Description

Die Räume wachsen, es dehnt sich das Haus. (The rooms grow, the house expands.)

—Friedrich Schiller, “Das Lied von der Glocke” (The song of the bell), l. 115

We are accustomed to describing the size of homes in terms of floor space. For example, we might purchase an apartment of ninety square meters but never one by volume. The latter would, of course, be far more precise, since it makes a considerable difference whether those ninety square meters are located in a new building with ceilings 2.5 meters high or in an apartment from the late nineteenth century with ceilings 3.6 meters high. From the perspective of relationships measured as lines, planes, and volumes, space seems to us to be an objective measurement; this metric concept of space has its limits, however, even though it may seem unbounded and infinite. Ernst Mach referred to the subjectivity of perception and juxtaposed it with the Euclidean concept of space: “The space of Euclidean geometry has the same properties everywhere and in all directions, and is unbounded and infinite. If with this we compare visual space, the ‘seeing space’ […], which is familiar above all to the seeing observer, we find that it is neither homogeneous everywhere nor in all directions, nor infinite, nor unbounded.”[1] Measurable space as bounded by numbers is an abstraction, but the space that surrounds us and in which we live is sensory in nature. Mach speaks of “seeing space,” and we can add “feeling space,” “hearing space,” since these too are “spaces” that need to be considered when building a home. Small children, who explore space by crawling, surely experience it differently than adults do; a blind man will feel his way around a room, sensing and hearing but not seeing, at least not the way we do. In addition to its objective, mathematic definitions, space has a sensory-physiological component that is no less important for housing than the usual floor space indicated in a real estate appraisal.

We also talk about rooms as living rooms, bedrooms, or children’s rooms, which leads to not insignificant misunderstandings. Naturally, the space that serves as the bathroom has a specific function. That is also true of a living room with the outlet for a television cable and for a kitchen with hookups for water, electricity, and gas. But we should not let ourselves be deceived by such infrastructure elements installed in rooms. The bathroom is used as a bathroom because the bathtub is there, and the situation is analogous with the toilet and the bedroom. But the room as such does not have these features installed in it. Nevertheless, we think of bathrooms, kitchens, and children’s rooms as rooms with certain requirements, but that is wrong. It is the infrastructure that limits the rooms to specific uses. Space as such is open and free. Aldo Rossi drew attention to a similar problem in his reflections on functional determinism in urban planning. He rightly advocates the view that the design of urban planning phenomena does not depend on their function: “Thus, one thesis of this study, in its effort to affirm the value of architecture in the analysis of the city, is the denial of the explanation of urban artifacts in terms of function. I maintain, on the contrary, that far from being illuminating, this explanation is regressive because it impedes us from studying forms and knowing the world of architecture according to its true laws.”[2] What Rossi says of urban planning can be applied to residential architecture. Here too the function of many objects changes over time, so that buildings that were once factories are now used as residences.

By the way, anyone who believes that such “loft apartments” are unprecedented is mistaken. Many large buildings in ancient Rome were used for housing during the Middle Ages. In the case of Diocletian’s Palace in Split, Croatia, this was perhaps an obvious idea; however, in the case of the amphitheater in Lucca, which is still occupied, this transformation of its function is testimony to the fact that built spaces are fundamentally open to quite different uses. That is precisely the point of departure for Martin Heidegger’s insight that space should not be seen as something given, as substance, but rather as an activity. He says of space: “Clearing-away (Räumen) is uttered therein. This means: to clear out (roden), to free from wilderness. Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for man’s settling and dwelling.”[3]

The idea that the given space in the sense of its physical and technical definition is not simply a place but only becomes a space through active appropriation is embraced by all previous attempts to define space. Heidegger’s interpretation makes it clear that clearing away and clearing out create the boundaries that make “the free, the openness for man’s settling and dwelling” possible in the first place; surely the essence of dwelling could not be identified more accurately or more poetically. Because Heidegger’s philosophy, which reflects on etymological roots, not only exposes what the debates on housing cover up but also says that dwelling is an activity that does not end with the handing over of apartments. Precisely because the following examples are concerned with pragmatic considerations of the floor plan in housing and its spatial disposition, it is all the more important to keep in mind that the creation of (living) spaces must always consider this freedom, the openness for man’s settling.

Rooms within the Room

Living spaces are subject to a number of relationships. We are interested first in those within the home. Every space within a home and especially every home as such is, however, also the point of departure for relationships to and contacts with the surroundings. Connections to the outside world are established via access routes, outdoor spaces, windows, and doors. Every living space should therefore be considered in relationship to the path that connects it to other spaces, both inside and outside. The form in which spaces within a dwelling can be organized or arranged at all depends to a large extent on the shape of the building volume, which not infrequently is prescribed by the given urban-planning circumstances: either in the form of actual relationships or based on an intended urban development that is set out in a development plan. The space of the city and the spatial structure of the place fundamentally influence the spatial structures within a home. For example, when deep lots determine the possibilities for the building volume, only certain types of building can sensibly be built. Naturally, much the same is true in terms of building heights and construction methods such as open or closed development.

Housing Types on One Level

Living on one level undergoes an apotheosis in the classic multistory apartment building. The extension of the apartment is restricted, so to speak, to the dimensions of the plane; the standard height of 2.5 meters, which is more or less the rule in residential architecture today, successfully prevents thoughts about the third dimension. This places extraordinary limits on spatial difference, and de facto deficiency becomes the axiomatic basis for all future lifestyles therein. In this type of 2-D apartment, designing spatially means accepting the third dimension—that is, the height from floor to ceiling—with no ifs or buts and ignoring the theme of varied heights, from the two-story living room to the full-height closet and the sleeping berth, into which one can just barely crawl. The antagonism inherent in differentiating space—namely, economizing on volume while still gaining space—is ignored. On the other hand, this restriction to the dimensions of a plane has many advantages. Among other things, homes that occupy just one level can be barrier-free, and hence can be used equally well in all situations and phases of life. And, of course, they have enormous advantages in terms of production. Multistory apartment buildings can be stacked on top of one another, which makes for less effort in planning; it also permits cost savings from prefabrication and simplifies the tasks of works on site, since they are installing the same element on the third floor as on the eighth. That is the theory, anyway. If it is not always so certain and simple in practice, that does not really argue against this type but rather in favor of it, since the problems truly begin to multiply when complex, interlocking spatial figures are built. But more on that later. Purely planar 2-D types by no means imply uniformity—the monotony of the twenty-story concrete slab building is not a law of nature—as is clear from examining the wealth of variations that result from organizing the living spaces within a home on one level. Creating categories—the goal of all typological research—reveals the variability and great flexibility of these types of apartments.

Let’s start with the simplest form: a longitudinal building volume in which the units are primarily or entirely oriented toward one side—an arrangement often used for buildings accessed via external galleries. One of the first residential buildings by Herzog & de Meuron to be built in Basel, the Haus an der Mauer (House on the wall) on Hebelstrasse (1984–88), has such an arrangement, even though it does not have an external access gallery. The porticoes the building does have serve as narrow verandas or as weather protection for the wood facade. Because the back of the house leans against an existing wall, as it were, all the apartments had to face the same side. The living areas are lined up in a series like the compartments of a train. The rooms are accessed via a corridor along the building’s rear wall. Differences in value occur only where—not insignificantly, the building is made of wood—there is a departure from a basic module and the distance between bays is halved or doubled. This modulation results from the number based on the multiplication or division of a given basic unit derived from the grid system for the supports.

Just how the interior of such a 2-D type can be improved by relating it to its context is demonstrated by a building in Rovinj (2004) by Helena Njiric. Most of the apartments are oriented toward one side, though a few are oriented toward two sides. In contrast to the project just analyzed, the paths and lanes that provide access and circulation are emphasized and stage-managed. Njiric’s design also alludes to both the gable roofs of the surrounding buildings and the colors of the Mediterranean and opens the compact building inward, so that apartments look out onto the streets like the buildings in the old part of town. Although both these buildings were developed from the 2-D basic type, we can see how different urbanistic and cultural approaches increase the variation. The architects Diener und Diener used a similar system for their apartment buildings in the St. Alban district of Basel (1986) by using a reflection along a central axis that serves as an extended zone of access indoors. The volume of the complex faces the river and has a zone that has shifted inward from which some of the apartments face the neighborhood and others the river.

Apartment buildings, St. Alban Valley, Basel, 1986

This two-sided orientation of an apartment has many advantages and qualities if skillfully employed, as another residential complex in Basel demonstrates. Not far from the Diener und Diener project, and on a comparatively deep lot, Michael Alder lined up his apartments serially, with a central access node that serves two units on each floor. The apartments face two sides and are distinguished by a clear arrangement of the living areas and secondary areas. As a result, the floor plans convey an almost loftlike spaciousness, which is well suited to the building’s surroundings, a former commercial zone. These apartments are located on a stream that was once used for mills and other small-scale industries. One advanced example, which shows how another “direction” can be added to this system, is the Hofgarten development in the Leimbach district of Zurich (2007) by the architects Galli & Rudolf ((Link Typology+ S. 130)). It demonstrates how layering the spaces can add depth to serial juxtaposition in a relatively low building by creating a wealth of connections. The quality is obvious: a deep volume has advantages in terms of cost but also the disadvantage that there are zones that are less attractive because they are difficult to light. The example in Zurich makes a virtue of necessity by placing the little used secondary rooms in the center, which is less well lit. The resulting zoning relates the rooms on one side of the apartment to the rooms of the other side via central zones. The serial principle on which these apartments are essentially based is put into perspective by this kind of mirroring along an imaginary axis.[4] Patrick Gmür and Jakob Steib produced a variation on this theme for their residential complex on Paul-Clairmont-Strasse in Zurich’s Wiedikon district, which was completed in 2006.

James housing complex, LAWU site, Zurich, 2006

They pursued a similar concept that organized the stairwells and secondary rooms around a prominent central zone. Within the units, the living spaces on one half of the building are connected by those on the other via short corridors. Two-story balconies the size of a full room, and hence like outdoor living spaces, are located as a self-supporting layer on the southwest side, providing additional space for the apartments. Still other solutions can be found to avoid a problem with longitudinally oriented volumes of even greater depth: namely, that tunnel-like configurations result, making for long passageways and unexciting interiors. Zita Cotti’s Katzenbach housing complex in Zurich (2005–7) offers another interesting approach. Its Z-shaped floor plans not only make it possible to orient the apartments on both sides of the long building volume but also to go beyond a simple continuous end-to-end arrangement and hence provide more variety inside the apartments. The effect of two-sided orientation, which as a rule leads to a hierarchy of living inside the apartment (e.g., the living room facing west and the secondary rooms and bedroom facing east), is countered by creating diagonal connecting between the rooms. Whereas the apartments described thus far focused on the question of the orientation of the living spaces, a few significant examples will be analyzed here in terms of the relationship of rooms within an apartment. One type we will encounter in many variations, which we would like to call a “living hall,” will serve as our introduction. In this type, a central room, to which all the other rooms are docked, defines the apartment. It resembles an ancient Roman atrium house—although, because it is in a multistory apartment building, it is not an exterior space—and provides access to all the other rooms and thus places them on equal footing spatially.

In Alvar Aalto’s eight-story residential high-rise in Berlin’s Hansaviertel (1955–57), this living room also communicates with the loggia.

Residential building, Hansaviertel, Berlin, 1957

The living room and outdoor space are combined into a spacious unity. The architect Otto Senn created the precursor to this type of apartment in Basel’s St. Alban district in 1935–38.

Parkhaus Zossen multifamily residence, Basel, 1938

Parkhaus Zossen, a multifamily residence, stands on the edge of a green space. Senn divided his spaces more into zones, terracing the bedroom and parents’ room in the larger units. It already features the connection of the living hall and the balcony. Subsequently, Senn systematically developed this form of combination living and circulation zone. For the Hechtliacker residential high-rise of 1962–65, also in Basel, he reduced the floor area of the living hall and demoted it to a corridor. Nevertheless, it demonstrates its quality, since it enables him to minimize the floor area devoted to circulation and design this distribution space as a kind of communicative heart of the apartment.

Hechtliacker residential high-rise, Basel, 1965

A layout oriented toward two sides is, as a rule, more advantageous for an apartment than one facing just one side; nevertheless, it is often difficult to achieve, especially in densely built urban neighborhoods. The building by Herzog & de Meuron is representative of that. It is possible to go beyond such objective limitations, even in densely built urban areas featuring closed construction, and create apartments open in more than one direction, as the following examples will show.

With floor plans based on Z-shaped or cruciform forms of access and circulation, additional leeway opens up when the apartments are arranged diagonally. This increases the ratio of exterior to interior space and results in possibilities even with volumes that at first do not appear to be suited to orientation in more than one direction.

For his building on the Wienerberggründen (1993), Otto Steidle created a type that combines row houses with courtyard buildings. Steidle’s floor plan combined these two morphologically distinct elements into a unity—that is, there are apartments that extend across both the courtyard and the front facade. Looking at the floor plans makes it clear how close together the courtyard buildings are, and yet Steidle’s configuration manages to give every apartment one side with a broad prospect. Despite the high density of this five-story building, there are no constricted apartments, only units that get light and air from at least three sides. Steidle modulates with incredible skill the expanses and constrictions of urban housing. Describing this property makes clear something we have been thinking but not remarking on all along: the living areas of an apartment should never be conceived independently of the structure of the building, its form, and its explicit design.

Wienerberggründe, Vienna, 1993

Another deep lot, albeit in a very different urban-planning situation, is the site of Gigon Guyer’s Neumünsterallee residential complex in Zurich. Completed in 2007, it has an L-shaped structure with two units per floor. They place the stairwells deep into the building but also cut light wells out of the building volume to provide light for the stairwells. This also provides natural light and ventilation in the corridors inside the units. The architects’ response to the depth of the building is a controlled insertion of hollow spaces. Generous footbridgelike balconies, which seem like outdoor living spaces and almost literally cite Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa Rustici, add to the diverse spatial offerings of these 2-D apartments. Gigon Guyer pull off the trick of apartments oriented toward three and even—thanks to the light well—four sides.

Derek Dellekamp pursued a related concept for an apartment building in Mexico City completed in 2003 (Condesa district, Av. Alfonso Reyes 58). Less austere on the exterior, the floors look like stacked containers, as is symbolically reinforced by the horizontal articulation of the corrugated metal panels. The facade seems closed, with only small, horizontal, rectangular windows distributed arbitrarily on it. The high ribbon windows are not intended to provide views outward; they merely provide light in the living areas. Terraces are cut out of this cube; some of them are on the facade and others are drawn into the building like patios. The closed look of the facade, which takes into account a lifestyle that emphasizes privacy, affords protected outdoor areas in the middle of Mexico’s megacity. Dellekamp planned both units that occupy an entire floor and maisonettes, so that within the cube there would be spatial relationships that differ from floor to floor, lending the facade a livelier look. The large living spaces in these apartments can also be lit naturally from three sides, thanks to this sophisticated spatial structure. A project for a residential complex on the Luzernerring in Basel, unfortunately never realized, demonstrates the density of ideas in the works of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron.

Luzernerring housing complex, Basel, project, 1989

In the context of a perimeter block development—a characteristic development structure in European cities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—they managed to conceive apartments that face all four compass directions. That is a feature one expects to find in a freestanding, owner-occupied home but not in a perimeter block development. Herzog & de Meuron proved with their design that virtually nothing is impossible if one is conscious of the problem and thinks through the architectural brief. Much like the project by Otto Steidle described above—which dates from around the same period—it combines the rows of a perimeter block development with short, comblike pieces that extend into the courtyard like fingers. This design also ensures that the units have something from the courtyard as well as from the street. Herzog & de Meuron succeed in creating apartments that are open in all four directions and are also oriented toward both the public space of the city and a serene, protected interior courtyard.

The Apartment as an Object in Space

The history of the attempts to describe the particular quality of architectural space—in contrast to, say, geographical, interstellar, or even psychological space—is also a history of failure. Even the attempts by leading members of the field to describe (architectural) space have not shed much light, as Philippe Boudon demonstrated in his essential study of architectural space.[5]

Boudon quoted several of the great masters of modernism, including André Lurçat, Auguste Perret, and also Le Corbusier, to get their suggestions regarding the characteristics of architectural space. For example, Auguste Perret claimed that architecture is “the art of organizing space; it expresses itself in construction.”[6] Boudon trenchantly concludes that, if this seductively beautiful definition is to be made useful at all, it would be necessary to explain which space it refers to. And he rightly asks whether the police officer directing traffic is not creating space as well.[7] To make Perret’s definition useful for architecture, it is necessary to complete the sentence, along the lines that architecture is the “the art of organizing architectural space according to the rules of the architectural art”[8]—an obvious tautology, as Boudon observes. Much the same may be said of Le Corbusier’s catchy definitions. With Boudon’s tools in our kit, we realize the limited value of such sentences as: “Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light” (Le Corbusier, trans. John Goodman). “Sometimes,” Boudon observes, Le Corbusier’s “definition is so all-inclusive that it no longer defines anything: ‘Henceforth I will fuse architecture and urbanism into a unity, into a single concept. Architecture everywhere, urbanism everywhere.’”[9]

It seems that it is precisely these beguilingly simple sentences that are most dangerous of all, since in their simplicity they ultimately say nothing about architectural space. Space as a feature of residential architecture is, of course, far from such attempts at an all-embracing definition. To put it another way, when housing is planned in architectural offices today, it is not questions of the ultimate definition of architectural space that determine their calculations. Both the two-story air space Le Corbusier conceived and even more so the nested volumes that Adolf Loos offered to counter such a modularization of space are the exceptions rather than the rule.

Adolf Loos’s Villa Müller (1928–30) is considered the prototypical realization of his Raumplan (spatial plan). The center of the house is a living hall that runs its entire length; staircases are the mediating elements between levels. Like a Biedermeier cabinet with drawers and hidden compartments, Loos repeatedly reopens a space; in the process, he dovetails, nests, and compresses the entire space. Just how complex, and hence difficult, the process of planning (and thinking of) space was in an age before computer-assisted design, which offers opportunities to quickly render perspectives in interiors, is clearly shown in his project for the Rosenberg House from 1925, which was never built. A model later built from the original plans by students revealed the contradictions: “During the construction of the model, inconsistencies appeared, such as too little headroom in passageways. Those mistakes would have had to be eliminated during the building of the house.”[10]

We can look over the shoulders of architects, so to speak, as they plan a space and thereby discover that even a master like Loos had to work hard to master the repertoire and acquire the confidence to think and design in the third dimension. That is probably one of the reasons that Loos’s conception of spatial planning did not have a large number of followers. It is a very exclusive program; it presumes from all parties involved, from the architect to the craftsmen, extraordinary knowledge, and the client has to appreciate the quality such a complex spatial dimension entails. In times when housing is a means of speculation, where the developer has replaced the client, that is surely an exceptional case that is rather improbable. The contribution made by Josef Frank, a contemporary of Loos and Le Corbusier, to the disposition of space in residential architecture is not well known. He attempted to structure space as a continuum and can rightly be seen as a mediator between Loos and Le Corbusier. He no longer separated spaces and encapsulated them as units, so to speak, but instead, and this is where he went beyond Loos, adopted the flowing character of Le Corbusier’s spatial creations.

He managed to capture in residential architecture the dynamic quality that we call spatial flow but without abandoning space as a balanced entity. Frank achieved this more clearly, perhaps, in a project for a residence in Salzburg as early as 1924—years before Loos’s Villa Müller. This project exemplified Frank’s concept of Wegführung (wayfinding) “by the linking of various levels and stairways. The ‘stasis of the centre’ is abandoned in favour of a dynamic spatial arrangement. More than in many projects of dogmatic modernism, here the fourth dimension, time, has been successfully integrated.”[11]

Frank’s famous essay “Das Haus als Weg und Platz” (The house as path and place) seems to be prefigured here—and it also reveals the secret of Frank’s conception: “path” and “place” are metaphors for movement, for the dynamic, for traversing space, and the place is the site of arrival, of lingering, the point of departure for setting out again. The steps are not simply to overcome physical levels; they become symbols for reaching new insights. With this metaphysical thinking, Frank goes beyond not just Loos but also Le Corbusier’s rationalism. Within the intellectual triangle of Loos, Le Corbusier, and Frank we find a number of exciting designs. We will not consider the questions whether Loos or Frank developed the Raumplan and whether the economic basis of Loos’s concept is, as Frank argued to his assistant Plischke “simply nonsense,” since the division of the use of space it sought simply did not function.[12] The idea of designing a residence with different, interlocking heights originated neither with Loos nor with Frank but is already found in the writings of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. As early as 1836, he described a “house in whose closed block spaces of various height have been united and taken as an occasion for ‘architecture’ whose appeal derives from a variety of balustrade heights: interlocking floors with rooms of various heights.”[13]

What matters is that, apart from this historical discussion, because of the rise of individualism in society, the subject of spatial diversity in multistory apartment buildings is enjoying a renaissance. Having experienced the failure of modernism’s egalitarian view, which ideally wanted to place as many of the residents of a complex as possible in identical units and was sold as a kind of social democracy of housing, many planners today are trying to revolutionize residential architecture by doing precisely the opposite. The trick is to translate the diversity of sizes, layouts, and forms within a property into a coherent whole, so that the building volume does not disintegrate into an arbitrary hodgepodge because of all its “individuality.”

The residential building on Siewerdtstrasse in Zurich (2006) by the architectural office EM2N can be seen as this kind of new type. This striking six-story property is about forty-five meters long and, at more than fifteen meters, is very deep. The architects came up with a very unusual solution; it could be called a “rotated split-level” type. The central motif is a living hall that runs the full depth of the building and is extended into the exterior by means of a loggia. From the entrance, one ascends four quite broad steps to the upper floor or descends four steps to the lower level of this space which runs from end to end in a north–south direction. From this central hall, which has ceilings three and a half meters high, comparable to late nineteenth century buildings, a stairway leads up to the upper story. EM2N violates the immanent logic of apartments that extend the full width of the building by placing the stairwells crosswise to the longitudinal axis of the units. Whereas the living spaces are oriented north-south, the paths that connect them are always rotated ninety degrees. This “change in rhythm” establishes, in its relation to the actual length of the living space, a depth that is revealed as a spatial experience.

The residential complex on Leimbachstrasse by pool Architekten, completed in 2005, was achieved by forming complex spatial structures from compact units comprising six apartments each. The architects succeeded in developing clear organizational units, which has advantages for planning and building, while retaining a very high degree of diversity among the apartments offered.

This model does not by any means have the last word in the diversity of offerings in residential architecture today, as the VM Husene by PLOT=JDS+BIG on Ørestads Boulevard in Copenhagen, completed in 2004 and 2005, demonstrate. In these two properties—whose names derive from their ground plans: the V house with 114 units and the M house with 95 units—the architects offered eighty different layouts. The facades of these clearly defined objects, with their striking figures in the form of letters, do not by any means reveal the diversity inside. It seems to have been the pleasure principle that led the architects to conceal their inner life from the outside. Julien de Smedt, one of the architects, revealingly compared this “multitude” to a popular computer game: “The buildings [the VM Husene—Authors] are like a three-dimensional Tetris game of people’s living units.”

De Smedt does not by any means consider this game—which required a great deal of planning and expenditure—to have been an end in itself on the part of a planners’ guild that has grown oblivious to the world. On the contrary, he emphasizes that we live in a world in which individualism is more important than ever. Difference, de Smedt says, is not only accepted today but even demanded. People who live in a multistory apartment building should have the same access to individuality that others have, in his view. This finding in Denmark has been confirmed by statements from other architects. The Swiss architects Marcel Meili and Markus Peter have made great effort to create diverse offerings for the apartments in buildings they design. They have written: “Since the early 1990s, we have been working on developing floor plans for apartments that systematically break down the inflexible inner connections and sectoring apartments.”[14] They explain this new trend by noting, among other things, that the “spatial arrangement for apartments common today essentially evolved as a standard during the postwar period.”[15]

Meili and Peter also identify the features of these new floor plans for apartments, including the following aspects: eliminating the separation of spaces based on day and night; independence of private spaces, wherever possible as hotel-room-like units; division into “quiet” rooms with conventional doors and “open” rooms (with broad sliding doors), which have the effect of expanding the space; arranging the living zones as central living area, around which the separate rooms are grouped; minimizing the limitations on the specific use of the rooms; natural light from two sides; and gentle spatial relationships. Directly connected to this is the evolution of the building volume itself; for economic and ecological reasons, in recent decades it has become deeper and, from an urban-planning perspective, denser. Hence it has become necessary to develop floor plans that are not just ten to twelve meters deep but considerably more. The creation of differentiated spaces need not be this complex in conception or construction but can rather be achieved by relatively simple means. For example, Cuno Brullmann merely added a step to his residential high-rise on Hertha Firnberg-Straße in Vienna, which was built in 2005. By doing so he created a landing; the living space is separated into two zones by this slight shift. The advantage of this is that a contiguous space is maintained at the same time that two areas are created, which can then be designed, used, and occupied in different ways. Particularly in the confined situations that result from the limited floor space in public housing, such “tricks” enliven the space to a certain degree. Naturally, this has nothing to do with Loos or Le Corbusier. Nevertheless, we see how a different sense of living can be stimulated by small measures.

Surrounded by insignificant tract houses, the Gradaska apartment house in Ljubljana by Sadar Vuga from 2006 has twelve extravagant units that set a new direction for metropolitan architecture. All of the apartments extend to several floors, with the central living area always occupying one and a half or two floors. The levels in these large living spaces are separated by half floors, which zones the space and weights them differently in terms of function as well (e.g., a living room with sofas and armchairs half a floor above a dining area). The space together feels like a volume, and that is equally true of each of the rooms that extends across two floors. The complex derives its special quality from the fact that the apartments are composed like complex figures, in a kind of spatial plan for the building. Sadar Vuga does not so much apply the concept of spatial planning to individual apartments—which are even a little rigid here—but rather nests and networks the twelve apartments to form a single, densely packed spatial structure.

Sadar Vuga residential complex in Ljubljana confirms, in a way, the prejudice that the spatial planning, with its complex formations, is ultimately an extravagant special case in residential architecture, whereas it is not suited to residential architecture for the masses because it is too costly. For her Gifu Kitagata apartment complex, however, Kazuyo Sejima attempted to introduce elements of two-story spaces and the integration of exterior spaces with a high degree of standardization on a large scale. Two-story living spaces and loggias integrated into the apartments are no longer reserved for exclusive villas but integrated into a ten-story residential building with access via an external gallery. The slender volume of the building makes it possible to create apartments extending the full width of the building and connected to loggias, as a continuous “hole” in the facade. Unlike the examples by Sadar Vuga or Sejima / Nishizawa—both of which, irrespective of the size, feature open construction— Grüntuch Ernst’s design for the Monbijou apartment building in Berlin demonstrates how the maisonette type, with its two-story living areas, can be built within a perimeter block development typical of the late nineteenth century, in a repertoire that is classic in two senses of that word. Two senses in that it harmoniously unites the typical premodern urban structure with the type of the modern, Le Corbusier–derived, two-story Etagenvilla. The solidly built, thoroughly worked-out project demonstrates the value of typological thinking from another perspective as well: freed of ideology, it can weave together distinct strands from the history of architecture and thus define a new type of content. The convincingly high quality of this building derives from its bracketing of the traditional ground plan of the city with a new elevation, which represents not just an image but also current urban lifestyles.

Kazunari Sakamoto, in turn, had the suburbs in mind when he designed his Egota House (2004), an ensemble of four freestanding buildings—thus far, after the first stage of construction, only one has been built((Link Typology+ S. 200)). Sakamoto offered a concept that suggests a single-family home, even though each building has four floors and five apartments. The apartments are accessed via external stairs, and have been nested in such a way that neither the paths nor the prospects and open spaces intersect. Thus the occupants have the impression of having their own building. Because the partition walls in the apartments are oriented in different ways, and the internal staircases of the maisonettes are placed individually, the apartments cross. Although this concept can be derived directly from Le Corbusier’s ideas, an entirely new picture results. The Egota House inscribes itself in the surroundings, without touching them, and thus offers a model for suburbia that has departed from the radical approaches of modernism precisely by referring to them.

Covas Hunkeler Wyss Architekten ran through all the conceivable possibilities for experiencing space in their multifamily residence in Teufen (2005), like a European approach to urban sprawl. The property lies on the line between a residential zone and a commercial zone. If Sakamoto took his lead from Le Corbusier, Loos was the model here. The half-floor staggering of the cross section and the choice of split-level types made it possible to provide each unit with one oversized living space. They extend across two and sometimes three levels (which does not mean an entire floor). The voluminous building resulting from its intended use plays with the repertoire of forms found on surrounding buildings: a cascade of roofs that form a simulacrum of the landscape of a typical Swiss village—a cheerful, amusing response to the heterogeneous surroundings.

Another perhaps entirely new approach to organizing the rooms of an apartment and these units in turn as spaces within a larger whole was developed by Kazuhiro Kojima in the form of his Space Blocks. They make it possible to generate not just the rooms of the apartments but also the apartments themselves as a spatial structure within an overall complex. In short, Kojima designs a spatial grid from superimposed layers. These spatial structures can then be developed virtually using a simple simulation program—or a model. The point is to combine “voids” with spaces filled by housing functions. This combinatorial analysis makes it possibly to scale the emptiness, fullness, and density within the Space Blocks in a playful way in terms of both urban-planning and functional considerations. The space block built in Hanoi in 2003 was one of the first such models that Kojima was able to build. To judge from the literature on it, it appears not to function optimally. Closer study will be necessary to determine why that is precisely. The fact is that Kojima has since built a Space Block in Nishizawa that is both harmonious and extremely functional. Kojima has certainly come up with an idea, and tried it out in practice, that will remain interesting in the future, especially for designs focused more on abstract models and planning processes. Complex spatial structures, especially those on a large scale, are a very important subject in light of the urbanization of the world.

The examples by Kojima, PLOT=JDS+BIG, and Meili/Peter in particular demonstrate that residential architecture is not a static construct but—if the people for whom residences are built are going to feel comfortable in them—demands progress as well. Although the human need for protection may not have changed since the Stone Age, the culture—that is, the form in which people live together—quite clear has changed. It is precisely this permanent cultural transformation to which residential architecture has to react anew constantly. It would appear that it is about the essential question of the essence of space: creating spaces of flexible use that do not resist active appropriation.

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Originally published in: Peter Ebner, Eva Herrmann, Roman Höllbacher, Markus Kuntscher, Ulrike Wietzorrek, Typology +: Innovative Residential Architecture, Birkhäuser, 2009.