\u201cThe first space for living was the cave. The first house was the hollow mound of earth. To build meant: to gather and layer building material [and] mass, around voids for air [and] living [and] space. … The technique of architect and sculptor was similar. … The architectural design concerns itself with \u2018space\u2019 as its raw material and with articulated room as its product . … The architect has finally discovered the medium of his art: SPACE.\u201d (1)<\/p>\n
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Written in Vienna in 1912, a place and time marked by some of the most radical cultural shifts of the last century, Rudolf M. Schindler\u2019s \u201cModerne Architektur: ein Programm\u201d describes the origins of architecture and offers two directives for the architecture of\u00a0that moment: first, that architecture must concern itself not with the object, but with space; and second, that\u00a0architecture is to be from and of the earth.<\/p>\n
Ten years later, Schindler built his\u00a0own, seminal house in Los Angeles. He had moved to America to work with Frank Lloyd Wright, and had\u00a0overseen Wright\u2019s studio during the master\u2019s long voyages to Japan. He was in Los Angeles supervising the construction of\u00a0Wright\u2019s first and most significant commission there, the Hollyhock House, built for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall. He had also traveled throughout the American Southwest, reporting to Richard Neutra back in\u00a0Vienna that \u201cthe only buildings that testify to any true feeling of the earth from which they spring are the ancient adobe buildings\u201d there.(2) The house he would design for himself, constructed between February and June 1922, is a\u00a0building as radical today as it was almost a century ago. \u201cThe basic idea was to give each person his own room\u2014instead of the usual distribution,\u201d he explained in a letter to his parents\u00adin\u00adlaw in 1921.(3) He elaborated on this atypical arrangement in an article in the journal T-Square, published in 1932, in which he describes the house as \u201ca\u00a0cooperative dwelling for two young couples\u00a0 … [where] rooms for specialized purposes [have] been abandoned.\u201d \u201cInstead,\u201d he continues, \u201ceach person receives a large private studio; each couple a common entrance hall and bath. Open porches on the roof are used for sleeping. An enclosed patio for each couple, with an out\u00adof\u00addoor fireplace, serves the purposes of an\u00a0ordinary living room. … One kitchen is planned for both couples.\u201d(4) Architecturally, Schindler combines in his house the idea of the \u201ccave\u201d (the\u00a0concrete floors and walls on three sides of\u00a0the spaces) with the idea of the \u201ctent\u201d (the delicate wood, glass, and canvas enclosures of the fourth walls), antici\u00adpating two distinct positions in the architecture of the coming century.<\/p>\n
The connection between nature and architecture was central to modernism. Two distinct strategies exist: buildings that, like those of Neutra or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, extend architectural elements out into their surrounding landscapes, ultimately controlling their sites, and buildings that draw the surrounding landscape into the architectural space.<\/p>\n
In many cases, the dialogue in the latter approach is abstract: Schindler, for example, would at times stain the plywood of his built\u00adin furniture in tones that matched the surrounding greenery. More surprising examples can be found in the house that Charles and Ray Eames built for themselves, Case Study House 8. The house, as much a \u201ctent\u201d as was technically possible at the time (the Eameses speak of a\u00a0\u201ckite,\u201d a delicate structure with the thinnest possible enclosure (5)), is precisely set between the toe of a slope and a row of eucalyptus trees, planted when the species was introduced from Australia to Southern California as a possible source for railroad timber. Two unexpectedly romantic moments connect the house to its site.\u00a0A solid panel facing the living room\u00a0terrace that at first appears to be cement board with vertical streaks is, in fact, an atmospheric photograph of the site depicting the surrounding trees. Inside the house, the\u00a0large two\u00adstory wood wall in the living room is Australian tallowwood (Eucalyptus microcorys)\u2014a machined echo of the row of trees in front of the\u00a0house.<\/p>\n
Other examples are more direct. In his early Textile Block houses, in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright mixed soil from the project sites into his concrete, an effort to unite earth and building with technically disastrous results (this severely weakened the concrete). At Fallingwater, the rock\u2014from which the house grows and to which it is anchored\u2014is the actual hearth of the fireplace, the literal and physical center of the house. The rock rises slightly above the stone floor to\u00a0connect the fire to the famed waterfall.\u00a0 At Oscar Niemeyer\u2019s Casa das Canoas, the rock is a more central element, organizing not only the house\u2019s plan and section but also\u00a0the thin,\u00a0white, amorphous roof, the curved solid and diaphanous glazed walls, the greenery, and the views. The second house Albert Frey designed for himself is the smallest imaginable pavilion set amid the rocks above Palm Springs, California. It is also organized around a massive boulder, separating areas on different levels for sleeping, dining and working, and living. The lightness of the structure\u2014 a\u00a0most delicate steel and glass enclosure carrying a thin roof of corrugated steel\u2014belies the harshness of the desert climate in summer and winter.<\/p>\n
Built around the same time as Frey\u2019s house, Geoffrey Bawa\u2019s Polontalawa Estate Bungalow is one of the great Sri\u00a0Lankan architect\u2019s most unusual projects.(6) Bawa\u2019s buildings generally show an affinity with their sites that\u00a0reflects his interest in landscape\u00a0 architecture\u2014his career began with him reshaping his own large country estate, Lunuganga, before\u00a0 he decided to study architecture at the Architectural Association\u2014as well as his respect for the land, rocks, and trees that are part of the culture he was born into. At\u00a0Polontalawa, public areas including the kitchen and living spaces are set between a simple plinth, which grows from the ground, and an expan\u00adsive, protective roof supported by\u00a0 massive, sculptural concrete beams, which in turn rest on a series of extraordinary boulders, around which flows the space. The rocks are of the site and of\u00a0the house.<\/p>\n
It is unclear if John Lautner knew Bawa\u2019s Polontalawa project.(7) Lautner was famously an apprentice and\u00a0respected collaborator of Wright\u2019s from 1933 to 1938, in the years that Wright worked on Fallingwater and while he extracted his Taliesin West from the Sonoran desert. Lautner also knew and respected Schindler and his writings and would have been familiar with Schindler\u2019s article \u201cSpace Architecture,\u201d published in February 1934 in the Dune Forum (edited at the time by Schindler\u2019s estranged wife, Pauline Schindler). In this article, Schindler articulates many of the thoughts first expressed in his 1912 text. Lautner also knew Frey and visited Niemeyer in Brazil, though not until the late 1980s, after Niemeyer returned from his European exile in 1985.<\/p>\n
Lautner\u2019s formal language, and in\u00a0particular his later, fluid work, is shaped equally by twentieth\u00adcentury developments in structural engineering (including the work of Eduardo Torroja; F\u00e9lix Candela, with whom Lautner collaborated on the Hope Residence; and Frei Otto, with whom he corresponded) and his almost obsessive photography of forms of nature\u2014landscapes, rock formations, clouds, lakes. Lautner used his camera in the way that other architects use a\u00a0sketchbook, and his archives house thousands of these nature studies. The seismo\u00adgraphic reading of his sites, registering their every subtlety, would shape\u00a0 each of his projects. Lautner\u2019s efforts to incorporate elements from the surrounding nature into his architecture are visible in projects as distinct as the Pearlman Mountain Cabin, where he used tree trunks as the building\u2019s structure, echoing the\u00a0surrounding forest, and the celebrated Arango House, in Acapulco, Mexico, where the continuous edge of water surrounding the main, open living space visually merges with the water of the Pacific Ocean below.<\/p>\n
Lautner\u2019s Elrod House is built in the mountains above Palm Springs. Early in the project, Lautner noticed the tops of boulders emerging from the site and proposed to excavate the ground about eight feet (2.4 meters) to\u00a0fully expose and integrate these into his building. Thus, the site\u2019s geology is almost violently thrust through the floor and into the circular space. A\u00a0concrete wall encircles the perimeter; the roof is a shallow concrete cone, with a massive concrete tension ring that supports nine wide concrete blades radiating from the center. Between these blades, various skylights open to the mountains, the horizon, and the sky. The house certainly is one of the most interesting \u201ccaves\u201d of the twentieth century, to return to Schindler\u2019s terminology. Frey, however, was convinced that his own house, a \u201ctent\u201d sitting lightly on the ground a few miles away, was the right approach to such a\u00a0site, and that Lautner\u2019s was not. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make sense to have heavy\u00a0concrete overhead,\u201d Frey complained.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy lift all that heavy stuff up there? … I\u00a0always liked the lightness of things. The sheet\u00admetal people put up the roof (of my house); it took them a day. And then I put these panels up on the\u00a0insulation myself. If you have\u00a0concrete, they actually have to build a whole structure to support it. It doesn\u2019t make sense. Concrete is fine in relation to the ground. It\u2019s an earth material.\u201d (8)<\/p>\n
A few years later, in the early 1970s, Lautner worked on various unbuilt schemes for a small vacation house for himself in Three Rivers, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The site was on the banks of the Kaweah River and strewn with massive boulders. Though the house has\u00a0a different relation to its rocky\u00a0site\u2014in one scheme, the small house is lofted on massive concrete pillars above the rocks; in another, the house is precariously perched on top of a tall\u00a0boulder\u2014the boulders are the\u00a0foun\u00addation and starting point for his de\u00adsign. Here, Lautner may be the furthest away from Schindler\u2019s 1912 dictum, well outside the \u201ctent\u201d and \u201ccave\u201d polemic. But his project, nevertheless, begins and ends with his site, the ground, the earth.<\/p>\n
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(1) The original manifesto is held in the R. M.\u00a0Schindler papers, Architecture & Design Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California,\u00a0Santa Barbara. Author\u2019s translation. Schindler\u2019s 1912 text underwent many changes. Schindler himself made notes on the text for a series of lectures he gave in Chicago in 1916 and Los Angeles in 1921, and he translated it to English around 1932, making it more technical, more prosaic, and less poetic than the original (the mound, for example, is no longer of \u201cearth\u201d\u2014Erde\u2014but of \u201cadobe\u201d). Over the years, this 1932 English version became known as the Schindler manifesto. According to Judith Sheine, \u201cSchindler\u2019s 1932 translation was made in light of his later experiences. His attack on \u2018functionalism\u2019 and focus on \u2018space\u2019 were emphasized in his 1934 article \u2018Space Architecture,\u2019 in which he contrasts his work with that of the International Stylist branch of modernism.\u201d Judith Sheine, letter to the author, 2014.<\/p>\n
(2) \u201cDie einzigen Bauten, die von wirklichem Gef\u00fchl f\u00fcr den Boden der sie tr\u00e4gt zeugen, sind die alten Lehmziegelbauten (der ersten Einwanderer).\u201d R. M. Schindler, letter to Richard Neutra, December 1920 or January 1921. Translated in August Sarnitz, R. M. Schindler, Architekt, 1887\u20131953 (Vienna: Christian Brandst\u00e4tter Verlag & Edition, 1986), 204.<\/p>\n
(3) R. M. Schindler, letter to Mr. and Mrs. Edmund J. Gibling, November 26, 1921, quoted in Kathryn Smith, Schindler House (Santa Monica, CA: Hennessey + Ingalls, 2010), 19.<\/p>\n
(4) R. M. Schindler, \u201cA Cooperative Dwelling,\u201d T-Square 2 (February 1932), quoted in Robert Sweeney and Judith Sheine, Schindler, Kings Road, and Southern California Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 15.<\/p>\n
(5) For example, a 1950 Architectural Forum article describing the house is titled \u201cLife in a Chinese Kite.\u201d<\/p>\n
(6) The Polontalawa bungalow was done in collaboration with the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner, a longtime associate.<\/p>\n
(7) The Polontalawa bungalow was published for the first time in February 1966 in the Architectural Review (\u201cCeylon – Seven New Buildings\u201d), and again in 1965 in the Danish magazine Arkitekten (\u201cArbejder pa Ceylon\u201d). Further, in 1967, the Hawaii Chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded Bawa the Pan Pacific Citation; at the time, Lautner was working on various, mostly unbuilt projects for the Hilo Campus of the University of Hawaii.<\/p>\n
(8) Albert Frey, interview by Jennifer Golub, in Jennifer Golub, Albert Frey \/ Houses 1+2 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 78\u201379.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2782,"template":"","class_list":["post-2763","texts","type-texts","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/productora-df.com.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts\/2763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/productora-df.com.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/texts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/productora-df.com.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/texts"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/productora-df.com.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/productora-df.com.mx\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}