At the same period in the late 1920s, three houses were designed which encapsulated the differing strands within the new view of architecture, by then often called "Modernism": the Dymaxion House by Richard Buckminster Fuller in the USA; "Les Terraces" outside Paris by Le Corbusier for the Stein and de Monzie families; and Haus Moller in Potzleinsdorf, a Viennese suburb, by Adolf Loos.
Fuller, denying the need for an emblem beyond creating an image of "newness", produced a remarkable metal structure hung from a central core in the history of architecture. The project made little allowance for normal domestic habits and needs; instead, it displayed the romance of technology. The intense concentration on elegant technical solutions to rationally stated problems, without being prejudiced by experience, is a Modernist theme which only came to fruition in the last decades of this century with the works of Norman Foster.
Loos integrated emblem and instrument in a house with a timeless calm. By reinforcing existing forms of habitation, with slight level changes of both floors and ceilings and the relationship of spaces, it is for the whole body not just the eye. To Loos, the house, while it must contain symbolic and formal values, was neither a work of art nor a spectacle. All these designers were concerned with the making of their buildings in the history of architecture. Fuller focused on technology transfer from industry, Le Corbusier on the imagery of new building technology, while Loos reconsidered the domain of craftsmanship.
Le Corbusier used technology to suggest new ways of moving through space and inhabiting it; new senses of enclosure, a new visual language of compressed planes, overlaid forms and virtual transparencies, a feast for the promenading eye. In contrast to Loos, Le Corbusier exploited his skill with publicity. As a result, the Villa Stein/ de Monzie, along with the celebrated Villa Savoye at Poissy which was built shortly after it, came to canonize the ideals of Modernism.
These three, so different, not only in their intentions but in their image, left rather worthless the term "International Style". But undoubtedly Le Corbusier reinforced the "International" idea with his memorable Five Points of Modern Architecture: (1) Lift the building on columns off the ground; (2) Replace the ground covered by the building's footprint with a roof-terrace; (3) Let long windows stretch across the facade, and from side to side of rooms; (4) Let the plan be free-flowing; (5) Let the facade be a free composition, able to respond to light, views or compositional effect.
Le Corbusier's own series of buildings, from the villa for La Roche, 1923--4, via the Villa Cook of 1926 (which first canonized the "five points"), exploits the polemic without limiting the excitement of the architectural experience. The interior spaces of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe might sometimes seem to "obey" the five points, but the effect is quite different, of pure, calm, almost abstract space. The experience of Le Corbusier's villas, by contrast, is captured by a dynamic promenade architecturale. |
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