¡Descarga Villa Muller - Adolf Loos y más Resúmenes en PDF de Arquitectura solo en Docsity!
METUJFA 1994
VILLA MULLER:
REVISITING THE WORK OF ADOLF LOOS
1
Kent KLEINMAN, I^eslie Van DUZER
THE SUBJECTS OF THE 'RAUMPLAN'
Received: 13. 6. Keywords: Loos, House, Raumpian, Ratio- nalism.
- Leslie Van Duzer and Kent Kleinman have expanded on this material in a new book (1994).
There is widespread agreement on the status of Villa Müller (Prague, 1930) as both the final and the most complete example of Adolf Loos's Raumpian. However, in the interest of specificity, it is necessary to pause before covering the villa with labels. Loos himself never accorded the Raumpian a theoretical treatment in a dedicated essay. Indeed Loos never actually employed the term. An oblique reference, a footnote in a 1929 eulogy to the carpenter J. Veillich, is typically held to be the defining moment for the Raumpian concept.
This is the great revolution in architecture: the solution of the plan in space....Just as mankind will eventually succeed in playing chess in the cube, so too other architects will, in the future, solve the plan in space (Loos, 1929,215).
The word itself was coined and circumscribed by H. Kulka in 1931, during an effort to compile the definitive oeuvre complete (Kulka, 1931,43). In Kulka's text, the Raumpian became the efficient, emphatic, three-dimensional articulation of the program, restrained by the discipline of the prismatic shell. Loos echoed this definition in an interview given shortly before his death.
24 METU JFA 1994 LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
Figure 1. Villa Müller: Northern View (authors' photograph)
Figure 2. Villa Müller: Dining Room (authors' photograph)
26 METU JFA 1994 LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
\u-
nnSEk
Plan 1
Plan 2 -m
Figures 4 and 5. Villa Müller: Basement and Garage Floor Plans (authors' drawings)
VILLA MULLER METU JFA 1994
?m JBELJ^
D
rlSMIIffilffilM Ran 3 -I J!
Plan 4 m
Figures 6 and 7. Villa MüUer: Entrance and Living-Dining Room Level Plans (authors' drawings).
VILLA MULLER METU^ JFA^1994
The room enticed dwelling by offering conventional lodging. The arrangement of the furniture contributed significantly to envelopment of the subject. Al- though Loos argued for the dispersal of furniture to the periphery of the room in what he called the 'Japanese style', the effect was not so much the expansion of the space as it was the creation of multiple enclaves. The arrangement of the furniture in the Villa Miiller did not exploit the perforated edges of rooms. On the contrary, the gaze of the resting body was always centripetally disciplined. This is evident in the boudoir alcove, where the built-in seating conspicuously turns its back to the 'exterior* view of the marble hall, and in the dining room where the subject seated at the granite table is divorced from the drama that surrounds him. The miscellaneous chairs and tables that originally gathered around the built-in features were invitations for bodies to come, to fill out the circle, and to complete the final boundary of the interior.
But the dweller is not alone. Cutting across all the carefully-crafted conditions of enclosure, or more often along their sides, is the path of the roving subject. To rove is to be upright, and this uprightedness has its benefits. Only the roving subject is offered exterior views; the dweller never sits at the window. It is also the singular privilege of the elevated eye to gaze through rooms, lo peer over penetrated boundaries, and to scan diagonally across space as the body navigates the sinuous channels of circulation. It is therefore quite ironic that precisely this landscape is the favored material for the most static of all viewers: the photog- rapher. Virtually all images of the enclosure privilege the diagonal view. But behind each such image lies a clogged artery and an impatient pedestrian.
In Villa Muller, to rove is also to be displaced. There is a consistent distinction between the architecture of the room and the architecture of the path. Whereas Loos's rooms are constituted by symmetrical arrangements, the lines of move- ment are never aligned with the axes of these symmetries. Loos consistently displaces circulation to the edge. This condition begins at the front door, where the travertine bench occupies the center and the entry is shifted to the side. The circulation system is not entirely without its physical markers; the edge sponsors its own set of structured landmarks that imply the continuity of the path. But the implication is always a ruse; the trajectory of movement loses its singularity in the vicinity of the rooms. The roving subject is misled. Left illegitimately hover- ing at the periphery of the anteroom, or at the threshold of the marble hall, or at the edge of the dining room, (s)he must either move on or join the interior.
The roving subject appears determined to undermine the sanctity of the dwelling subject with its offsides presence and its diagonal gaze. The dwelling subject responds with a kind of spatial amnesia, forgetting its exposed flank. Both positions are summoned by the Loosian Raumpltm. The architecture rallies equally to the support of each case, and thus the possibility of either condition is eliminated. The interior will eventually trap the rover, and the dweller will always sense a slight breeze.
DRESSING THE DUAL SUBJECTS
- All but one of these titles are in Newman and Smith's (1987) translation of the col- lected essays of Loos.'Die Englische Uniform' is in Loos (1983).
Already in his earliest essays ('Men's Hats', 'Men's Fashion', 'Undergarments', 'The Shoemaker', 'Women's Fashion', 'The English Uniform', 'Footwear'), Loos showed a focused interest in the immediate surfaces that surround the body (2). The obsession with matters of dress was not transitory, nor was it incidental to his architectural work. In fact, Loos moved without qualifiers between clothing and cladding, between what could be called the first and second housings for the body.
30 METU JFA 1994 LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
"1 1""
Section B-B
Figures 10 and 11. Villa Mullen A-A and B-B Sections (authors' drawings).
32 METU JFA (^1994) LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
Section D-D
Figures 12 and 13. Villa Müller: D-D Section and View from tlie Living Koom (authors' drawing and photograph).
VILLA MULLER METU JFA 1994 33
However, even in this miniscule space, the characteristic dualism of Loos's architecture is present. For the immobile eye, for the eye that momentarily warrants enclosure as the body rotates and pauses at the top of the stairs, for the eye that is transfixed by the symmetrically-framed spectacle that snaps into place like a carefully-laid trap at the lop of the stairs, for the eye of the stationary subject, Loos has provided the subtle signs of a bounded interior. First, there are signs on the floor. Rather than being a seamless extension of the floor of the marble hall, the oak strips of the niche are neatly trimmed to form a distinct rectangular pad and the direction of the herringbone pattern has been rotated 90 degrees with respect to the room beyond. There is also an inlaid bar of mahogany and black oak that forms an unmistakable threshold, graphically marking the spatial limit of the space. Also, roughly at eye level, there is a wide band of cladding material that appears nowhere else in the villa, a strip of black wallpaper speckled with blue and green flowers. The paper wraps all four sides of the niche, interrupted only by the opening to the stone hall. It is an an- nouncement acknowledging the status of the niche as a room as well as a corridor, a place and a passage. The dual subjects are, after all, housed in one body.
THE THINNESS OF LINES
Loosian scholarship has often claimed that through the application of formal analysis (dashed lines crisscrossing over pristine drawings in search of order), the true architectural subject of a work can be 'excavated' and 'brought to the surface'. This approach assumes that the true building is buried within the thickness of the wall, and that the weighty structure, in all its material specificity, is but a coarse shadow of a more meaningful, intrinsic, geometric order. In other words, the assumption has been that a good drawing lurks inside the plump building. But the opposite is true in Villa Müller. Everything is on the sur- face. The walls have no interiors. They have no centerlines and their thickness is unknowable. The only meaningful lines that exist are the edges of the floors and ceilings, and the perimeter of the building envelope. The only measurements worth noting begin and end at the exposed faces of the cladding.
Loos emphatically rejected the disembodied project of the draftsman/architect as marking the inevitable collapse of building under the weight of the drawn line. Perhaps it will seem surprising that there are many moments of measurable inexactitude in Villa Müller: grids which are quite irregular, symmetries that are quite unequal, centers that are not nearly centered. But these are rallying points of resistance against the seduction of graphic marks:
Drawing board and kiln! A world separates the two. Here the exact-
- This quotation is from Loos's, 'Keramica-^ ilude of the compass, there the indeterminacy of the incidental, the (Loos. 1929,57). fire, the dreams of mankind, and the mystery of becoming (3).
VILLA MULLER METU^ JFA^1994
Figure IS. Villa Müller: Interior (authors' photograph).
36 METU JFA 1994 LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
Figure 16. Villa Miiller: Interior (authors' photograph).
38 METU JFA 1994 LESLIE VAN DUZER and KENT KLEINMAN
REFERENCES
KULKA, H. (1931) Adolf Loos:Das WerkdesArchiieklen, Anton Schroll Verlag, Vienna.
LHOTA.K. (1933) Arkitekt Adolf Loos, ArkitektSIA (32) Prague.
LOOS, A. (1929) Josef Veillich, in Trotzdem, Georg Prachner Verlag, Vienna.
LOOS, A. (1983) Die Potemkinische Stadt, Georg Prachner Verlag, Vienna.
NEWMAN, J. O., SMITH, J. H. trans. (1987) Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, Opposition Books, MIT Press, New York.
SEMPER.G. (1989) The Four Elements of Architecture, H. F. Mallgrave and W. Hermann, trans. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
VAN DUZER, L., KLEINMAN, K. (1994) Villa Milller: A Work of Adolf Loos, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
