Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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144 House and Exterior in the architecture of the „Vienna School“ Iris Meder University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Institute of <strong>Landscape</strong> Architecture, Peter-Jordan-Straße 82, 1190 Vienna, Austria (e-mail: iris.meder@boku.ac.at) Abstract The architecture of the „Vienna School“ of the 1920s and 1930s, following Adolf Loos, distinguished clearly between the interior and the exterior, both in the building itself and in the psychological consequence of a separation of the private living space and its semipublic surroundings. In the sense of Vienna Modernism, on the other hand, the garden was considered the house‘s outward continuation. At the same time, architects such as Josef Frank and Franz Kaym/Alfons Hetmanek applied Camillo Sitte‘s urbanistic principles and Gottfried Semper‘s architectonical theories both directly to the ground-plans of their houses and to the urbanistic schemes of settlements in a bigger scale. Analyzing significant examples, the role of landscape architecture, with its dialectical view of interior and exterior, and its theoretical principles, and also its practical realization in the Vienna School of Modernism are examined in a detailed way. A special significance is laid upon the Vienna School‘s concept of the exterior as urban environment and the public space in opposition to the private living space of the house. Key words Architecture, relationship between exterior and interior, theories of perception, design analysis, landscape ideas, cultural context of landscape and open spaces civilized behaviour in public, and also the duality of the individual and society. The house is supposed to behave in a decent way and „to be discreet to the outside“ (Loos 1931: 129) while inside, it may show its luxury, the way a human being does not reveal his psyche to everybody in the street. In Loos‘ single family houses such as the Steiner (1910), Moller (1928), and Müller (1930) houses, the main floors are lifted above the level of the garden, to which they hardly have any relation. The ground floors, often with only inferior rooms, have no direct access to the garden. The houses stand on a socle in aristocratic self-reference, the cubical shape, which Loos kept using, being extremely compressed and centripetal. Oskar Strnad‘s house for Oskar and Katharina Hock was built in 1914. The narrow side goes to the street, the building is approached gradually and in several turns. Inside, the way leads from dark to light, upstairs to the main floor and straight ahead through the living room towards a small, non-transparent door to the terrace, next to a big window facing south. The exterior remains clearly separated from the interior although the terrace is considered as another outside living room. While the big windows are almost French doors, the only way leading to the outside is one small, narrow door, restraining the movement out on the terrace enforced by the huge windows. The visually closed door implies a retardation of the tendency of opening given by the windows and keeps the movement inside the room. The private garden side has big windows and terraces on several levels whereas the street facade shows a certain retreat. Strnad‘s house for the writer Jakob Wassermann and his wife Julie [Fig. 1] was built in the same year. Due to the narrow plot, again the house‘s narrow side goes to the street. The flat-roofed building widens to an L-shape and thus forms a courtyard orientated to the south-east. Within the big L-shaped living room with four French doors to the courtyard, there is no clear center; with their variable furniture arrangements, the zones show a cha- Fig. 1 For the „Vienna School“, following Adolf Loos and Josef Frank, the relation of inside and outside and their semantic layers had a special importance. To analyze them, it is necessary to picture the theoretical premises of Vienna modernism. For Adolf Loos, truth is the core of architecture. In this context, the exterior is seen as an image of the interior, an outward presentation, ethically corresponding to the inner structure. The outside refers to the interior, but as the public level of the building, it is regarded as a mask, seen in a positive way in the sense of Gottfried Semper and Georg Simmel. This, too, corresponds to the psychological level of the private psyche and a
145 like a side table, the dimensions of its slim columns responding to the tree trunks. The outward multiplicity of the shapes of space in the context of inside and outside, open and closed corresponds to the diversity of relations and dimensions of space inside the building. Here, too, the core of the design is the diversified path increasing in space volumes and lighting conditions. Frank‘s informally arranged, centrifugal space zones demand moving. Since the paths are not axial, still every room has secluded zones. This principle of articulating the path in curved or broken lines, only tangentially touching rooms or areas regarded as closed spaces, is a direct correlation to the urbanistic principles of Camillo Sitte. Fig. 2 racter of improvisation, modifiability, even randomness. This can be said of the entire building, which is supposed to appear gradually grown, used and therefore imperfect and modifiable, even incomplete. In detail, this extends to the perennials in the courtyard which evoke the impression of an accidental overgrowing of architecture after longtime use. Their positions, however, are marked exactly in the floor plan. In the elevation, too, the vegetation is given in detail up to the chimneys. All the same, the architectonic structure does not get lost in infinitity <strong>–</strong> an aspect also promoted by the clear separation of outside and inside. When designing, Strnad develops, in the sense of Semper, first the path and then fixes the floor, the walls and finally the roof. The house‘s exterior originates from its character as a structure of spaces and therefore understands itself as the backside of an organism orientated towards the private interior. Hugo and Olga Bunzl‘s wooden house in Pernitz, Lower Austria, built at the same time, stands free upon a hill outside the village. As a modern countryhouse, it derives its shape and design from the conditions of its surroundings without symbolically stressing them by the means of acting as rural. The living room occupies more than half the space of the ground floor, opening to all sides in four French doors and a wooden door to the terrace. The same principles as in factory owner Hugo Bunzl‘s house were used in Frank‘s designs for workers‘ housing. In 1919, Bunzl commissioned the Ortmann-Pernitz settlement, consisting of one-floor row houses with the minimum room schedule of kitchen-living room, bedroom, stable, shed and toilet. „To make the contact between the house and the garden as close as possible“ (Frank 1924: 28), the kitchen-living room, covering the whole depth of the house, opens to the garden in a French door. Julius and Margarete Beer‘s spacious house [Fig. 2] from 1930 is marked with terraces on the garden side, where the street facade‘s block-like character is dissolved in a variety of space volumes implemented in different shapes. A delicate terrace is set on one corner of the house In his book „Urbanism following its artistic principles“, published in 1889, Sitte propagated asymmetrical, irregular shapes of squares and streets following the examples of medieval cities. According to Sitte, public space is important not least as a semantic system of social relevance. Thus his critique of the modern metropolis, for instance the Vienna Ringstraße, aims at its lacking ability to create convincing relations between the different functional spaces of the social organism of the city. Sitte‘s writings were basic both for the residential settlements of „Red Vienna“ and for the „Vienna School“ following Strnad and Frank. Strnad’s and Frank’s open systems do not claim conclusiveness but in themselves deal with their contradictoriness. In an ambivalent surrounding, the architects provide „open worlds“ (Strnad 1922: 323). Just as the design does not start from an imaginatory homogenous entirety, the house is not perceived at one view but in a succession of partial aspects relating to each other. The basis of the temporal perception of architecture was August Schmarsow‘s lecture „The character of architectural creation“ (1893). Schmarsow‘s theory is based on the perceiving subject and thus establishes a direct link between the viewer and architecture. The starting point is the process of moving, the core the „inside of Fig. 3 Papers
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University of Natural Resources and
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Authors of the papers are fully res
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3 Day 2 Thursday, April 30, 2009 Se
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6 The “Landscape-Infrastructure
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10 Endnotes [1] Bernetti, Casini, M
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12 Urban landscapes need great idea
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14 the term “overall expression
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16 Fig. 2: Initial overall pictures
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18 Evaluation of Open Space Form an
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20 Fig. 5: Other vegetation This st
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22 Type of activity: • Exercise/p
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24 Landscaped, Modern, or Social? T
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26 Fig. 2: Rose and Perennial Show
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28 Herbert Bayer’s Megastructures
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30 a large extent the Japanese deve
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32 A Fertile Wilderness: The CPR’
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34 Fig.3 as their destination. The
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36 The Method of Structuralist Land
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38 Fig. 2: SLA implements gender eq
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40 Landscape Evaluation Process. A
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44 holders (as Piemonte Region, Riv
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46 Frameworks - Preparing rural lan
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50 Do Landscape Architects make the
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52 within the larger landscape piec
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54 Landscape as Urban Structure: th
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58 housing neighborhoods. Construct
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60 “massive change, required - ni
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62 architecture’s ability to conc
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64 cape Journal 6 (1): 4-12 Jackson
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66 Green Idea/Grey Reality Carl Smi
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68 argument was put forward for omi
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70 Green Streets Potential for Down
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72 size of rain garden through the
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74 Climate Change asks for Sustaina
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76 Fig. 2: Simplified example (livi
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78 Sustainability in Park Design -
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82 Preserving community gardens in
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84 the City applied the military so
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86 Endnotes [1] Anyone interested i
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88 Urban imageability & open space
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90 ning up degraded wetlands, plant
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92 How to balance the multiple role
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Page 130 and 131: 128 The traditions of landscape sch
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