The result is a building that, depending on one’s point of view, looks
like a solitary building or falls into line with the surrounding architectural
and spatial structures. The building establishes the transition between
different structures in the city. Whereas the facades give no hint of the
architectural fabric within, the volume of building and the articulation of the
facade indicate the division of the lots and locate the building on a prominent
site in the center of the city. These impressions are reinforced by the
perforated facade, which causes the building to be almost inconspicuous in the
line of adjacent buildings while standing out on the side facing the square
thanks to its symmetry. The facade’s two-color scheme and the flush alternation
of its materials play with the tension between the building as a solitary object
and the facade as an image interwoven with the city, taking up its surfaces and
reflecting and continuing them. Siza’s apartment building makes it evident that
the composition of the surfaces, their materiality and color, has not only
aesthetic but also spatial significance, in that it works with the light of a
place but also evokes specific associations.

The Broëlberg I housing
complex in Kilchberg by Gigon / Guyer is related to Siza’s building in respect
to its urban context. The colors of the complex involve it in a dialogue with
the landscape. In lieu of single-family homes, this compact housing complex is
like an island in the park. On the outside, the building’s earthy palette fits
in with the landscape, while the brilliant orange in the dense space of the
inner courtyard forms a stark contrast. The facades feature large window
openings, which direct the view out of the apartments over the lake, creating a
unique spatial situation in relation to the immediate context of the buildings.
The free arrangement of the windows on the facades is in keeping with this
focused gaze and the landscape that is thus brought into the apartments. Even
when seen from outside, their wide frames make them seem like eyes looking into
the distance. The look of the facade, with its large windows against the
backdrop of the dark brown, earthy wall, reinforces the solitary character of
the housing complex but at the same time integrates it into the heterogeneous
and detailed architectural structure of its surroundings. The facades are
experienced as demarcations and surfaces of a space in three respects: the
full-height window openings as the visual level and surface of the apartments,
the dark outer facades as a backdrop for the park landscape, and the bright
inner facades as demarcations of the courtyard. It’s embedding in the landscape,
but also its contrast with it, results in a solidly assembled image.

The facades of the Kölner
Brett by Brandlhuber Kniess, by contrast, complement the urban space
surrounding the building like the different elements of a collage. The Ehrenfeld
district of Cologne, whose industrial structures have declined, is complemented
– but not completed or repaired – in the spirit of a Collage City[16] by placing the Kölner Brett on an open site. The materials employed –
large glazed openings, surfaces closed off by plastic panels, and exposed
concrete – allude in an almost ironic way to the industrial surroundings but are
at the same time entirely new elements. This upheaval becomes palpable: the
facade reflects the constant change of the urban space. In its solitary
location, the Kölner Brett is comparable to the multifamily house in Sargans by Peter Märkli.
The latter, however, does not enter into a dialogue with the space and
architecture of its surroundings but rather functions by means of references to
and images from architecture. The house constitutes a classical main facade with
a hierarchical division into base, wall, and attic levels. The spatial qualities
are located behind that. For example, the apartments have generous free spaces
in the form of loggias hidden behind the facade. By contrast, surprisingly, the
rear side of the Kölner Brett has a second main facade – in the sense of its use
and the orientation of the apartment units. Turned away from the street, the
house is supplemented with a gallery that provides access to the apartments but
above all provides them with open areas. In contrast to the house in Sargans,
the residents are not hidden behind the facade but rather project in front of
their apartments on their balconies. This protruding volume turns the facade
into an inhabitable space between the private apartment and the surroundings.
The private realm turns outward, entering into new relationships with the
unprotected exterior, and permits views from the outdoors into one’s own
apartment.

Inhabiting the Space Between

A facade transports several levels of perception, just as Holbein’s painting
does. It tells a story, contains hints, references, and signs. It can be
interpreted in various ways, and it changes in space – not only when the
viewer’s standpoint changes but also when it moves and changes itself. The
facade is a surface that moves in space. It turns inward and outward and forms
folds. The essence and meaning of these folds lie, according to Bernard Cache,
in the questioning of relationships between inside and outside, between the
building and urban space.[17] The fold is a feature of the facade in its nature as dressing and shell.
It turns the facade into a space within which we move. The room dovetails and
describes the transitions between public and private areas. The access gallery
makes it possible to experience the facade as a space. In the case of the Kölner
Brett, the house turns the gallery outward. Private actions that would otherwise
take place on the balcony or terrace mix with the route of public access to the
house. In the Casa Bianca,
the situation is reversed, since there the access gallery is located behind the
facade. The street is moved to the interior of the house. The dovetailing of
spaces within the facade that are not initially connected can take many
forms.

Maison Édouard Françoise realized an apartment building whose units are extended
outward.[18] They are provided with balconies that, like outdoor rooms, have walls and
window openings but no roofs. The balconies are on stilts well in front of the
building, amid a forest of trees and in some cases connected to units only by
narrow footbridges. Thus one room of each apartment is located outside of the
house, in the front yard on the street. There it is not only possible to sit
beneath the open sky as if on a terrace or balcony but also to leave the
apartment while remaining inside its boundary and to look back into it from
outside. The dovetailing of space results in new relationships between the
apartment and the city. Conversely, it can also occur when the surroundings
wander into the apartment, when the boundaries between inside and outside blur.
The traditional Japanese house has a continuous veranda that serves as a
transition between inside and outside. It belongs to the interior, where it
connects different rooms with one another, and at the same time to the exterior,
depending on how the various sliding elements of the facade are opened or
closed.[19] In contemporary Japanese architecture, there is a tendency to make the
exterior walls as thin as possible and to reduce its elements, the door and the
window, so much that they are no longer distinct from the interior walls.[20] Windows look into the space of the street as well as into neighboring
rooms. Spatial transitions do not distinguish between interiors and exteriors.
With reference to traditional Japanese architecture and its framed prospects
into the landscape, the transformation to an “interior-scape” is evolving, an
inner landscape in the context of today’s urban cityscape.[21]

One experimental example of the apparent dissolution of a border or blurring of
the threshold area between private and public spaces is the Curtain Wall House
in Tokyo by Shigeru Ban[22] “Curtain” is meant literally here. The two residential floors of the
building can be opened completely along the full length of the facade. The
building is on the corner of an intersection; the curtains blow in the wind –
something one normally experiences in interiors – and the house extends into
urban space.

The Altamira tower block in
Rosario, Argentina, by Rafael Iglesia also operates with an apparent dissolution
of the facade. The result is the experience of the apartment extending into the
city. Fragile-looking wall panels, which barely touch each other, circumscribe a
space that, seen from outside, does not appear to be closed by them but rather
dissolved. Seen from inside, these wall panels seem to slide far out in front of
the actual boundaries of the apartment. They border on the terraces located in
front of the apartments and direct one’s gaze over the city.

In the Forsterstrasse apartment
building in Zurich by Christian Kerez, the transition already begins
in the stairwell. Inside a rectangular, freestanding volume lies stretched out a
long, dark stairwell with no windows. It provides access to the apartments on
the end at their innermost point. Staggered wall panels divide the apartments
into rooms and functional areas. The spaces between the wall panels provide
access to the rooms. This permits views through to the facades even from the
entrance and results in a spatial continuum that opens increasingly toward the
outside. It leads up to a continuous all-glass facade. The path through the
house leads from the completely enclosed space of the semipublic stairwell to
the completely open spaces of the private rooms. The real demarcation of space
is achieved by the vegetation that surrounds the residence like a green wall and
is superimposed on the interior spaces in the reflections of the windowpanes.
Because of it’s opening, the building could scarcely be more exposed; yet it
stretches beyond the boundaries of the enclosed space and appropriates the green
surroundings as an extension of the apartments. The entire apartment unit is an
interim space in which the occupants move within different degrees of opening
and closing.

By contrast, the Kanchanjunga
residential tower in Bombay, India, by Charles Correa is less about
appropriation than about demarcation. The degree of being open and closed is,
however, defined not so much by preventing views as it is by dealing with
climatic conditions. The facade is generously open to the east and west, but the
living spaces proper are moved well back into the interior of the building. The
outer layer of the eastern and western facades forms side zones for bathrooms
and servants’ quarters. There are also two-story terraces and loggias with deep
notches. These large notches articulate the otherwise smooth facade of the
tower. They are a clue to the complex spatial structure of the apartments. As in
the courtyard of a bungalow, the terraces are the foci around which the
apartment units are organized. At the same time, they form the outer shell that
provides protection for the life inside to unfold.

In the Marco Polo Tower in
Hamburg by Behnisch, the outer shell of the building is not as clearly designed
as a protective layer. First of all, the apartments push their way outward with
their all-glass construction. As in Correa’s building, the tower is a collection
of units of many different types, but here they are not organized systematically
into an overarching figure but instead manifest themselves to the outside
individually in a variety of ways. It is only the surrounding layer of terraces
and loggias that fuses the individual apartments into the form of a building.
The facade space is defined by individual interior demands for spatial
expansions and contractions but also shapes the building outwardly to create a
volume. It seems to be a soft mass that is perceived from the inside as a
spatial expansion and form outside as a volume.

In the Carabanchel public
housing in Madrid built by FOA, by contrast, the facade space is a clearly
defined layer. The crucial quality of the facade as a form-defining element is
the way it unifies the apartments behind it. Its crucial quality as space, by
contrast, is, as with the Behnisch project, expanding the apartments outward.
They are provided with deep loggias facing east and west, to be used differently
by the residents according to the time of day and their needs. The outer shell
with its folding elements of bamboo produces a Mediterranean play of light and
shadows in the darkened loggias, which are protected from sunlight and prying
eyes. The threshold space of the loggias and their cladding makes it impossible
to distinguish individual apartments when seen from outside, resulting in an
abstract image on the edge of the park. When the folding elements are closed,
the entrance doors are seen as openings in a hermetic, windowless volume. Thanks
to the residents, however, the facade is transformed into a mobile, folded shell
that playfully recombines qualities of depth, transparency, and uniformity in
ever new ways: “The primary architectural effect of the building is not
dependent on the architect’s vision, but as an effect of the inhabitants’
choice, as if the facade was a register at any given moment of a cumulative
effect of individuals’ choices.”[23]

Dressing, Surface, Space

The Carabanchel housing complex has a facade that envelops the building and its
occupants and places an outer, changeable dressing on it. This dressing does not
just delimit the interior of the building. It also formulates the edge of the
park for which it forms a backdrop. Last but not least, the facade is very
clearly a space, one that faces the public park and the private apartment
equally. The facades presented in the following catalog of projects often
combine several of the aspects described here: they clad the building; they
operate within the spatial context of their surroundings; and they represent
usable space for the residents. In the process, they repeatedly raise the
fundamental question of the essence of the elements of door and window. Their
design manifests the complex, multilayered relationship between the individual
and society in accordance with the given cultural context.

The Cité Napoléon illustrates this tension in the discrepancy between the layout
of the site, which promotes a completely new form of communal life that emerged
in the age of industrialization in the nineteenth century, and its facade, which
conceals this difference by conforming to the neighboring buildings.[24] The situation is very different with the Robin Hood Gardens residential
complex in London and the Byker residential neighborhood in Newcastle. The will to organize
new communities goes hand in hand with the desire to make it possible to
experience this symbolically as well. These types based on the access gallery
produced entirely new images and ideas of dwelling in the city. Yet behind those
galleries is a type of apartment that scarcely differs from the familiar and
widespread type of the English row house. Robin Hood Gardens and Byker do not so
much represent a new form of individual housing but rather express the
widespread form of the small-family urban household within a new
community-oriented organization.

In times in which life in different social milieus and the expression of such
life in a wide variety of types of household are generally accepted, there is
increasing need for individual alteration not only of homes but also for the
surroundings of the home. Hence new builders groups and cooperatives are
transporting their communal areas to the street space and turning it into a
transitional space between the apartment and the city. Other milieus are joining
to form gated communities, thus privatizing the space of the street and creating
a protected island within the city. In contrast to the middle of the twentieth
century, when large housing projects were intended to produce new images by
means of a radical transformation of urban space, today it is more an array of
different surfaces for living. The facades no longer seek to convey a claim to a
universally valid ideal for society but rather try to conform to the ideal image
of one variant. They are thus employed as a medium that not only conveys the
image of dwelling outward via its surface but is also a reaction to its
environment. The image of the facade emerges in the space of the city.
Blackfriars Bridge: Living in the City is a design by the architect C. J. Lim
for a temporary housing structure on unused bridge piers in the Thames in the
center of London.

25

. See www.cjlim-studio8.com, accessed October 9, 2010.

The structure has no shell but is rather composed of many individual
parts. Even the threshold, the transition between private and public spaces, is
not clearly indicated but is instead subject to constant changes. On the whole,
however, the structure conveys an image comparable to that of a facade. It
leaves behind traces in our imagination, which we associate with living in
general and with the place in particular, and that from that point onward can no
longer be separated from the real experience of this place. The building emerges
at the moment it forms into an image. The facade is not the hard shell of a
building but rather part of an image of our notion of dwelling that is
constantly dissolving and reforming.

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Originally published in: Ulrike Wietzorrek, Housing+: On Thresholds, Transitions, and Transparencies, Birkhäuser, 2014.