BLURRED LINES: REINVESTIGATING THE DESIGN POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTURALIZED FURNITURE AND FURNITURIZED ARCHITECTURE IN MODERN HOUSING

A Thesis Presented to The Academic Faculty

By

Allen C. Pierce

In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Architecture

Georgia Institute of Technology May, 2014

Copyright © Allen Pierce, 2014 BLURRED LINES: REINVESTIGATING THE DESIGN POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTURALIZED FURNITURE AND FURNITURIZED ARCHITECTURE IN MODERN HOUSING

Prof. Mark Cottle School of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology

Prof. Sabir Khan School of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. John Peponis School of Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology

Date Approved 04/07/2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS

iv List of Figures vi Summary 1 1. Introduction 3 2. Critical Readings + Lessons from the Past 3 Division +Reproduction: Seeds of Disunity 6 Unity and the Totalizing Instinct 9 Openness with Scale, Space with Place: Lessons from Loos 11 Flexibility 15 3. Constructional Possibilities 15 The Ship + the Castle 21 Unity, Simultenaity + the Possibilites of Digital Futures 22 4. Formal Primitives 22 Proportion: Plane + Pavilion 23 Density + Porosity 24 Agglomeration + Subtraction 25 Edge + Center 26 Inside + Outside 27 Nesting + Layering 28 Ambiguities 29 5. Formal Case Studies 29 Schindler House, Rudolf Schindler, 1921 31 Fisher House, Louis Kahn, 1967 33 Escherick House, Louis Kahn, 1961 35 Furniture House, Shigeru Ban, 2006 37 Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa, 1972 39 Final Wooden House, Sou Fujimoto, 2007 41 Villa Muller, Adolf Loos, 1928 43 Fleet Library, Office dA, 2007 45 6. Design Experiment I: Lake Shore Drive 47 Planimetric Possibilites 51 Four Schemes 56 Hybrid Scheme 59 7. Further Design Experiments 60 Works Cited

iii LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Drawings of the Nakagin pods reinforce... 1.2 The Raumplan’s separations and interpenetrations... 1.3 “Furniture” is independently occupiable, like small rooms, and also captures... 1.4 The Schroder house’s “flexibility”... 1.5 The Schroder house has but two distinct configurations...

2.1 Kahn’s bench at the Fisher house... 2.2 The thick masonry that makes up the castles... 2.3 The stair pavilion at the heart of Office dA’s Fleet Library... 2.4 Massiveness, in the form of the stair pavilion, can suddenly spin off light... 2.5 Thinnness and assembly manifest in dense elements...

3.1 Plane (frontal), pavilion (circumferential) + hybrid conditions. 3.2 Density extremes: opaque and transparent. 3.3 A pure mass, carved. An aglomerated mass carved. A pure aglomeration. 3.4 Edge Conditions. 3.5 Centers - balanced + unbalanced, edge-proliferating + centripitally focused. 3.6 Inside edge, outside edge + bridging condition. 3.7 Bay window + Inglenook. 3.8 Nesting - separate forms + poché conditions of varying density. 3.9 Layering - from what to what? Grain becomes significant.

4.1 The Schindler house clearly distinguishes between... 4.2 The center is still occupied by moblie furniture but... 4.3 Siding, window frame, furniture and fresh air access... 4.4 Furniture integration happens at specific moments... 4.5 Spaces penetrate the interior at different depths... 4.6 Furniture mediates every significant inside-outside juncture. 4.7 Shelves, benches + windows manifest as part... 4.8 Deep embrasures in the storage units make... 4.9 Formally, shelving units act as structure... 4.10 The house plays with the ambiguities...

iv 4.11 The treatment of the pieces of casework and the spaces between them... 4.12 The capsule carries with it connotations of extreme interiority. 4.13 Along with the pod rhetoric comes a goal of holism. 4.14 In truth, Nakagin’s edges are made up of fairly standardized 4.15 Every level of Final Wooden House is occupiable... 4.16 Every level of the structure has a different plan. 4.17 Each of these spaces overlaps with many others. 4.18 The pod could go anywhere - a siteless interior. 4.19 In the lady’s room at Villa Müller, we see a fractalizing edge... 4.20 Built-in pieces extend their authority outwards into open spaces... 4.21 The lady’s room includes a olivewood box setee nested within it. 4.22 Edges are built up out of planar elements and include parts of each niche. 4.23 The pavilions are centers with actvated edges. They nest...

5.1 Mies’ perspectives show an “infinitely” open space sparsely populated... 5.2 Photographs show the space without people. 5.3 Logical possibilites for primitive-conditon interventions... 5.4 A) The empy “site”. B) The preexisting design + circulation... 5.5 Along the short inside wall, interventions... 5.6 Thick oustide edge interventions may not be sufficiently porous... 5.7 The inside edge is best placed to accomodate the private... 5.8 A thin outside edge and thick inside edge... 5.9 A center scheme shapes the space around it. 5.10 Additive edge scheme - massing and zones of control. 5.11 Subtractive edge scheme - massing and zones of control. 5.12 Additive center scheme - massing and zones of control. 5.13 Subtractive center scheme - massing and zones of control. 5.14 The hybrid scheme takes advantage of... 5.15 Hybrid scheme - massing and zones of control. 5.16 Hybrid scheme - bird’s eye axonometric. 5.17 Hybrid scheme - plan. 5.18 Hybrid Scheme - worm’s eye axonometric.

v SUMMARY

“Blurred LInes” seeks to reopen discussion of the scale and interrelation of architecture and furniture, traditionally conceived. It traces the recent history of furniture and architectural making from the high-point of the “built-in” through the manufacturing age, questioning the corresponding stratification of our imme- diate built environment into building, infill and objects. Engaging modernist and contemporary criticism, it explores a return to unified building in which the archi- tecture might well become the furniture and vice-versa, erasing built hierarchy and asynchronicity. The paper describes lessons learned from modern masters of the discipline from Adolf Loos to Nader Tehrani and attempts to identify key formal, spatial and constructional considerations in the successful integration and “blurring” of this line. All of this comes to bear in the establishment of design experiments to be carried out in studio, testing the possibilities and viability of the paper’s theoretical models.

vi 1. INTRODUCTION

In his grand chronology of the rise of the industrial, Siegfried Giedion traces the history of furniture from a time when the term referred only to light benches and stools, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wherein it increased in significance, heft, and immobility to a high-water mark in the two decades after the fin-de-siecle. During this period, the idea that furniture would be not only built-in but fully of the architecture became a tenant of many early- modern design philosophies - those of Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler, and Adolf Loos, to name a few. The fact that “built-ins” were also a common part of retrospective English-Morrisite and common developer housing from c. 1890-1920 should be unsurprising - to designers of every stripe the concept of integrative holism was as uncontroversial as it was self-evidently positive.

Giedion attributes this shift - from light, mobile furniture (the French categorical is, in fact, meubles, the German, Möbel) towards something emplaced (indeed quite immeuble) - to a radical increase in societal stability and the security of personal property. According to his history, the development of increasingly large, elaborate built-in furniture goes hand-in-hand with such modern “improvements” as the rule of law, the lock and socio-economic egalitarianism. Indeed, we now feel as little need to tote our worldly possessions around with us lest they be stolen as we do to make out a will and testament every time we set out looking for fresh food. Chairs, beds, and cabineats can be, and were becoming, part and parcel of our architecture, our real-estate

(immobilier, Immobilien). For many of the high modernists, the line between architecture and furniture like the line between architecture and landscape - was on its way to disappearing.

1 And yet, in the years since the second world war, integrated furniture-architecture has all but disappeared in common practice. In its place we have the dual concepts of the “installed” casework system and the freestanding object, both placed into the separate, blank boxes we now occupy. Why this sudden shift? This (if Giedion is to be believed)backpedaling into the light and the mobile? Why, just when our personal spaces were reaching a zenith of concreteness, immobility and unity, do we encounter this sea change towards the ephemeral, impermanent and bricolaged? And, what is the status of “built-in”, today? Is it a viable, even desirable model?

I hope to answer these questions and more first by looking back at issues in the recent history of design and design theory, and second by examining the issues faced by, and strategies available to contemporary designers who are once again seeking to erase the line.

2 2. CRITICAL READINGS + LESSONS FROM THE PAST

Division + Reproduction: Seeds of Disunity

Since at least the middle of the last century, the built environment has been understood to break down into distinct, nested “levels”. The idea is that each scalar level of building (and hence design) responds to a different set of conditions and is carried out by a different set of agents, bracketed in by the level above. This thinking is so pervasive that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any suggestion that levels might elide into one another and come under one design, one point of control, is often seen as idealistic at best; totalitarian at worst.

Arguing against the tradition best expressed by Walter Gropius that everything from the “teaspoon to the city” could be designed simultaneously, such that “the same poem speaks at every level”, NJ Habraken writes, “built environment, in all of its complexity, is created by people. Yet it is simply far too complex, too large and too self-evident to be perceived as a single entity, an artifact like a chair, a car, a painting.1” Indeed, Habraken’s book, The Structure of the Ordinary, attempts to codify this principle, extending it as an explanation for the propagation of distinct professions - the urban designer, the architect, the interior designer, the industrial designer - and the erasure of the general “designer” envisioned by those at the Dessau Bauhaus and other visionary schools of the early 20th century.

1. Habraken, NJ. The Structure of the Ordinary. p. 6.

3 What is implicit in Habraken’s understanding of the built environment - its whispered co-requisite - is industrial production. Indeed industrial production, serial reproduction, necessitates his world view. In order for a structural element, or a modular screen system, or a stand-alone chair to function in its environment, there must first exist a separate, higher order into which it can fit. Habraken uses chess as a metaphor: the game, played with pieces, depends upon the preexistence and prearrangement of the board, but anyone can play the same game with functionally identical pieces on an identical board2. Chess cannot, however, be adjusted to it’s surroundings; it cannot modify its game play as it transitions from the picnic blanket to the kitchen table. The game board - the very condition that allows chess’ transportability - disallows its ever relating to “levels” above the board, its perpetual intermediary.

Built-in furniture, as it began to appear in early modernism was synonymously extant and simultaneously manifest with the conditions in which it existed - this meant that it could readily elide directly into the “building” which would later be characterized as a distinct super-level. We might imagine, as counterpoint to Habraken’s chess story, the way that a child plays: inventing different but each entirely more appropriate games for the picnic blanket and for the table and for the beach, and doing so with what is on hand, creatively integrating the game - both its rules and its materials - into each new “site”.

Industrially produced furniture, the very best of which can only ever stand separately and will almost always be ubiquitous, overcame built in furniture because of its cost and its production efficiency - causes only marginally related to long-term human need or good design. The means of production - the division of labor - inevitably translated into the mode of production - the division of levels. The out-production of the old means by the new in the marketplace translated to the success of the new mode of thought over the old;

2. Ibid. p. 22.

4 our failure to realize and control the bounds of industrial production has allowed industrial thinking to propagate into fields where it is not necessarily useful or appropriate. And so the baby went: out with the bathwater.

Giedion says it best:

To control mechanization demands an unprecedented superiority over the instruments of production. It requires that everything be subordinated to human needs… Today, man is overpowered by means.3 (Giedion, 714)

The resultant condition was the one described by Habraken; one in which the utter separateness of the layer we perceive haptically, the layer that bounds our visual world and the architectonic core of our buildings has led to the modern bricolage home and workplace. After all, how can a seat correspond dimensionally or materially with a partition, with a window, and onwards with the exterior condition when all are designed and paid for separately, often with no intelligent coordination; no common agency? Is it any wonder that those at the height of recent interior design - practices like Philippe Starck and Roman + Williams - succeed only by intelligently trading in historicist collage, forced, as they are, to collate disparate pieces and remain within their narrow scalar box?

Limited as this condition is, furniture “within its level” either takes the form of stock-assembled case goods and spatial dividers or of the industrially designed object that floats as an entity in the space of the room. The object condition necessarily cannot bind to the architecture in any real way, seeing as it is separately designed and produced with an eye towards working OK in a variety of spaces but never intended for a specific one. As a consequence, furniture of this type tends to float into the room without actually

3. Giedion, S. Mechanization Takes Command. p. 714.

5 engaging it by scale or material association, first becoming a stumbling block, then a kind of object-of-display. In 1923, as industrialization began to fuel the transition of furniture from accommodations for living to the center of the culte de l’objet, Schindler identified the oncoming difficulty,

The furniture, originally conceived to adapt the house to a more comfortable use has usurped our place in it. Our homes have become storage places for all kinds of “things” instead of affording us a sheltered space for living.4

What is perhaps of greater interest to us than the “object” is the aesthetic development of the industrially produced kit-of parts system. Over time these non-integral interventions - whether shop-built plywood boxes or advanced modular steel systems - have taken on many features of built-in furniture, trying where they can to appear integral or non-modular. Nowhere is this more obviously manifest than in the drawings of such “pod” buildings as Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, wherein the rhetoric of the fully-integrated spacecraft-like living space is entirely broken by the quickly obvious line - Habraken’s line - between the inserted spacecraft-white cabinetry, bathroom-unit and bed (made by a cabinet-maker and installed) and the normative steel-and-concrete box that forms the structure and enclosure (the work of the welder, the concrete-pourer) [Fig. 1.1]. Finding the limits of industrial reproduction, designers are now reaching back for integrality only to stumble on institutionalized divisions.

Unity and The Totalizing Instinct

Latter day philosophers of design have been quick to point out the often-totalizing instincts of many of the early-modern giants - Gropius, Mies, Wright, Corbusier, etc.

4. Schindler, R. “Care of the Body”. Los Angeles Times. April, 1926.

6 1.1 Drawings of the Nakagin pods reinforce the very line that their rhetoric seeks to erase.

Gropius’ “teaspoon to city” comments are often trotted out by today’s socially conscious academicians to demonstrate a kind of egotism; a desire for total control. Wright, for one, unabashedly considered himself the only agent capable of realizing his “total” design vision. The integration of furniture into architecture - the elision of multiple levels of design-control - is often bundled into this criticism. In some cases, this may be for good reason; certainly Wright’s designs for “prairie-like” couches and foot-stools to continue his landscape metaphors played out uncomfortably and with little appreciation for the human scale.

Reflecting on the gesamtkunstwerke of CR Mackintosh and Joseph Olbrich, Adolf

Loos tells a story of the “poor little rich man” who has hired an architect to design every aspect of his material life, only to find, upon being presented with a gift, that there is no

7 longer room in the design for living - that without room to improve, add to, or grow into the design, the architect has left him to live “with his own corpse”.5 Indeed, Mark Wigley has identified the “explosive” total design of Gropius as identical to the “implosive” totality of Mackintosh - both rendering the whole world a single interior to be designed in toto. The impulse to elide - to combine levels or extend control outward - represents, to

Wigley, a totalizing tendency; a desire to control more aspects of occupant’s lives than is called for and thereby implicitly deny them agency.6

It is notable, in light of these criticisms, that Loos himself was a master of the use and design of integrated furniture. He, along with Schindler realized a condition in which unity could be maintained without its becoming totality. Schindler described it thusly:

It must be the basic principle of all interior decoration that nothing which is permanent in appearance should be chosen for its individual charm or sentimental associations, but only for its possible contribution to the room conceived as an organic entity, and as a background for organic activity.7

In this way, a principle of “unified but neutral” design is manifested. Both architects understood that unification - “spatial assemblies [which] are not stitched together but woven”, as David Leatherbarrow described Schindler’s work8 - was possible while still allowing a place for a collection, or a personal touch, or a favorite chair, or a birthday present from a friend, as Loos’ poor little rich man had wanted. In a sense, this

5. Leatherbarrow, D. “Sitting in the City, or the Body in the World.” Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture.. p. 273.

6. Wigley, M. “What Ever Happened to Total Design?” Harvard Design Magazine, Summer 1998. p. 6.

7. Schindler. “Care of the Body”.

8. Leatherbarrow. p. 283

8 is architecture that accommodates a life without dictating it. It is neither the white box, which accommodates little and begs for much, nor the total design, which, like the over- strict mother, provides only in return for conformity.

Openness with Scale, Space with Place: Lessons from Loos

The mode in which we occupy the built environment has been a major topic of debate over the later half of the twentieth century. The idea that furniture - direct accommodation for the body - could become an integral part of structure and enclosure, or even grow to the scale of the building itself stakes a clear position in these debates.

In many ways, the notion runs counter to concepts of universality, infinite extension and perpetual motion that were advanced by such thinkers as Mies, Corbusier + Superstudio

(to be quite cursory). The title of the book Raumplan versus Plan Libre is correct in its oppositional positioning insofar as Loos presents a configuration of distinct spaces - distinct in their dimensions, materiality, program and relationship to the whole - while

Corbusier seeks to create a more open, undifferentiated and extended space.

It makes sense, then that Loos would make such significant use of integrated furniture as a means of shaping and defining spaces while Corbu would rely more heavily on light steel meubles. What Loos is able to maintain by differentiation and specialization is a human scale and sense of place-ness (not just space-ness) that is often lost in the “infinity” of free- and open-plan projects. And, he is able to do this while retaining the openness and holism sought by both sides.

In a certain sense, the Raumplan sees the entire building as a single entity with many functions - a great piece of furniture which has been carved out according to need

- something less machine- and more mobel à habiter. It, “proposes the differentiation

9 of volumes and their combination into one ‘unified’ configuration”.9 One volume might correspond to a certain use and position in the larger piece and two might functionally interrelate, not unlike a chair and a desk within a room. Unlike the traditional chamber plan, in Loos’ houses, each volume (room) and sub-volume (bench, nook, desk, bed) captures more space than it actually occupies by projecting into and overlapping with the space of others, resulting in incredibly dynamic interpenetrations in which no open space is unaccounted for by some element of the perimeter condition. In this way each element operates at a variety of scales - at times furniture is alternately subsumed into room, synonymous with it, or even engulfs the space. Sometimes it is not clear which.

Loos’ fully integrated Raumplan also anticipates the fact that we are not, as so many early-modern diagrams would have us believe, perpetually in motion but are often static for long periods of time. His design offers a variety of vantages and opportunities for many kinds of intercorporeal relationships - distance and closeness, cover and exposure. In many cases, he plays up the safety of removal and solitude present in the dead-end chamber Robin Evans highlights in “Figures, Doors, Passages” while maintaining visual and auditory connection to other spaces, even playful intrigue. In this way, the “unbridgeable gap” between “architecture to look through and architecture to hide in”10 is, in fact, bridged [Fig. 1.2].

From Loos we can glean strategies for maintaining openness and freedom of movement - almost unquestionably good values that have come down to us from modernism - without giving up scale and specificity. Loos also demonstrates how one or two built elements can capture a space much larger than their actual footprint and

9. Ibid. p. 276.

10. Evans, R. “Figures, Doors and Passages.” Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. p. 74.

10 1.2 The Raumplan’s separations and interpenetrations place the body in an “architecture to look through and to hide in.”

1.3 “Furniture” is independently occupiable, like small rooms, and also captures and acti- vates stretches of surrounding space when inhabited.

11 operate at a series of spatial scales simultaneously, depending upon their occupation.

In effect, a significant proposition of the Raumplan is the possible simultaneity of furniture, room and building and the ability of the designer to hold all three in ambiguous interrelation, allowing each to shift according to occupation.

Flexibility

One of the most famous early examples of the “building as furniture” is the

Schroder house by Gerrit Rietveld. At the time the house was built, Rietveld had primarily worked on conventional mobile furniture, usually using sheet materials like plywood. He had the idea that the logic of his furniture could be scaled up to something fully occupiable that, like a cabinet, he could create a house-sized piece of furniture that could convert to different occupancies (like a drop-leaf table) and different uses

(like a secretary) becoming, in effect, a swiss-army-knife of a dwelling: compact but multifaceted.

On the surface, he seems to have accomplished just that. His major move is to develop a plywood screen system that allows for the rapid reshaping of space along pre-planned lines. During the night, these screens, along with a couple of other pieces of plywood furniture, cordon off the upstairs space into three distinct bedrooms and a dining/living space. During the day, the whole space opens up to accommodate group activities, guests, cooking, piano playing, etc.

The plan seems to have worked for Trus Schroder and her three children (and for Rietveld, once he moved in with them), but it is difficult to imagine a family, differently composed or disposed, moving in and having success living there. The “flexibility” of

Rietveld’s great cabinet plays out over short cycles. It is designed to work perfectly

12 over a cycle of days, weeks. It falls apart over longer cycles - seasons, years, decades.

Its flexibility depends, like Habraken’s chess pieces, on an underlying layer of static conditions, which renders it, ultimately, inflexible [Fig. 1.3].

This is an important thought to take forward into the design of architectural furniture. Often, when the topic of built-ins is breached, it turns towards murphy beds, pullout tables and the like. What this turn fails to recognize is that the longevity of architecture - and hence of architecturalized furniture - depends on its not wearing out.

Wearing out can mean, here, the failure of physical-mechanical parts which are taxed by repeated motion, but it can also mean the cessation of a piece’s ability to bear change, in the abstract sense. Those pieces of furniture that seem most “flexible” actually bear the greatest number of impinging assumptions and are thusly, as occupants press these assumptions, at a higher risk of stress-failure.

1.4 The Schroder house’s “flexibility” is upheld by the rigidity of the Schroder’s daily pat- terns and relationships; in fact, it reinforces them.

13 One solution for long- and short-cycle flexibility may lie, again, in the idea

(borrowed from the Raumplan) that space unoccupied by built material can be colonized by those things, those functions which surround it. In this way, a static built environment is activated in different ways depending on how it is occupied and does not have to be, itself, animated. In the short-term, this meets Rietveld’s goals - the accomplishment of more functions and accommodations for more program in less space, while in the long term it leaves room for different occupants and different occupations. Indeed, new occupants might activate a well-designed space in radically different ways than their predecessors without changing a thing; the Schroder house, like the common Murphy bed will only ever do the one thing it was designed to do and will dictate that action to all future occupants, regardless of their preference or instinct.

1.5 The Schroder house has but two distinct configurations - two modes of occupation which dictate spatial function and use.

14 3. CONSTRUCTIONAL POSSIBILITIES

The Ship and the Castle

From an examination of architecturally integrated furniture in the western world, we might derive two simultaneous origin stories - one of a shipwright and one of a stonemason

- both out to build their own homes.

The shipwright deals in sticks and sheets; bones and skin. When he sets out to build his house, he does so by framing it, then skinning it. When he wants to make a bench or a bed, he works their frames into the frame of the larger building. The most primitive example of this might be the traditional Finnish sauna with its cascading benches, derived from and participating in the building frame, (indeed, many of the best examples of “ship” construction come from early Scandinavian architecture). Within this paradigm, spatial definition and weight are largely dependent upon the thickness of the framing member and the thinness of the sheathing. Framing members define clear bays and spaces seem to meet one another at zero-points where only thin skin divides them. More often than not, the assembly of parts is obvious - the building is clearly agglomerative.

Louis Kahn often engaged the idea of integrating furniture with the frame. Where he needed a frame for a window or a railing or a portal, that frame could also become a seat or a cabinet or a shelf. In his houses for the Eschericks and the Fishers and at Exeter library, brick is treated as the structural material while wood fulfills all other tasks, beginning with

15 enclosure but extending to the admission and control of light + air, the facilitation of corporeal comfort, the storage of tools and books and the specification or specialization of distinct spaces. Agglomerative as the process is, each piece seems to extend out independently from its rooted frame, articulating in its own way. [Fig. 2.1]

2.1 Kahn’s bench at the Fisher house almost “comes out of” the muscular wooden window frame. They are concieved of together and built simultaneously - literally “of” one another.

16 The stonemason, by contrast must deal in great thicknesses - without significant depth her structures will deflect and fall. She begins her home by stacking or pouring mass into form. When she wants to make a bench or bed, she does so by leaving material out - by making an exception within the upward growth of the mass. We see such spaces in medieval castles and in bunker-like constructions of early concrete. Here, spatial definition is freer, in one sense, than for the shipwright. The even loading of the heavy wall or vault allows for more specific and varied removals or exceptions. Scale is achieved not by relation of the body to the building material but of the body to the void [Fig. 2.2].

At Ronchamp, Corbusier builds a highly articulate concrete church in which the wall thicknesses change considerably depending on their orientation and proximity to use. On the south wall, the deep stained-glass recesses recall private chapels into which individuals can

2.2 The thick masonry that makes up the castles of Northern Europe is incedentally carved out or left void to create space for the body without effecting the overall massing.

17 remove themselves. The confessionals occupy sub-niches in the heavy walls north and west in which space is cut for entry and seating but little more. The side chapels themselves feel, on the ground, like great scoops out of the mass of the church - their delicate light reflecting down from somewhere on or above the massive roof. The overall effect is of a unified outer massing that is only articulated by internal carving and shaping.

The richest possibilities manifest when the two paradigms appear to be happening simultaneously; when their features blur. In the work of Office dA, we often see this played out. From one vantage, we appear to occupy a niche, and exception in the material that surrounds us. Viewing the situation from another angle, perhaps passing through a door or coming around an edge, we might realize that, in fact, there is a thinness to the material that merely wraps around us. What we believed to be excepted mass is, in fact, skin-on frame.

Likewise, we might approach a surface edge-on that appears to be a thin sheet only to find that it is quite thick as the surface moves on.

This game has practical, not just perceptual value as it allows one condition to exist inside the other. A framed box might include a “carved” niche, which is in turn backed by a thin wall that abuts a concealed, “excepted” closet. Thick space-shaping walls might, at certain moments, open to reveal their hollowness for storage or occupation.

This ambiguous condition is on full display across multiple scales in Office dA’s Fleet

Library at RISD. The architects, tasked with developing a huge bank hall into a library for the design school, needed to find a way to adapt the scale of the room down to spaces sometimes small enough for a single person to crawl in and study. In order to do so, they introduced two pavilions - one apparently solid and the other apparently framed - at a scale in keeping with the large space [Fig. 2.3]. Each of these great big furniture pieces, in turn, articulates further.

The “solid”, a giant urban-scale staircase-to-nowhere at times peels apart to become stick-

18 and sheet- pieces: long library tables, seating, etc. [Fig. 2.4]. At other times, it is itself carved out into one- and two- person niches as though it were truly solid (it is, in fact, thin wood, and mostly framed). The other pavilion, which houses the circulation desk and other services, appears to be trellis-like: all frame and no mass [Fig. 2.5]. Upon closer inspection, aspects of the pavilion prove to be great masses of laminated wood that have been carved out for specific purposes. In both cases, the shifts are only manifested as one variably occupies the larger space - on top, next to, below, close to or far from each piece - all without animation or metamorphosis on the part of the building.

2.3 The stair pavilion at the heart of Office dA’s Fleet Library reads as a shaped mass placed in the larger bank hall.

19 2.4 Massiveness, in the form of the stair pavilion, can suddenly spin off light and thin planes and frames like these library tables.

2.5 Thinnness and assembly manifest in dense elements; thickness and carving appear at moments of constructional thinness.

20 Unity, Simultaneity and the Possibilities of Digital Futures

We have already discussed the role that manufacturing and the radical division of la- bor had on the conceptual shift towards stratified building levels. Writing in 1998, Habraken had this view of the future of building:

With ongoing industrialization and systematization, building design is increasingly a matter of selecting and combining systems. The range of system components and rules about how they combine are prede- termined. Partitioning systems, sanitary and kitchen equipment and cabinetry, and furniture and lighting systems result from long-range product development and marketing, far beyond the reach of any sin- gle intervention, or any designer’s desire for innovation. To a great

extent, such systems now set the terms of the design game.11

In answer, from beyond the grave, Giedion would remind us that, of course, “Mech- anization is the outcome of a mechanistic conception of the world.”12 It should be obvious to all observers that we are even now moving out from under the weight of this mechanistic conception. New digital manufacturing technologies are allowing designers to return to what

Mario Carpo has called a “pre-Albertian paradigm” in which design and making are simul- taneous and synonymous. These very same tools promise to bring unity back to building

– to allow for the creative rejoining of the levels Habraken insists must always be. “Tasks that were separated by the mechanical revolution are already being reunited by the digital revolution.”13 By reuniting the disparate construction professions and allowing designers to experiment with shifting scale at unprecedented speeds, this reversal will be our friend in pursuit of simultaneity and unity, too.

11. Habraken. p. 74.

12. Giedion. p. 717.

13. Carpo, M. “Nonstandard Morality: Digital Technology and its Discontents.” Architecture Between Spectacle and Use. p. 123.

21 4. FORMAL PRIMITIVES

The blurring of Habraken’s lines leads to a number of formal possibilities. It shifts the scale of any given space up - an apartment might now include only one piece of furniture, or might be furniture, a library-room could be occupied by whole buildings that are also benches. Issues abound in the placement and manifestation of such diversely functional creatures - discussions of porosity, proportion + poché, relationship to site, to body, to self. A brief exploration of these possibilities as primitives along with the caveats of history will empower design experiments to come.

Proportion: Plane + Pavilion

3.1 Plane (frontal), pavilion (circumferential) + hybrid conditions.

The proportions of a design matter significantly to its effectiveness and to the way it is addressed. At opposite ends of the spectrum we can imagine a piece that is circular and one that is an incredibly long and thin line. The former invites use from all sides and activates everything around it, encouraging motion. The latter discourages motion, acting

22 more as a barrier and only addressing use on its two long sides. The former may gravitate towards the center while the other inevitably creates a new edge when it does not already follow one.

Likewise, the height of a piece in relation to its site and to the human form affects its reading and operation. A piece might be as short as a bench or table or much taller than a person - as high as the ceiling if it is nested within a building. Again, the former is open and invites many to gather around it while the later divides space and lends itself to separate, dispersed functions.

Density + Porosity

3.2 Density extremes: opaque and transparent.

The last example – the height of a piece – engages the issue of porosity. The density-porosity continuum can manifest significantly in terms of sight, light, movement, sound, and air-flow. A less-dense piece can promote connection in one way or another while a denser one begins to provide separation and privacy in all of its forms.

Porosity is a major game in Loos’ Raumplan residences where an edge between two spaces might regulate exchange of persons but not exchange of words; views but not sounds. Porosity is an opportunity for user-generated change – the ability to slide a panel or fill an open shelf with books can make alterations in porosity possible without requiring great transformations on the part of the built piece.

23 Agglomeration + Subtraction

3.3 A pure mass, carved. An aglomerated mass carved. A pure aglomeration.

Agglomeration + subtraction provide formal equivalents to the ship and the castle, understood as construction metaphors. Agglomerative forms do not necessarily hold a strong outline – their functional parts might pop or pinwheel out from some bonding core.

Thusly, they are potentially better at articulating the space around them towards distinct shapes or uses. Like Kahn’s window seat, they demonstrate their assembly and call out their constituent parts externally (in their extension) and internally (at joints). By nature, agglomerative forms are often more porous as only the material needed is attached.

Subtractive forms tend to start with a more-or-less pure mass and make exceptions into it of the shape, size and location needed for a specific function. These constituent spaces might be said to exist within the poché created by the otherwise unoccupiable mass. While subtractions more wholly describe the smaller spaces they create, they are less adept at projecting their force beyond the plane of the larger mass. Particularly with hyper-regular masses, this can mean that the furniture piece has difficulty fully acknowledging and integrating with its surroundings.

24 Edge + Center

3.4. Centers - balanced + unbalanced, 3.5 Edge Conditions edge-proliferating + centripitally focused

At the fleet library, Office dA occupy the center of the large space with pavilions of equally grand scale. From this position, the sub-functions and sub-spaces tucked into each pavilion are able to project out and capture the remaining space - interacting with one another and with the edge condition.

With a center-based design, directionality becomes significant. In a condition like

Mies’ Lake Shore Drive apartments with two window-walls and two interior walls, “center” may not necessarily mean the geometric middle as the furniture piece alternately pulls to one of three corner possibilities - solid/solid, solid/glass and glass/glass - taking on a very different personality in each case. The size, proportion and placement of the furniture piece within its “site” affect the space that is captured around it. Should the kitchen part be closer to a wall, and therefore smaller? Should the living room niches pull away from the window, making the space they can control more expansive?

25 Kahn’s frame-furniture, as it evolves from window mullions and balustrades, necessarily occupies the edges of a space - a condition we are more used to seeing in built-in furniture. From here, they reach back into the space. In Loos, too, we see the inclusion of furniture into screens and walls from whence it addresses and controls empty centers variously occupied by more transient objects like tables, chairs and pianos. In an edge condition, the designer runs the risk of being left with an uncontrolled center should the space be too large or the edge-piece not effective enough. In these cases, it may be neccesary to articulate a new edge, in some way subdividing the larger space and providing new opportunities to operate on the unoccupied zone. Shigeru Ban’s Furniture House does this - articulating subdivisions under the roof with casework that pertains to each space.

Inside + Outside

3.6 Inside edge, outside edge + bridging condition. 3.7 Bay window + Inglenook

The question of the design’s relationship to externalities can radically affect layout.

The same massing - a high bar, for instance - would relate in radically different ways on an outside edge, where it would screen light, air and views, than an inside one where it might encompass systems and provide privacy to intimate programs like bathing.

An outside piece would manifest in a highly porous way and would be charged with mediating between the outside environment and the indoors. It may be more aptly realized as a part of the enclosing frame - light and made up of different agglomerated interventions depending upon its orientation, etc - not unlike Kahn’s windows. An inside piece could be denser - with small punches and niches removed for its specific functions - even whole spaces tucked within its depth; something closer to the core of Mies’ Farnsworth house.

26 The interaction of the two becomes vital, too, just as in the classic pre-systems house the relationship between the window seat and the inglenook informed both the social and thermal dynamic of the room. Various middle conditions might exist that warrant a graduated design

- increasing porosity, decreasing thickness, etc.

Nesting + Layering

3.8 Layering - from what to what? Grain becomes significant.

3.9 Nesting - separate forms + poché conditions of varying density.

Developing the idea of graduated responses - from darkness to light, from public to private - an understanding of the way spaces layer or nest allows for the calculation of proper scale, orientation and order. A layered scheme tends to have an obvious grain while nesting privileges a center condition. A design might layer from one equal condition to the other, while nesting implies the inclusion of smaller conditions within larger ones.

In Office dA’s library, reading nooks are nested within the poché of the stair pavilion, subtractively, while the pavilion itself is nested within the bank hall, additively. Nesting often incorporates poché conditions – spaces are tucked into the depth of masses – while layering tends to arrange multiple pieces in proximity and sequence within a common, larger space. Kahn’s Exeter has visitors moving through non-hierarchical layers from the center to the perimeter as they get books from the stacks and bring them back to their carrels.

27 Pairings + Ambiguities

Within one piece, a variety of apparently conflicting formal patterns might emerge. A piece might imply or actualize some relationship to the edge while existing as an independent centered entity. It might read as incredibly thin and divisive from one perspective while feeling open and centrifugal from another. It might bridge from an internal to an external condition, adapting to each, or subsume both within itself. It might appear to be at once monolithic and built of many parts. These multiple readings not only provide a richer experience to guests but also open up the spaces themselves to many different modes of occupation and the long- and short-cycle flexibility that comes with them.

28 5. FORMAL CASE STUDIES

Schindler House, Rudolf Schindler, 1921

In the revolutionary house that Schindler built for himself in West Hollywood,

California, the formal strategy is clearly additive. The encompassing structure is alternately of tilt-up concrete panels or carefully joined wooden frames; the concrete is by and large left as-is while the frame often elaborates into furniture pieces which fill corners or project into open spaces. This dependency on the frame means that Schindler’s built-ins participate primarily in edge conditions, even creating new edges as they project into the room. The center of the four main rooms is, more often than not, occupied by movable furniture of the same material and styling as the frame – a gesture towards the idea that the house and its furnishings are much the same things at different scales, nested within one another.

The wooden sections, and hence the furniture are generally the most porous parts of the building – they encompass the windows that divide outside from inside and the screens that divide one studio from another. The un-furniturized concrete sections of the building are allowed to operate at the highest levels of density. Likewise, the concrete always operates in plane and reaches up to or past ceiling conditions while the wooden frame often elaborates out into the room to be occupied from all sides and remains low as tables, chairs + small shelves to be seen and interacted over.

29 4.1 The Schindler house clearly distinguishes between the wood furniture order and the concrete non-furniture.

4.2 The center is still occupied by moblie furniture but it is of the same material, style, and proportions as the frame-edge. In some cases it pinwheels off of an edge deep into the space, defining new edges.

30 Fisher House, Louis Kahn, 1967

Like the Schindler House, the Fisher House clearly differentiates between a concrete + brick order which does not relate to furnishing, and a wood + glass one which does. Again, it is the wooden frame that is additively elaborated from the edge towards the center providing seating, storage and modifiable access to fresh air. The joints of the bench in the living room corner, for instance, demonstrate the integrality of the seat with the window frame. The light wood construction of the view window, the bench and the fresh-air panel all participate in a moment of high porosity contrasted with the cementitious mass that surrounds them.

The varying planes of glass, then air-access, then occupation by bodies + things points to localized moments of layering – a mediation between the fully outside and weather-bearing and the fully interior and shielded. As these layers project into the space of the interior, they begin to shape it – not behaving merely as an extension of the plane of the window but beginning to acknowledge multi-dimensional space and accepting views and use from multiple angles.

4.3 Siding, window frame, furniture and fresh air access manifest as a single assembly.

31 4.4 Furniture integration happens at specific moments around the house and articulates into the house, shaping space and allowing for aprehension at a variety of angles. This is reinforced by their frequent colocation with corner conditions.

4.5 Spaces penetrate the interior at different depths defining different functions, occupations and levels of enclosure.

32 Escherick House, Louis Kahn, 1961

The Escherick house continues Kahn’s understanding of the window – the building edge - as a moment for furniture. Here, entire walls become immense wooden shelving units. Contrary to the Fisher house and the Schindler house before it, this sets up not a light frame condition but one of thickness. Benches, view windows and air-access panels are carved out of the thickness of the shelves to differing depths, variably mediating the edge depending upon solar orientation and the program of the interior space.

These shelving units are clearly layered back from the garden conditions outside and relate directly across rooms to one another, creating an insulated layer of occupied space between them. As such, they are always addressed frontally from within and without: accentuated planar surfaces which operate only on their broader faces as weather barriers, and as passages for light, air, bodies + things.

Unlike the more open-centered Fisher house, at the Escherick house Kahn continues the use of integrated furniture along internal surfaces, particularly in the master bathroom and kitchen. Here the pieces are thick and low; they often take on tasks like plumbing and heavy storage, conditions which would leave outside edges undesirably thick and encumbered.

4.6 Furniture mediates every significant inside-outside juncture.

33 4.7 Shelves, benches + windows manifest as part of deep, layered wall assemblies - carved out of therir mass. As such, they are aprehended frontally, as planes. They layer through the building, too, framing larger spaces.

4.8 Deep embrasures in the storage units make way for view- and light-glass, seating and fresh air access.

34 Furniture House, Shigeru Ban, 2006

At his furniture house, Ban makes great play of vertical case goods as both structure and enclosure. The long, thin cabinetry runs from floor to ceiling and defines each of the house’s rooms without the use of doors or other screening mechanisms. The cabinets hide their functional spaces within their depth – as though nooks carved from the mass of a wall – but Ban also cleverly acknowledges their fundamentally agglomerative nature at a variety of scales by showing where two distinct cabinet units meet and by celebrating the finger joints that hold each unit together. In some sense, while the units literally stack up next to one another without hierarchy, the nesting of assembly processes is acknowledged in the multiple scales of building, wall, unit + board.

Ban notably limits the use of his furniture units to interior edges, where he uses them to divide the open space of an otherwise open Miesian pavilion. This allows the standardized units to be entirely opaque while floor-to-ceiling glass sheets, entirely porous, handle outside edges.

4.9 Formally, shelving units act as structure and interior enclosure. This allows the architect to articulate new and varied edges under the Miesian roof plane.

35 4.10 The house plays with ambiguities between agglomerative assemblies - at multiple levels - and monolithic masses which have been shaped for use and occupation.

4.11 The treatment of the pieces of casework and the spaces between them (doors or no doors, backs or no backs) establish surfaces of varying porosity and visual weight.

36 Nakagin Capsule Tower, Kisho Kurokawa 1972

The rhetoric of the “pod” as it comes to bear on the Nakagin capsules is fundamentally about interiority. It is a story about the self-related and self-sufficient living space. As such, all edges are treated as fully opaque interior surfaces with the exception of a barely-acknowledged round opening in one wall. The material manifestation of the built-in furniture that lines the long walls attempts to imply a holism that comes with the subtractive definition of space. It is as though the pod wants to be a single blockof material whose interior mass has been carved away to make just enough space for the body and its various functions. Kurokawa’s dependency on the standardized cabinetry of his day lends a very different reading, however – one of an assembled product made up of many pieces.

Even as the pod functions mainly at its edges, it is largely about the center – the space occupied by the body. The body is nested within the pod, as are a variety of other furniture pieces like desks and stools that pull out of perfectly sized nooks when needed.

The pod might be, it is implied, further nested within another layer of infrastructure or perhaps even within another layer of occupiable space.

4.12 The pod carries with it connotations of extreme interiority. It is as though the body is nested within the capsule, which might well be itself be subsumed by a higher level of enclosure.

37 4.13 Along with the pod rhetoric comes a goal of holism. The space wants to feel as though carved from one block of material.

4.14 In truth, Nakagin’s edges are made up of fairly standardized cabinets installed against its true structural walls.

38 Final Wooden House, Sou Fujimoto, 2007

Sou Fujimoto’s Final Wooden House is, in some sense, a pod in its own right. It is a single architecturally-scaled, fully integrated piece of furniture which can be placed anywhere and whose interior surfaces are meant to provide for all of the occupant’s needs.

More clever than Kurokawa, though, Fujimoto plays games with the assumptions implicit in the pod-thesis.

While the interior is occupied like a carved-out block, it is quite obviously an assembly of variously cut logs with a common square profile of roughly 18”. These logs layer to different depths to create variable porosities between its single interior space and the outside. At the same time, many of the logs are grain-aligned such that two exterior surfaces of the mass show end-grain, implying a trans-scalar similarity between the unit and the whole and reinforcing the feeling of subtractive space-making.

As the thickness of the material between interior and exterior works to create varied porosity, the edges created by these material exceptions are all put to use in multiple ways. What is at one elevation a bench might from another level be a counter and from one higher a step up to a sleeping surface. Thus, the edge we normally understand as the floor – a surface only for walking on – is activated and programmed as furniture.

4.15 Every level of Final Wooden House is occupiable; every surface programmable.

39 4.16 (above) Every level of the structure has a different plan. As one moves up and down, one occupies a variety of spaces each designed for one or more functions.

4.17 (left) Each of these spaces overlaps with many oth- ers. This makes the pavilion something like a Raumplan house in miniature.

4.18 The pod could go anywhere - a siteless interior.

40 Villa Müller, Adolf Loos, 1928

At the villa Müller, one of Loos’ most mature houses, formal ambiguities accompany and allow for spatial ones. The entire volume of the house can be seen as one mass that has been carved out for various modes of occupation + circulation. As such, Loos’ integrated furniture primarily lines the internal edges produced by this carving or is created as a part of the carving process. From their positions around the edge, benches and tables project their spatial authority out into the centers of large rooms where mobile furniture is brought in to correspond. The controlled openness of Loos’ Raumplan allows this projection to happen even across multiple spaces and elevations.

As each sub-space created by the fixed furnishings extends off of rather than into the larger space it serves, a fractal edge is created with spaces increasingly smaller in scale nested within the perimeter condition of the next larger zone. A particularly apt example of this is the lady’s chamber with its olivewood box of a settee and, in turn the settee’s delicate cabinetry and shelving. The independent zones of each room in turn layers as the projected authority of a terminally-interior nook crosses room boundaries - usually terminating at an opening to the exterior - shaping the masses that divide rooms as it proceeds. This carving-away by view shed and movement generates a highly selective porosity in the dense, marble-lined building.

4.19 In the lady’s room at Villa Müller, we see a fractalizing edge resulting from the nesting and sub-nesting of spaces within the edge conditions of the next largest space. The room extends to a three sided settee niche, a window niche and a couch niche. These are further extended by the space of window sills and by shelving.

41 4.20 Built in pieces extend their authority outwards into open spaces, usually to an opening in an outside edge.

4.21 An olivewood box settee is nested within the lady’s room. Shelves are nested one level further into the settee.

42 Fleet Library, Office dA, 2007

Like Villa Müller, the Fleet Library also engages in a nested fractalizing of space.

Not only are its two pavilions – the grand stair and the circulation pergola – nested within the gigantic space of the bank hall, but they also contain smaller spaces scaled to groups of bodies (rooms) or individuals in quiet study (nooks). Likewise, the material of the pavilions fractalizes down in scale, most notably as the plane of the stair pavilion wall divides, folds and subdivides to the scale of small reading tables.

With each scalar level comes a shift back and forth between center and edge con- ditions. The pavilions themselves occupy the center of the bank hall, a fully interior-facing space whose external edges are left all but untreated; the edges of the hall correspond as a vantage from which the pavilions are apprehended and to which their spatial authority is centrifugally projected.

The pavilions themselves have programmed external edges where reading nooks and computer terminals alternately impress into their masses or are built up against them.

The stair pavilion even succeeds in activating its “roof” edge as bleachers where it steps and, where flat, as a desk-lined elevated reading room where flat.

While both pavilions can be accessed and apprehended in the round, their differenc- es in porosity demonstrates their alternate programs. The stair pavilion’s edge nooks are the most private spaces in the whole library. They are nearly opaque to the outside – study spaces having been carved into the mass and computer terminals being shielded by planar screens – and only permit limited views back out into the library. It is impossible to see or move through the pavilion; all inward passage terminates within a short distance of its outer edge. The circulation pavilion, on the other hand is dense below counter height, hiding stor- age and computers, but fairly porous above that datum. This allows visitors to see and talk to staff on duty and for staff to monitor the space around them – almost panoptically – from within their otherwise enclosed offices.

43 4.22 Edges are built up out of planar elements and include parts of each niche. Assembled, the pavilion feels like a carved mass, articulated at its single, wrapping edge.

4.23 The pavilions are, themselves centers but consist of actvated edges. They nest within the bank hall as their sub-spaces nest within them.

44 6. DESIGN EXPERIMENT I: LAKE SHORE DRIVE

Seeking a site to test the rules and propositions detailed above, it became clear that such a “location” would have to be both physical and ideological. In that regard, the built spaces of Mies van de Rohe stand out for their radical openness and non-specificity.

Mies made a point of representing his interiors as almost unprogrammed and nearly without scale – infinite planes stretching above and below the occupant to every horizon.

Such spaces do not, it would seem, lend themselves to the idea of permanent, static occupation by anything or anyone, and yet the concept of openness is certainly desirable and actionable within the bounds of architectural furniture. This friction – a desire for openness without the twin problems of non-specificity and scalelessness provides the friction necessary for my intervention to take hold.

Mies’ 860-880 Lake Shore Drive development, built in 1951 in Chicago, provides both a program and a square footage well suited to the experiment. 660 Lake Shore Drive’s one-bedroom apartments, at about 660 sq. ft. require a range of programs – sleeping, cooking, eating, lounging, working, socializing – without an excess of space or redundant design. This variety of programs, closely packed, is rich ground for the development of one or two pieces of furniture operating at an architectural scale which provide for each of them via the shared, co-activated space.

The drawings and photographs of 660 published by Mies’ office do a good job of describing the way in which the corner apartment is meant to stretch out to the horizon without any particular sense of scale or location. The drawings are sparsely furnished with light metal chairs and glass tables and the photographs are still emptier, showing

45 inhuman gulfs of spaces between minimal insertions. The challenge, then, will be in preserving the doorless and largely partitionless condition posited by Miesian openness while reintroducing scale and specificity through programmed zones within, and projected out from the intervention.

5.1 Mies’ perspectives show an “infinitely” open space sparsely populated with light metal furnishings.

5.2 Photographs show the space without people. Wind howls between the few objects that might contribute place or scale - spaced too far apart and left too exposed for comfortable occupation.

46 Planimetric Possibilities

Assuming that we understand, initially, the 660 corner apartment to be an open rectangle with two adjacent glass walls and two adjacent opaque walls, we could express all of the single-primitive planimetric possibilities by noting that an intervention could contact all four, three, two, one or none of these surfaces. Acknowledging that, at a basic level, the space is symmetrical along one of its diagonals and making note of proportional differences among logically equivalent propositions, a chart of those primitives would look something like this:

Lines of Symetry

Logically Equivalent Proportional Permutations

5.3 Logical possibilites for primitive-conditon interventions in a outside-outside-inside-inside rectangle

Obviously, the four-edge option is not a viable one if we hope to maintain a degree of openness - the furniture cannot fill the entire apartment. Neither would it be good if it bridged the entire space like most versions of the three-edge diagram - this would in effect create two distinct rooms, cut off in some way from one another. This leaves us with schemes which 1) engage a corner, 2) sit back against a wall, 3) project most of their mass into the room from an edge or 4) float in the center of the space. Especially as we begin to engage schemes in greater detail, it is important to acknowledge that the apartment is somewhat more complex than the simple square. With a proportion closer to 2:3, a corner entry and columns projecting in, it actually looks more like figure 5.4a.

It is also important, at this point to acknowledge Mies’ original plan [fig 5.4b] in which a “T” creates a barrier to passage along the long internal wall and shields the kitchen and bathroom. This “T” includes the wet wall, reminding us that services would come

47 5.4 A) The empy “site”. B) The preexisting design + circulation. C) Corner conditions: limiting. from the core to some place on this edge. We can see how the “T” creates a circulation scheme in which the supremely private bed is placed about as far away from the door as possible and is visually shielded from visitors up to a certain point. We can also begin to see the difficulty of a corner-heavy scheme [fig. 5.4c] given the volume of a column, the location of the door and the proportions of the room. Indeed, by our earlier calculations the ideal corner for an installation large enough to fit a significant proportion of the program would be the same corner as the door - likely not a good place for sleeping, bathing, reposing.

Looking for possibilities along the short inside wall, we find that, again, the proportions of the room affect the viability of certain schemes [Fig. 5.5]. A piece deployed more or less flat against the wall cannot extend its projective control very deep into the room on the long axis. A thinner installation branching out from this wall deep into the space runs the risk of becoming over-planar, being of use only on its long sides where it has rendered the residual spaces quite narrow, and of blocking daylight to much of the interior.

5.5 Along the short inside wall, interventions either struggle to project into the space or else over-divide the open center.

48 Daylight is likewise a concern for schemes which primarily engage the glass walls [fig. 5.6]. To block a significant portion of these planes with a thick, heavily programmed intervention would cut off the Miesian expanse we hope to hold onto, not to mention severely limiting light and views. An outside-edge intervention might work should the it become thin enough or porous enough that light and views are maintained for most of the interior.

5.6 Thick oustide edge interventions may not be sufficiently porous to allow for views and light to the interior.

Meanwhile, inside edges have the opposite proportional requirements. As the sole source of plumbing in the apartment, the long inside wall is primed for some of the heaviest programs - cooking, cleaning, bathing. Moreover, as these programs demand a high degree of enclosure or privacy, this edge cannot be very porous. It makes sense, then, to create a thicker intervention on the long inside wall - one which might incorporate or subsume entire rooms like the kitchen and bathroom [fig. 5.7]. Together, the two could provide for the whole program - the porous and the dense, the public and the private, bright spaces and dark, systems-connected functions and free ones [fig. 5.8].

5.7 The inside edge is best placed to accomodate the private functions of the apartment and to access water and gas. This may warrant it’s thickening, even to a scale at which it can consume whole program areas. 49 5.8 A thin outside edge and thick inside edge can each respond to some of the desired programatic conditions.

Considering center-based schemes in which interventions detach from all edges, the significant proportion becomes the residual space around the piece. We can begin to understand the space left to each side of the intervention as a multiply-programmable zone into which the pieces activated faces can project a level of control [fig. 5.9a].

That said, we might begin to see the spaces closer to the door as larger group spaces where guests would likely congregate, and spaces closer to the bed as smaller personal spaces for reading, sleeping, etc [fig. 5.9b]. Likewise, we might come to view the long glass wall as a more public space and the interior wall as more private and service- oriented - lessons adopted from our edge analysis [fig. 5.9c]. These two polarizations combined, a “pavilion” scheme might have a distinct valence towards the bed-side inside corner, implying two small zones and two larger ones. These spaces will, in turn, dictate the distribution of program elements around the outside of the pavilion.

5.9 A center scheme shapes the space around it. Shifting the pavilion to the darker and more private corner opens up the entry space and the space against the glass for gathering and daytime living.

50 Four Schemes

From this diagram-level understanding of potential arrangements, we might begin to develop some inhabitable schemes with real dimensions. There are initially two - an edge scheme and a center scheme, which become four with consideration that they might either be agglomeratively or subtractively conceived.

The edge scheme would take advantage of two layered bars - a thin, porous one along the long glass wall and a thick, opaque one along the long inside wall. With the agglomerative approach, the inside bar is the challenge: manifesting as a unit and achieving the needed density. Operating subtractively, the outside edge bears greater consideration. It must be carved out enough to allow light and views to the interior without compromising the gestalt of the form.

The agglomerative edge design [fig. 5.10] takes advantage of the existing “frame” present in the form of the window mullions to build horizontal surfaces for eating, writing, sleeping and sitting out into the room. The mullions, further extended, provide bays within a window zone in which a reader might take refuge at a more human scale. On the inside wall a framed-out variant of Mies’ “T” together with the edge of the bed begin to imply a second bar which subsumes the private and wet functions of the apartment.

Sliding screens complete the volumes of the bathroom and closet, providing privacy while maintaining openness and lightness. These spaces dissolve again to planes and frames when the screens are otherwise manipulated.

The furnishings of light frame-bars struggle when asked to project control into the open layer between them. The inside bar is not sufficiently defined as a zone to extend any authority outwards. Similarly, the pieces along the glass stand too much apart and in the open to exert strong control over the center. Because they are already at edges, the bars have no real power to interrupt views or movement from one part of the apartment to the other and are, therefore, felt from the interior as fairly passive forces.

51 The subtractive edge scheme [fig. 5.11] has no such problems manifesting as a whole or projecting zones of control outward. The excepted program spaces in the thick and thin bars define zonal layers through the open center, back from the short glass wall to the interior of the apartment. The smooth inner faces of the carved out furnishings do a significantly better job of defining spatial distinctions and “drawing” lines outward into the open.

The private functions of the thick bar are easily incorporated into its poché with ample storage space to spare. Furthermore, the easy density of the bar better provides scale for the sleeping and washing body and retains the thermal output of the bed and the kitchen.

The thin bar is slightly more problematic. Here, removals begin at the inner plane but must be rapidly expanded within the bar to take in as much light and open up as much view as possible. The requirement for thinness in some ways manipulates the occupying body more than it accommodates it: the dinette is compressed to two facing seats, the settee must remain simple and fairly uncushioned, the writing space of the desk is limited. Should the bar become much thicker, the loss of light and view would be significant. The limitations of this outside/inside edge condition play a major role in shaping this scheme.

Turning to the centered “pavilion” condition, the diagram for both constructional modes focuses on creating and controlling four or more perimeter spaces within the apartment to be activated by the contents of the object they surround.

In the additive condition [fig. 5.12], framed shelves, benches, beds and counters pinwheel out from a common core, defining one or two corners of spaces which extends much further into the room. Unlike the parallel bars, this allows for a more dynamic and overlapping use of the residual space. Because the furniture piece is in the middle of the room, the edge of the apartment become tools in shaping and bookending these extended zones of control.

52 EDGE ADDITIVE

5.10 Additive edge scheme - massing and zones of control. SUBTRACTIVE

5.11 Subtractive edge scheme - massing and zones of control.

53 CENTER

5.12 Additive center scheme - massing and zones of control.

5.13 Subtractive center scheme - massing and zones of control.

54 Because the additive condition cannot truly make a cohesive, occupiable interior without the use of doors, the space of the bathroom must be made private by screens which reach out from the pavilion to engage the inside wall, capturing the space of the

“hallway” which shortcuts from the kitchen to the bed for the bathroom’s temporary use.

The agglomerative center scheme continues to run into the issue of clear self- definition present in the agglomerative edge. Because a cohesive form will not fully manifest - its frame remaining fairly porous - it struggles, again, to assert its authority out into the room.

With the subtractive center scheme [fig. 5.13], each of the spaces carved from the mass of the pavilion is more clearly manifest and more capable of extending its control to the edges. Furthermore, the well-defined corners of the volume increase the implied division and actual privacy between the perimeter zones.

The bathroom, in this scheme, can exist as a pocket of space within the mass - entirely private and entirely opaque. Within the left-over spaces of the perfect volume, storage in the form of closets, cabinets and open shelves provide an opportunity to display or hide the personal treasures and detritus common to all apartment-dwellers.

The overall volume of the scheme lends a distinct feeling of self-containedness in common with the pod. Like a pod, it feels as though it could be placed anywhere in the apartment; indeed, with proportional modifications, in any similarly sized space. Neither the more fragile and space-specific agglomerative center design nor the highly grounded edge schemes is possessed of this apparent mobility. Still, unlike the two pods seen before, the subtractive-center design is able to activate its external surfaces, not just its interior.

One thing this apparent mobility fails to account for is connection to utilities. Being, as it is, in the center of the room, the intervention has no way of achieving the grounding to systems that the edge schemes maintain. Without some kind of umbilical, visible or otherwise, it cannot fulfill the wet programs inherent in modern housing.

At this point it is clear that each of these schemes, alone, has its shortcomings.

55 The Hybrid Scheme

5.14 The hybrid scheme takes advantage of the groundedness of the inside edge and the openness of the center.

Taking note of the issues faced by of each initial design, we can conceive of a hybrid scheme [fig. 5.15] which adopts the best aspects of its predecessors while avoiding their weaknesses. A blend of subtraction (where spatial definition is required) and agglomeration (where articulation and display are desirable) the new scheme wavers in its formal reading. It also makes use of two initially opposed primitives, the thick inside edge and the centered pavilion, to allow some spaces to access services and remain fully opaque and others to take advantage of the floating, exposed position of the middle to reach out and activate space on all sides.

5.15 Hybrid scheme - massing and zones of control.

56 5.16 Hybrid scheme - bird’s eye axonometric. The pavilion retains a degree of “detachment” even as it integrates with the architecture. It controls the area around it, extending zones of influence out from it’s carved niches. The inside edge takes on all of the programming that requires privacy and access to utilities; it is largely static and internal. Some functions are shared across the “hall” that divides the two; cooking, for instance, is divided into wet and dry. Togeth- er the two halves define service zones for cooking, washing + dressing, and sleeping + reading.

57 5.17 Hybrid scheme - plan

5.18 Hybrid Scheme - worm’s eye axonometric. Both units are assemblies, though the whole appears as two smooth volumes or one split mass.

58 7. FURTHER DESIGN EXPERIMENTS

In many ways the physical and ideological features of the 660 Lake Shore Drive apartment that make it such fertile ground for testing some of the key issues of blurred lines also limit or altogether disallow the exploration of others. For one thing, building within the preexisting structure of the Mies tower prevents the true integrality of building structure with the build levels below or within it. The size of the apartment, while perfect for initial explorations of a standard housing program does not allow for interventions of a truly architectural scale, either, or the integrated operation of many pieces at an urban one.

For these reasons, more design experiments will be necessary. To begin, a smaller scale exploration of pod-like forms may be in order - pushing the boundaries of material integrality and human scale, not to mention challenging pushing the design to fulfill the same programs and provide the same differentiations as the larger apartment with much less area. A third experiment might engage a much larger scale - taking over a whole floor of 660 or even a warehouse or a parking garage or a city block. This outward expansion of the boundary would allow the furniture to grow further in size and scope to the scale, even, of whole buildings with active inside and outside edges. Now not only limited to interacting with the edge conditions of the individual apartment, furniture units might work together to shape and activate the space between themselves as buildings act on their corresponding negative spaces in an urban scheme.

59 WORKS CITED

Carpo, Mario. “Nonstandard Morality: Digital Technology and Its Discontents.” 2005. Architecture Between Spectacle and Use Ed. Anthony Vidler. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francis Clark Art Institute, 2008. 127-42.

Leatherbarrow, David. “Sitting in the City, or the Body in the World.” Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture. Ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 269-88.

Evans, Robin. “Figures, Doors and Passages.” 1978. Translations From Drawing to Building and other Essays. London: Architectural Association, 1997. 55-91.

Giedion, Siegfried. Mechanization Takes Command. New York: WW Norton, 1948.

Habraken, N. John. The Structure of the Ordinary: Form and Control in the Built Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Schindler, Rudolph M. “Care of the Body” Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles] 4-18 Apr. 1926.

Wigley, Mark. “Whatever Happened to Total Design?” Harvard Design Magazine Summer (1998).

60 ADDITIONAL WORKS REFERENCED

Bertram, Anthony. The House: A Machine for Living in. London, UK: AC Black, 1935.

Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe: Lake Shore Drive Apartments. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 1999.

Davies, Colin. Key Houses of the Twentieth Century. New York, NY: WW Norton, 2006.

Giurgola, Romaldo. GA- Louis I Kahn: Indian Institute of Management and Exeter Library. Tokyo, Japan: ADA Edita, 1975

Leet, Stephen. Richard Neutra’s Miller House. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004

March, Lionel and Judith Sheine. RM Schindler: Composition and Construction. London, UK: Ernst + Sohn, 1993.

Marcus, George H and William Whitaker. The Houses of Louis Kahn. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.

Neutra, Dion. GA- Richard Neutra: Kaufmann “Desert House” + Tremaine “House in Montecito.” Tokyo, Japan: ADA Edita, 2000.

Reed, Peter S. . GA - Louis I Kahn: Esherick House and Fisher House. Tokyo, Japan: ADA Edita,1996.

Roth, Manuela, Ed. “Office dA: Fleet Library at the RISD.” Library Architecture + Design. Salenstein, Switzerland: Braun, 2011.

Safran, Yehuda and Wilfried Wang. The Architecture of Adolf Loos, 2nd Edition. London, UK: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987.

Smith, Kathryn. Schindler House. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. van de Beek, Johan. “Adolf Loos – Patterns of Townhouses.” Raumplan versus Plan Libre. Ed. Max Risselada. New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1998. van Zijl, Ida. Rietveld Schroder House. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

61 IMAGE CREDITS

1.1 “Nakagin Capsule Tower ” 15 May 2013. ArchDaily. Accessed 1 April 2014. 1.2 van de Beek, Johan. “Adolf Loos – Patterns of Townhouses.” Raumplan versus Plan Libre. Ed. Max Risselada. NY, NY: Rizzoli, 1998. p. 37. 1.3 Pierce, Allen, 2014

1.4 van Zijl, Ida. Rietveld Schroder House. New York, NY: Princeton Architectur al Press, 1999. 1.5 Ibid.

2.1 Reed, Peter S. GA - Louis I Kahn: Esherick House and Fisher House. Tokyo, Japan: ADA Edita,1996. 2.2 Brownlee, David, and David DeLong. Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture. Los Angeles, Ca: Rizzoli, 1991. p. 68 2.3 “Fleet Library at RISD.” Accessed 01 Apr 2014. 2.4 Ibid.

2.5 Ibid.

3.1 Pierce, Allen, 2014

3.2 Ibid.

3.3 Ibid.

3.4 Ibid.

3.5 Ibid.

3.6 Ibid.

3.7 Ibid. 62 3.8 Ibid.

3.9 Ibid.

4.1 Smith, Kathryn. Schindler House. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2001. p. 32. 4.2 Ibid. p. 53.

4.3 Reed, Peter. GA - Louis I. Kahn.

4.4 Pierce, Allen, 2014

4.5 Reed, Peter. GA - Louis I. Kahn.

4.6 Ibid.

4.7 Pierce, Allen, 2014

4.8 Reed, Peter. GA - Louis I. Kahn.

4.9 “Furniture House 5, Sagaponac, NY.” Accessed 01 Apr 2014. 4.10 Ibid.

4.11 Pierce, Allen, 2014

4.12 “Nakagin Capsule Tower ” 15 May 2013. ArchDaily.

4.13 Ibid.

4.14 “Nakagin Capsule Tower” 9 Feb 2011. ArchDaily. Accessed 01 Apr 2014. 4.15 “Final Wooden House / Sou Fujimoto” 23 Oct 2008. ArchDaily. Accessed 01 Apr 2014. 4.16 Ibid.

4.17 Ibid.

4.18 Ibid.

4.19 Pierce, Allen, 2014

63 4.20 Ibid.

4.21 Safran, Yehuda and Wilfried Wang. The Architecture of Adolf Loos, 2nd Edition. London, UK: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987. 4.22 “Fleet Library at RISD.” Accessed 01 Apr 2014. 4.23 Ibid.

5.1 Blaser, Werner. Mies van der Rohe: Lake Shore Drive Apartments. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 1999. 5.2 Ibid.

5.3 Pierce, Allen, 2014

5.4 Ibid.

5.5 Ibid.

5.6 Ibid.

5.7 Ibid.

5.8 Ibid.

5.9 Ibid.

5.10 Ibid.

5.11 Ibid.

5.12 Ibid.

5.13 Ibid.

5.14 Ibid.

5.15 Ibid.

5.16 Ibid.

5.17 Ibid.

5.18 Ibid.

64