Corbusier, Rohe, Aalto; Residential Buildings

One of Le Corbusier’s early houses was the Maison Citrohan in 1922. His main focus when he was designing this house was to mass produce it, similar to what Henry Ford did with his cars. He admired the car, because its design was to accommodate its function, and because it would be easily and cheaply produced in massive amounts. We start to see Corbusier’s style start to emerge from the Maison Citrohan: the concrete columns or pilotis that raise roof terraces and create space for cars, the large spanning windows, the double tall spaces, the modular rooms, the white washed walls and the beginning of the plan domino style. I admire his vision for the Maison Citrohan, as he saw it as being a machine for living, which is turning away from customary bourgeois dwellings.

Later in his life in 1928, Le Corbusier designed the Villa Savoye at Poissy. By this time, he has developed his five points of architecture, and the Villa Savoye is perhaps the clearest example of these principals. The principals expressed are: elevating the building off of the ground to make room for utilities and cars, makings roof gardens to make up for space taken away on the ground, spanning ribbon windows for spacious views, a free floor plan and a free façade. Le Corbusier thought that these principals would fix all of the problems that architecture faced. I really like this building because he stuck to his principals and designed a really interesting space. Often what I try to do when I am designing something for a class project is create a set of regulations that I want my building to have, and then shape the building around those rules. That is why this building really inspires me because you can see in every aspect of the building how he was trying to stay within his rules and create an interesting house at the same time.

Near the end of his life, Le Corbusier’s designs started to change in the way that they looked. People criticized his buildings for no longer being rational because they were more expressive and used metaphors as a design concept. Corbusier’s buildings might not follow his principals as apparently as they did in his past, but he expanded on them in ways that stretched the boundaries of his guides. In 1951 he designed the Villa Shodan, which may be seen as an expanded version of the Maison Citrohan. The difference is that the façade is artistically organized in a pattern like a painting, and he used the metaphor of a parasol for the shape of the top of his villa. The openings in his wall do not seem as rational as the past projects he worked on did, because the grid is broken up in several areas, and he does not use his ribbon windows. I can still respect this building because he is not just throwing away his past ideologies, he is just seeing what he can do to bring is principals to the full potential, and experiment with new things.

Alvar Aalto focused on a naturalization of modern architecture when he was designing his buildings in the 1930s. He took certain elements from the international style of architecture and made it national, by combining it with local materials and considering the climate of the site.

One example that shows this type of style is the Baker House at MIT which he designed in 1947. It was designed with the site in mind, as it has focused views over busy roads and towards river basins. He broke up the program by separating the private dorm rooms and the public spaces. Both of these spaces had different forms that reflected their different functions, with the private spaces having a curved form and the communal parts were laid out in a rectilinear form. He picked the red brick to reflect the traditional houses in Boston.

Another one of Aalto’s houses was the experimental house in 1952. This house was a personal vacation home so he had the opportunity to do anything he wanted to with it. He chose to place it in the woods, and centered it around a courtyard with a fire pit as the main focus. One of the most notable features of this house is the experiments that he did with the brick patterns, which freely expressed and played with dozens of different patterns. He also did experiments on the building by not putting it on a foundation, and working with free form columns structures. The experimental house is inspiring because to me it is about trying new things in design to see what works and trying something different.

The Kroller-Muller House was one of Mies Van Der Rohe’s earliest projects, and it set in motion his ideas about architecture that would evolve later in his life. This house was a simplification of the classical style, which had a stress on order, repose, symmetry and rectilinear plan. With this project he started ideas such as order and industrial architectural style, simplified forms, and distillations from history.

Mies Van Der Rohe designed the Tugendhat House in 1928. With this house he wanted to express the industrial age in the use of his materials and the airiness and lightness of the building. He also wanted to control the sense of proportions, free floor plan, and create a sense of transparency. Similar to work that Corbusier was doing, the free floor plan was exemplified by the rounded staircase and south façade. This house was the residential version of what he was doing with his famous Barcelona Pavilion, which was very open and had a free plan because the suspended the roof with steel columns, which left the walls to be fitted with transparent glass.

One of Mies’ most well-known houses was the Farnsworth House. This house embodies what Mies attempts to do with most of his projects, which is flexibility. He achieves this in the Farnsworth house by having the structure on the interior so he can have essentially one large room that can be used any way that the resident needs. Every exterior wall on the Farnsworth house is glass for the transparency that he likes to create, and to make it feel like an outside space. He elevates the house off of the ground, almost like placing a foreign object on a random site. I do admire that he is considering flexibility in this building, because he is right when he says that present culture needs its buildings functions to change so rapidly that you should not design solely for function. But it must be brought up that it is very hard to call this a house, because I imagine it is very hard to live in a glass box such as this.