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

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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 – 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
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