Rotational impulses in space
Rudolf M. Schindler.
Schindler-Chace House. Kings Road, Hollywood, 1921-22.
Mies van der Rohe.
Concrete Country House Project, 1923.
Walter Gropius.
Bauhaus. Dessau, 1925-26.
Mies van der Rohe achieved, with five projects carried out between 1921 and 1924, his indisputable accreditation as an avant-garde architect. The Concrete Country House is one of them, the others being his two Glass Skyscrapers, the Concrete Office Building and the Brick Country House.
Although only a few perspectives and two photos of a model are preserved from the Concrete Country House project, its importance is beyond doubt for Mies' biographer, Schulze, who points out that this house did not have, when it was designed, any architectural precedent in Europe: neither Rietveld, nor Le Corbusier, nor Mendelsohn, nor Gropius had achieved anything like that at the time.
If in the Brick Country House Mies breaks the compact box of the traditional house by means of the individualization of the walls and its extension towards the outside, in the Concrete Country House the box is broken by a different procedure, which is the articulation of its built volumes, after having separated them.
To do this, Mies designs a plan similar to an swastika, which can be understood as the superposition of a building body Z-shaped with another L-shaped, generating three protruding wings projected towards three different orientations. This composition, asymmetrical and rotational, shows a game of solids and voids in which the built volumes and the exterior spaces are interpenetrated in all the fronts of the house.
Although only a few perspectives and two photos of a model are preserved from the Concrete Country House project, its importance is beyond doubt for Mies' biographer, Schulze, who points out that this house did not have, when it was designed, any architectural precedent in Europe: neither Rietveld, nor Le Corbusier, nor Mendelsohn, nor Gropius had achieved anything like that at the time.
If in the Brick Country House Mies breaks the compact box of the traditional house by means of the individualization of the walls and its extension towards the outside, in the Concrete Country House the box is broken by a different procedure, which is the articulation of its built volumes, after having separated them.
To do this, Mies designs a plan similar to an swastika, which can be understood as the superposition of a building body Z-shaped with another L-shaped, generating three protruding wings projected towards three different orientations. This composition, asymmetrical and rotational, shows a game of solids and voids in which the built volumes and the exterior spaces are interpenetrated in all the fronts of the house.
Mies van der Rohe. Concrete Country House Project, 1923.
Due to all this, although nothing is known about the plan of the Concrete Country House, Philip Johnson, in his biography of Mies, gives him the merit of having designed the first "zoned" house, and ventures to assign uses to each of the wings: living area, bedrooms area and service area.
Following his before mentioned maxim of that period -there are no form problems, only building problems- Mies does not speak about composition or expression when he comments on this project, but justifies it in very prosaic terms, limiting himself to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of concrete as a building material. But, recognized or not, there is a composition in the Concrete House, similar to the one proposed for painting in the 1920s by Theo van Doesburg, which we could call "centrifugal composition". This type of composition is generated by the abolition of the center, and the search for a new asymmetric equilibrium based on the movement of the parts towards the periphery.
But, although the house of Mies, as Schulze says, had no precedent in Europe, it did have one in America: between 1921 and 1922, Rudolf Michael Schindler, a Viennese architect emigrated to California, had already designed and built his own house, using that idea of a centrifugal composition, and also introducing a very radical domestic program. The Schindler-Chace House on Kings Road, West Hollywood, made of concrete and redwood, is composed of three L-shaped building bodies arranged like a windmill, which pivot around a double central chimney. One was occupied by a common kitchen, a guests´ studio and a garage, and the other two housed the two couples who shared the house. Each person had an independent study, which occupied one of the arms of the L.
In the Schindler-Chace house, the interpenetration between buildings and spaces resulting from the centrifugal composition is not a mere formal game, but it has a clear functional justification: the two L-shaped bodies that house each couple are attached, forming a Z , so that the zones of the garden to which the Schindler and Chace studios open are opposite and independent, and the third L-body serves, in turn, to create an access space separated from the private gardens.
But Schindler, a bohemian architect with long hair who wore sandals and silk shirts without a tie, and built cheap houses in California for left-wing artists, committed the sin of using at his house on Kings Road a massive architectural language, inspired by the houses of the Pueblo Indians, with precast bearing walls made of slightly inclined concrete panels.
Following his before mentioned maxim of that period -there are no form problems, only building problems- Mies does not speak about composition or expression when he comments on this project, but justifies it in very prosaic terms, limiting himself to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of concrete as a building material. But, recognized or not, there is a composition in the Concrete House, similar to the one proposed for painting in the 1920s by Theo van Doesburg, which we could call "centrifugal composition". This type of composition is generated by the abolition of the center, and the search for a new asymmetric equilibrium based on the movement of the parts towards the periphery.
But, although the house of Mies, as Schulze says, had no precedent in Europe, it did have one in America: between 1921 and 1922, Rudolf Michael Schindler, a Viennese architect emigrated to California, had already designed and built his own house, using that idea of a centrifugal composition, and also introducing a very radical domestic program. The Schindler-Chace House on Kings Road, West Hollywood, made of concrete and redwood, is composed of three L-shaped building bodies arranged like a windmill, which pivot around a double central chimney. One was occupied by a common kitchen, a guests´ studio and a garage, and the other two housed the two couples who shared the house. Each person had an independent study, which occupied one of the arms of the L.
In the Schindler-Chace house, the interpenetration between buildings and spaces resulting from the centrifugal composition is not a mere formal game, but it has a clear functional justification: the two L-shaped bodies that house each couple are attached, forming a Z , so that the zones of the garden to which the Schindler and Chace studios open are opposite and independent, and the third L-body serves, in turn, to create an access space separated from the private gardens.
But Schindler, a bohemian architect with long hair who wore sandals and silk shirts without a tie, and built cheap houses in California for left-wing artists, committed the sin of using at his house on Kings Road a massive architectural language, inspired by the houses of the Pueblo Indians, with precast bearing walls made of slightly inclined concrete panels.
R. M. Schindler. Schindler-Chace House. Kings Road, Hollywood, 1921-22.
The sin of not making structure and enclosures independent, aggravated by the use of a carpentry´s design near to Wright, that seemed not 'modern' enough, left the Schindler-Chace house, the first truly modern house built in the world, out of the exhibition The International Style, organized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Henry Russell-Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932. Le Corbusier's Mandrot house was instead included in that exhibition, showing that sins such as using bearing walls were only left to masters.
The Bauhaus building in Dessau was designed in 1925, two years after the Concrete Country House by Mies, which Walter Gropius obviously knew, and if we see his plans we will see the same swastika, although with the sense of rotation inverted. Solving the encounter of the volumes with the ground line, by means of a continuous horizontal cut, is also a common feature to both buildings.
Gropius, however, showed that he was not satisfied with just following Mies's steps, because he managed to enrich the plan in swastika by proposing a volume arrangement that goes beyond the uniform cornice of the Concrete Country House. To do so, he combines in one of the building bodies a low volume (the zone of canteen and auditorium) and a higher prismatic volume (the study block) located at one end, generating a vertex in the composition, absent in Mies´house, that stabilizes, as if it were a heavy paperweight, the rotation of the blades of the swastika. With this design strategy, in addition, the centrifugal composition, which Mies limited to the plant, is extended to the third dimension. And this is a transcendental contribution, one of these that have made the Bauhaus building a myth of modern architecture.
The absolutely original plan of the Schindler-Chace house reappears with a new architectural language in Mies´ Concrete Country House project. But, while in America the contribution of Schindler was virtually ignored, in the European context Gropius knew how to follow the path opened by the Concrete House to design a building that, although it was not so original, did not stayed where Mies left his design, but went one step further. The history of architecture is perhaps a sum of the contributions of a few architects able to invent new forms and a few more that from those forms manage to create others that enrich them. Both are works of great artists, but the first, to be recognized, requires critics able to identify the good in the new, beyond fashions and styles.
The Bauhaus building in Dessau was designed in 1925, two years after the Concrete Country House by Mies, which Walter Gropius obviously knew, and if we see his plans we will see the same swastika, although with the sense of rotation inverted. Solving the encounter of the volumes with the ground line, by means of a continuous horizontal cut, is also a common feature to both buildings.
Gropius, however, showed that he was not satisfied with just following Mies's steps, because he managed to enrich the plan in swastika by proposing a volume arrangement that goes beyond the uniform cornice of the Concrete Country House. To do so, he combines in one of the building bodies a low volume (the zone of canteen and auditorium) and a higher prismatic volume (the study block) located at one end, generating a vertex in the composition, absent in Mies´house, that stabilizes, as if it were a heavy paperweight, the rotation of the blades of the swastika. With this design strategy, in addition, the centrifugal composition, which Mies limited to the plant, is extended to the third dimension. And this is a transcendental contribution, one of these that have made the Bauhaus building a myth of modern architecture.
The absolutely original plan of the Schindler-Chace house reappears with a new architectural language in Mies´ Concrete Country House project. But, while in America the contribution of Schindler was virtually ignored, in the European context Gropius knew how to follow the path opened by the Concrete House to design a building that, although it was not so original, did not stayed where Mies left his design, but went one step further. The history of architecture is perhaps a sum of the contributions of a few architects able to invent new forms and a few more that from those forms manage to create others that enrich them. Both are works of great artists, but the first, to be recognized, requires critics able to identify the good in the new, beyond fashions and styles.
Walter Gropius. Bauhaus. Dessau, 1925-26