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

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Fig. 4
architectonical work“ (Schmarsow 1894: 21), also in its
psychological dimension. The connection to Strnad‘s
and Frank‘s stress on temporality in the articulation of
the path through the building and the definition of static
space through clearly recognizable limits is evident. Like
Schmarsow, Sitte too advocates the thesis of a „concavity
of art“ (Schmarsow 1894: 21): it is the perception of
objects arranged concavely around the eye that generates
the impression of space. Frank transfers Sitte‘s urbanistic
concept of space-shaping and path definition to
the house itself as „street and square“ (Frank 1931: 316),
following Leon Battista Alberti‘s ‚domus minima civitas‘.
The duality of rest and movement, statics and dynamics,
implemented in the notion of „street and square“, is significant
for Frank‘s work in the first place. The same can
be said of the relation of the individual and society, with
the architectural correspondence of inside and outside,
which is significant in the notions of „Facade and Interior“
(Frank 1928: 187) or „House and Garden“, the furniture
shop founded by Frank and Oskar Wlach in 1925.
Sitte‘s theories were also adopted by Otto Wagner‘s
disciples designing social housing in the twenties. Especially
the large-scale housing estates of Franz Kaym and
Alfons Hetmanek show the influence of Sitte‘s writings. In
1919, Kaym and Hetmanek, who already in their student
time were strongly influenced by Adolf Loos, published
the book „Housing for People, Yesterday and Tomorrow“,
presenting housing schemes based on small allotment
modules. In the following years, they designed numerous
housing schemes. Kaym and Hetmanek‘s most important
single family house was built for the banker Alfred
Wechsberg and his wife Anna in 1921 [Fig. 3]. In the living
room, next to a big south window, a small door goes
to a porch and then to the terrace. An axis of symmetry
marked in the floor plan goes from the footpath and the
entrance door over the rooms of the living floor and the
big window to the strictly formal square-shaped garden
parterres, surrounded by rows of cylindrical columns.
A setback going through the entire height of the building
stresses the axis of symmetry on the garden front.
The garden parterre creates a mirroring of the house‘s
volume to the outside which is conceived as a formulation
of space in Semper‘s sense, with markings of the
corners and the rows of columns as rudiments of walls.
Corresponding to the hermetic square of the garden, the
flat-roofed house can be read as a cube with setbacks
and risalits. Where, in Frank‘s sense, a juxtaposition of
the big south window and another opening to the street
would have been logical to make the house transparent,
the axis ends in the wall of the dining room and is thus,
following the principles of Loos, only an architectonical
axis and not one of light. Kaym and Hetmanek kept their
architectural vocabulary, with an economically reduced
set of tools, also when building settlements. In terms of
urbanism, they followed Sitte‘s principles. The strict rows
of units are left to create the impression of freestanding
or semi-detached units.
Frank‘s influence is also evident in the work of Paul Fischel
and Heinz Siller. In 1933 they designed the house
of Adolf and Christa Fürth [Fig. 4]. The flat-roofed cuboid
stands in the middle of the narrow, deep, sloping plot, set
back 30 m from the street following the building alignment.
It is approached in several turns. Inside the house
a „garden corridor“ with an opaque door to the garden
branches off from the dining zone flooded by light. The
Frank style ground plan, developing logically from the
duality of sun radiation and Wienerwald view, makes
the house lightweight and transparent. Upstairs, on the
south-east corner, a sleeping porch is cut in.
Jacques Groag‘s country house for Otto Eisler [Fig. 5]
in Ostravice in the Moravian Beskids (1934) is characterized
by organic shapes. A funnel-like setback next to
the living room both lets the outside in and the interior
extend to the exterior by opening up to the panoramic
south side. The porch covering the ground level terrace
reaches far beyond the house. Above the living room
window it dissolves in a pergola visually sheltering the
terrace but permitting the sunlight to enter the living
Fig. 5