Blog 3 Adolf Loos and Richard Docker

            This blog is going to be a comparison of two architects who were influential in the modernist movement. One of them is Adolf Loos and the other is Richard Docker. While both were working towards developing a modern architecture, their views and ideas towards what should be the outcome were different.

            In designing his modern houses, Adolf Loos used a system of planning that he called Raumplan. Raumplan was characterized by the organization of varying volumes of space, eliminating a central hall way and replacing it with a staircase, placing windows to allow in necessary light and frame views, and having a minimal exterior enclosure that was meant to reflect a difference from the public and the intimate interior. These ideas are reflected in one of Loos’s house Villa Muller. Loos considered this house to be his best execution of Raumplan.

            In Villa Muller the procession of rooms goes from low ceilings to gradually higher ceilings and eventually up a staircase into a double height sitting room. As you move through the house, the journey allows views into different rooms due to the varying volumes of spaces. Once you reach the top of the house there is a roof terrace with a large opening in a wall framing the Prague cathedral in the distance.

 The staircase that replaces the main hallway and the procession up volumes.

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Framed view of Prague cathedral

Image from Adolf Loos PowerPoint presentation

            The vast variation of interior spaces is contrasted by the exterior of the house. The outside is essentially a cube with large areas of plain white walls. This gives the appearance of being cold and uninviting which was the intention of Loos. He purposely made the exterior to function only as enclosure because he wanted to create as separation between the public outside on the private inside.

 Villa Muller's boxy. white exterior

http://liangzeng-arch1201.blogspot.com/2010/03/villa-muller.html

            Another modern architect of the time was Richard Docker. He was one of nineteen architects to design a house for the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927. The houses that were built were located in Weissenhof Estate which is a housing development in Stuttgart, Germany built for the exhibition. While some of the houses of the exhibition still exist, others were destroyed in World War II. One interesting fact is that Adolf Loos was supposed to be one of the architects to design a house in Weissenhof Estate but was removed from the list of architects because of disagreements with the Werkbund.

            In House 22, one of the houses designed by Richard Docker in the Werkbund Exposition, the design intent was to create a piece that was part of the whole Weissenhoff Estate. The goal was to present the estate as a whole rather than a collection of different styles. Docker once said, “Just as the individual space, the room, the piece of furniture, the aperture, the material, the construction system, etc., are interdependent members of a specific whole, the building itself is only one stone in the manifold structure of an urban organism.”

            In the layout of the house, the rooms are created by an intersection of the same geometric rectangular shape. While this is similar to Loos because of the intersection of spaces, it is different in that it is only an intersection in plan view. There is not a change in volumes like Loos. Also, because of the intersections of  rectangles, a main passage route is created. From this hallway you can access multiple rooms. This is another difference between Docker and Loos because Loos would design his houses to be moved through in a progression.

Floor Plan of House 22

Overlay showing the intersecting rectangle creating the passage way 

 

            A third difference between the two architects is that Docker seems to make more of a connection between the public and private. In House 22 there is a path from the garage to the terraced garden. The path continues up the garden onto a covered terreace that leads into the living room. The whole movement up to the covered terrace and into the living is visible to the public. This is in disagreement to how Loos believes the public and private should be separate. However, the procession up the small terraces to the covered terrace is reminiscent of the way one would move through the interior of one of Loos’s houses.

Pathway up terraced garden and into the living room. The red is the garage.

            As I stated before, both architects implemented ideas that moved architecture towards a more modern design but they differed in the ways that each moved forward.

Blog 2 Guimard, Horta, Van der Velde

Around the turn of the century, new advances in the technology of materials such as iron and glass allowed for the increased use of these materials in architecture. Because of the malleability of the material, specifically iron, combined with its strength and light weight, structure became an expressive part of architecture. From the theories of exposed structure, use of new technology, and ornamentation of a building rose the style of Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was the integration of ornamentation and structure as a reflection of nature rather than seeing them as two separate aspects of architecture. This new style of architecture was significantly developed because of the work of three architects: Hector Guimard, Victor Horta, and Henry Van der Velde.

            In decribing the theory behind this movement, Henry Van der Valde states, “Ornament completes form…and we recognize the meaning of justification of ornament in its function.” To me this sounds like a furthur evolved theory of Viollet-le-Duc. Viollet-le-Duc called for the rationalism of structure and that structure should be exposed in order to understand the building. Van der Valde’s theory coincides with Viollet-le-Duc’s but furthers it but saying structure can be more than structure. It can also be the ornamentation off the building. This theory relied on the technology of the time and again goes back to the ability of iron to be molded into forms reflective of nature while still being structurally strong in order to have rationality in its form.

            Victor Horta was originally trained in the Beaux-Arts style of architecture. Although his first ten years spent working was comprised of neoclassical buildings he eventually began to design highly inventive houses. His houses provided multiple solutions to narrow building sites. In his Tassel House, the floor plan was no longer organized as a series of rooms but rather overlapping spaces. It was an originator to the open floor plan. The use of steel and iron as the structure allowed for large spans of space that further enhanced the openness of the house as well as letting in a significant amount of light. The open floor plan no longer had rooms that designated activities but rather zones that suggested areas. The floor plan allowed for multiple arrangements of the space which is how virtual transparency is achieved.

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            The final architect was Hector Guimard. He integrated decorations into a rational architecture that was guided heavily by Viollet-le-Duc. Guimard was also influenced by Victor Horta and after seeing the houses he designed, Guimard revised plans he had made for an apartment building in Paris. Guimard is particularly known for expanding on the idea of a reflection of nature through ornamentation through the structure. This can be seen in the large loops in the structure of his designs such as the Paris Metro entrances.

http://mic-ro.com/metro/images/paris/paris-abbesses.jpg