Adolf Loos


"My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces (cubes). I do not design floor plans, facades, sections. I design spaces. For me, there is no ground floor, first floor etc.... For me, there are only contiguous, continual spaces, rooms, anterooms, terraces etc. Storeys merge and spaces relate to each other. Every space requires a different height: the dining room is surely higher than the pantry, thus the ceilings are set at different levels. To join these spaces in such a way that the rise and fall are not only unobservable but also practical, in this I see what is for others the great secret, although it is for me a great matter of course. Coming back to your question, it is just this spatial interaction and spatial austerity that thus far I have best been able to realise in Dr Müller's house"
Adolf Loos, Shorthand record of a conversation in Plzeň (Pilsen), 1930




The composition of the inner, primarily residential spaces in the family houses of Adolf Loos is based on entirely unique architectural thought, on the principle of the spatial structure of the plan, the so-called "Raumplan". "Raumplan" is embodied amongst other things by Loos' understanding of economy and functionality, and Loos applied it in his designs for social housing. 

Villa Müller
Nad Hradním vodojemem 14
CZ 162 00 Prague 6 - Střešovice
Czech Republic

Adolf Loos 1930

Completed in the same year as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in Paris and Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, the Villa Müller is Loos’s defining modern house in an era when rich, progressive industrialists were the source of modernist commissions. In Loos’s case the client owned a building company pioneering the use of reinforced concrete, so the house was a particularly relevant showcase.

While Frank Lloyd Wright was perfecting the seamlessness of the transition from inside to outside, Loos was deliberately keeping the public outside and the private inside of his houses as separate as possible. "The building should be dumb outside and only reveal wealth inside." Outside, the Villa Müller is distinguished by its cubic shape, with flat roof and terraces, its irregular windows and its clean, white façade.

Inside, the Villa Müller is at once more traditional and more original. The materials are warm,  rich and comforting, and the furniture a deliberately eclectic mix of traditional styles. The client is not required to conform to some all-consuming modern lifestyle. On the other hand the spatial planning of the building is where Loos was most innovative.

Loos uses the different levels of the Raumplan to create a careful “architectural promenade” from outside to inside. The first entrance way is low, with strong but dark colors such as deep green/blue tiles. This opens onto a cloakroom area that is generous in plan, brighter with white walls and a big window, but still low. At the far end a short, modest staircase takes the visitor round a right-angle bend, emerging dramatically between marble pillars into the double-height, open-plan sitting room.


The promenade continues past the raised dining room to the upper floors of the house, the Raumplan providing unusual and exciting views  into adjacent rooms. On the top level is a roof terrace, with a “window” in the freestanding end wall to frame the view of Prague cathedral.







http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/villamueller/index.htm

 Movement within the module

Within and against this modular mass production LeCorbusier developes the seemingly unproblematic idea of an architecture of movement, best exemplified by his classic icon of modernity: the villa Savoye, one of the few built experiments in modern "space-time". Within his Oevre Complete, edited by LeCorbusier himself, the photographic sequence through the interior of the villa is inconspicuously subtitled "promenade architecturale". If the thus suggested analogy to promenading through a park, landscape, or urban environment is taken serious, one faces an uncanny (unhomely) paradox: The inhabitant of such an environment would have to be conceived as a flaneur, a stranger in his own house. In his own house, where he once knew himself safely kept and reassured of his identity, the scene should constantly vary, offering change, surprise and the unknown, re-emerging over and again as the unfamiliar and never becoming his home.

A similar spirit haunts the Villas of Adolph Loos: Spatial sequences merging across the shifting levels prevent fixed identities to take root anywhere. Communism would move through such spaces, if the exterior would not have been secured architecturally as a discrete, hermetic unit. The same is true for LeCorbusier's Villa, who's landscape-like quality is constricted into a cartesian envelope, thus clearly and objectively defined as object and property. Only within the four walls does spontaneous movement extrude its space from the given, inexhaustably ambiguous spatial substance.1

1-The Architecture of MovementPatrik Schumacher 1996Published In: ARCH+ 134/135, Wohnen zur Disposition, Dezember 1996 German: Architektur der Bewegung