Adolf Loos developed a system for planning spaces called Raumplan. Raumplan was characterized by the organization of varying volumes of space, eliminating a central hall and replacing it with a stair case, placing windows to allow necessary light and frame specific views, and having a minimal exterior enclosure that was meant to reflect a difference from the public outside and the private interior. This Raumplan system is most evident in Loos’ Villa Muller located in Prague, Czech Republic.
Villa Muller Facade
In Villa Muller the procession of room goes from low ceilings to gradually higher ceilings and eventually up a stair case to a double high sitting room. This system of compression and release is also a big element in many of frank Lloyd Wright’s Designs also being designed thousands of miles away in the same time period. As you move through the spaces in the in Villa Muller the journey allows views into different rooms due to the varying volumes of spaces. Once at the top of the house there is a roof terrace with a large opening in the wall to frame a view of the Prague cathedral in the distance.
Villa Muller section showing raumplan
The simplistic plane exterior façade is in great contrast with the material rich interiors of the building. The outside is basically a large white cube with punched windows highlighted by a yellow paint trim. This appearance of being cold and uninviting was the intention of Adolf Loos. He purposely made the exterior to function only as in enclosure to create and emphasize a separation between the public outside and private inside. The unornamented yet material rich inside emphasizes Loos opinion on how people should lead two different lives, a public and private one.
Villa Muller interior
Loos despised ornament, in an essay titled Ornament and Crime from 1908 he stated that ornament should be striped of objects in order to culturally evolve, optimize the use of resources and eliminate waste. While I agree with him that ornament doesn’t optimize our resources I don’t agree with him on that fact that having it make us less evolved people. I also believe that while he eliminated ornament from his building in a traditional sense, he still created ornamental interiors by his use of materials, so one could argue that materials are in fact still ornament.
Richard Docker was one of nineteen architects to design a house for the Werkbund Exhibition of 1927. The houses that were built were located in Weissenhof Estate which is a housing development in Stuttgart, Germany built for the exhibition. While some of the houses still exist, many others were destroyed in WWII. Adolf Loos was supposed to be a member of the Werkbund and design a house for the competition but backed out do to disagreements with the Werkbond.
Richard Docker’s House 22, designed for the Werkbond Exposition, was designed with the intent to create a piece that was part of the Weissenhoff Estate. The goal was to present the estate as a whole rather than as collection of different architectural works. Docker once said, “Just as the individual space, the room, the piece of furniture, the aperture, the material, the construction system, etc., are interdependent members of a specific whole, the building itself is only one stone in the manifold structure of an urban organism.”
In the layout of the house, the rooms are created by an intersection of the same geometric rectangular shape. While the intersection of spaces is similar to loos’ design, it is different in that it is only an intersection in plan view; there is not a change in volumes like Loos. Also, because of the intersections of rectangles, a main passage route is created. From this hallway you can access multiple rooms. This is another difference between Docker and Loos because Loos would design his houses to be moved through in a progression from area to area without the use of a corridor.
Yet another difference between the two architects and their respective works is that Docker makes a connection between public and private. In our progression through House 22 there is a central main entry path that leads through terraced gardens and continues up onto a covered terrace that leads into the living room. This whole path of movement is visible to the public. This public journey to the main entrance bears much resemblance to one of Loos’ plans by moving from space to space and the uses of elevation changes, but this also contrast with Loos in that he would not divide his public and private in such a manner. In conclusion both the Werkbund and Adolf Loos greatly contributed to the modernist movement. Though they had separate ideas for modern architecture they both helped to push the envelope on modern design.
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