Unmaking rooms: beyond the box
Doing away with rigid definitions and profitability concerns, the room can become an indeterminate space full of unexplored potentialsLouis Kahn made a series of drawings for the City/2 exhibition in 1971 one centred on the interior room and another ventured outdoors. He describes the street as a community room, the walls of which belong to the donors, its ceiling is the skyCredit:Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the artist, 1972323 Estate of Louis I Kahn / The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum CommissionArchitecture comes from the making of a room, wrote Louis Kahn on a drawing produced for the exhibition City/2, held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1971. Similar ideas appeared in his speech upon receiving the AIA Gold Medal that same year, where the room was celebrated as the beginning of architecture. His portrayal of the room is poetic and decidedly ambiguous: it is the place of the mind and its structure is the giver of light. The room is, to Kahn, the quintessential architectural element, its basic unit of aggregation; he saw a floor plan as a society of rooms. Rather than reducing the room to an array of rational parameters to be complied with, he provides a generous portrayal of many ways to create a sense of place and a space for life.Kahns position came as a rebuke to the oversimplification of the space of the room into a box and of the building into a grouping of parallelepipeds, attached one to the next without much flair or care. He was, in essence, protesting against some of the teachings of the architecture of modernity that had managed to spread around the world and had in turn helped produce decontextualised buildings devoid of any nuance or complexity.Creating spaces for life is also what animated Gio Ponti when designing Villa Marchesano in 1938. A drawing he made of the then unfinished house shows a series of annotations that reveal projective aspects of the proposal, while the actual architecture walls, windows, doors remains concealed. Thoughts, ranging from intentions to intuitions to topographical indications of the various modes of inhabiting, are scribbled over the large sheet of tracing paper; spaces are not defined by the construction of their perimeter but by the many ways in which they will be inhabited.Gio Ponti made a drawing of Villa Marchesano in 1938, before it was finished, without any walls at all. Instead, the drawing captures moments and intentions, including a spot where you descend into this water from these stones, just like the nymphs doCredit:Courtesy Gio Ponti ArchivesPonti was more interested in the interrelation between spaces than in the precise dimensions of rooms more in the views towards the outside than in the exact size or shape of windows, and more in the wellbeing of inhabitants than in the functional design of furniture. For meals, a lightweight table without a permanent home can be positioned here, or here, or here, or here; the four possible placements for the table depend on the season, the time of day or the whim of inhabitants.Some descriptions are pragmatic: from here, you get to the house and there is a high window over a workbench. Others verge on the poetic: over there you descend into this water from these stones, just like the nymphs do and, from a distance, the white ceramic roof resembles a large sheet drying in the sun, streaked with blue shadows from the pines. Some specific aspects of the design of the house are pencilled in as well, revealing the ideas of the architect about colours, materials and atmosphere: flooring all in white, blue ceiling and this door has small panes of glass, it excites but allows for little curiosity. A particularly impressive pine tree needs to be seen from the bed and from the writing table, while the unavoidable presence of the sea, il mare, runs along the bottom edge of the drawing and its presence is imprinted in the views from every room.A room, whatever its function, location or shape, is a space ultimately activated by its useThis drawing, as well as others made by Ponti, offer a counterpoint to those produced by architects such as Bruno Taut and Margarete SchtteLihotzky only a decade earlier. In an effort to reconstruct destroyed cities after the First World War and improve the housing conditions of the working class, European architecture had moved towards standardisation and efficiency. Architects such as Taut and SchtteLihotzky placed the users at the centre of their projects of mass housing in Berlin and Frankfurt. In a commendable endeavour to make the lives of inhabitants easier, especially those of the housewives inevitably burdened with the majority of the household workload, the architects made an effort to optimise the workflow, which was then signalled in the form of arrows of movement in the projects floor plans. In doing so, however, they seemed to convert inhabitants into machine operators, all their movements calibrated in a choreography of domestic duties.In Frank Halmans ongoing Rooms for Reading collages, a series begun in 2014, the paper walls begin to peel awayCredit:Jeannette ScholsPontis Villa Marchesano plan follows a very different approach. By mapping thoughts and intuitions, arrowing movements and views, and signalling both the spaces for household chores and the places for leisure and rest, Ponti bestows them all with value. Seeing this drawing, the viewer can better imagine the life inside and out than by just looking at other types of plans or even photographs. The dwellers of Villa Marchesano are not represented as automatons, their movements not dictated by pure functionality. They are, first and foremost, inhabitants of these spaces.Representation is the tool architects use to bridge the gap between the mental realm and the outer world, to materialise ideas into being. It is primarily for the benefit of clients, collaborators and contractors. Pontis drawing, however, was made for publication and its main audience was other architects. As founder and editor of Domus, his choice to produce and publish this drawing in 1938 signals a desire to move beyond a merely formal or technical representation of architecture and clearly state that a room is a place in which inhabitation happens. As a portrayal of the household, it transcends the standard floor plan.In a bid to capture the experience of resting in the shade of a carob tree (the request of the client), architect Jos Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat made a drawing of the trees on the Casa Ugalde plot. The final house, completed in 1953, preserved as many of these trees as possibleCredit:Photographic Archives Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofa / VEGAP. All rights reserved. DACS 2024A few years later, in the early 1950s, as Europe was recovering from the Second World War, Jos Antonio Coderch de Sentmenat and his partner Manuel Valls i Vergs were commissioned to design a house on the outskirts of Barcelona under a unique premise. The client, Eustaquio Ugalde, wanted the new home to preserve the feeling of that afternoon when he had climbed up the hill on the site and sat to rest under the shade of a carob tree, admiring the surrounding views.On visiting the site for the first time, Coderch observed the land and took note of everything around him in the form of a sketch. The drawing shows the precise location and species of every tree within the perimeter, including whether there was a group of more than one or if a pine tree had two trunks, and points out the direction of the best views. There are no architectural intentions projected onto the paper, simply data. With every distance, height and angle measured, the resulting image resembles a treasure map. Contrary to Pontis Villa Marchesano drawing, this one is made as part of a process. It is a starting point from which to iterate possible configurations of the house, and although it was not meant to be kept for posterity, Coderch held on to it throughout the whole duration of the project. He recognised its generative importance in the formalisation of the project and ultimately chose to make it part of the publication material for the house. As Ponti, who Coderch had greatly admired from the early days of Domus and who later became a good friend, there was a certain acknowledgement that the house and its rooms cannot be understood if not in direct relationship to their site.The shade of a tree can give welcome respiteCredit:MISCELLANEOUSTOCK / AlamyWhat slice of the sun enters your room? wondered Kahn in his drawings scribbles. In Casa Ugalde, the exchange between inside and out is carefully selected to frame the best views, the shape of its walls embracing the dweller in a succession of interior and exterior rooms, in a distinctive rhythm of light and shadow, architecture and trees.In Italo Calvinos The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo makes his life in the trees and, in doing so, turns the trees into his homeItalo Calvino might have provided a different response to Ugaldes brief. In his 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees, the young nobleman Cosimo Piovasco di Rond climbs up a tree after a rather banal argument with his family over the meal served for dinner, and then refuses to come down. He spends the rest of his life jumping from one tree to the next, without ever touching ground again. He makes his life in the trees and, in doing so, turns the trees into his home. The adaptation is not without its problems, but Cosimo becomes increasingly resourceful in finding ways to domesticise his daytoday life among the branches. He finds the most comfortable of them to sleep or read on, learns how to channel the water from a nearby cascade to drink and wash himself and his clothes, and manages to cook what he hunts without setting the surrounding forest on fire.His new home is extensive and extensible, in constant transformation: a series of undefined spaces that expand and contract according to his needs. On rainy days, he seeks refuge among the densest foliage; during the warmer months, blooming fruit trees become his pantry. It is certainly not comfortable by any contemporary standards and yet it is adequate for his needs. Sometimes seeing my brother lose himself in the endless spread of an old nut tree, like some palace of many floors and innumerable rooms, I found longing coming over me to imitate him and go and live up there too, recounts Cosimos younger brother, the narrator.Herman Hertzbergers photograph of a Paris street scene in the 1970s demonstrates that even unlikely places can be dining roomsCredit: Herman HertzbergerWhether intentional or not, in this portrayal of a flexible and indeterminate mode of inhabitation, Calvino as Ponti and Coderch before him is opposing the generalised view on domestic space that has come to define the last hundred years, exemplified in the functionalist architecture that started during the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Most of us live today in singlefunction rooms with standardised cuboid dimensions, designed to accommodate the minimum necessary furniture for their intended use. Contemporary comfort is predetermined and homogenised, inflexible to change, imprinted in many minds as the only possible solution to a wide range of different needs.As these past examples have shown, the canonical definition of a room as a space enclosed between four walls and a roof is solely apt if architecture is considered from economical, regulatory or technical points of view. This definition applies both to a bunker and a car, even a shoebox, yet it fails to recognise an openair veranda, a picnic table set for a family meal or the shaded space under a parasol on a sunny day at the beach. A room, whatever its function, location or shape, is a space ultimately activated by its use. Without inhabitants, it ceases to exist as an architectural space and becomes plain mass and air, atoms organised in a particular manner. The room is a container of objects and rituals, inherently linked to its inhabitants and their evolution through life. It is a space where people can meet, inside or out. Its porous enclosure if enclosed at all is punctuated by windows and doors and pipes and tubes, and its use is inevitably influenced by the cultural context of its time. Rather than a fixed entity, a room is an element in constant transformation, from its construction to its inevitable decay, whether these changes are immediately visible or not. All rooms are temporary rooms all of them will eventually turn to dust.Explore the good rooms series, a collection of domestic spaces made, imagined or described by architects, curators and writers2025-01-06Reuben J Brown Share AR December 2024/January 2025Good rooms + AR HouseBuy Now
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek