BLURRED LINES: REINVESTIGATING THE DESIGN POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTURALIZED FURNITURE AND FURNITURIZED ARCHITECTURE
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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.
4our 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.
5engaging 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.
61.1 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
7longer 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
8is 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
9of 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.
101.2 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.
11operate 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
12over 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.
13One 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.
143. 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
15enclosure 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.
16The 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.
17remove 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-
18and 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.
192.4 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.
20Unity, 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.
214. 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
22more 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.
23Agglomeration + 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.
24Edge + 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?
25Kahn’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.
26The 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.
27Pairings + 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.
285. 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.
294.1 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.
30Fisher 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.
314.4 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.
32Escherick 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.
334.7 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.
34Furniture 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.
354.10 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.
36Nakagin 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 block of
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.
374.13 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.
38Final 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.
394.16 (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.
40Villa 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.
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