Cornoldi, Adriano; The Architecture of the Single-Family Residence; 1999

A good home is that in which one lives well. Its essential quality is that possibility of being lived in. Since the domestic landscape deals primarily with private life, its primary value is derived from its ability to offer pleasant shelter and a discreet relationship between its interior spaces However, in contemporary culture, novel models [emphasize] exterior ostentation, [or that ignore interior life in their focus] on house-city relationships (constructive typology, abstract-gurative problems,). In residential design it is important to consider degrees of domesticity (the capacity for the building to be lived in) The most positive contemporary development of residential design lies in the complex combination of differentiated moments, integrated within a wide series of encounters (that themselves are inuenced by varying degrees of spatial relationships). The Loosian raumplan, foundation of the residence as complex system of differentiated enclosed spaces, represents this most developed concept of residential design [It is a concept] derived directly from the experience of the 19th-century American home (itself developed from the Georgian period, at the origins of modern life). The raumplan is also connected to the theories of Frank Lloyd Wright, Hoffman, and Muthesius (the overall balance between renement and variety in its elements, and the dynamism of internal relationships)

It is interesting to note that, in warmer, Latin, regions, residential design is based primarily on ideals of magnicence, rather than intimacy (of representation, rather than domesticity; essentially monumental icons, found both in urban and rural homes, characterized by a lifestyle that is more public than private, often reected by a particular type of atrium, of living room, of staircase, of garden,). Contemporary design truly derives from British and northern culture. From 18th-century England derive the concepts of privacy, comfort, sport, and it is there that modern life is born, with bourgeois lifestyle [see Private Life from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment; G. Dulby] The Italian Aleri shares his experience of warmth and livability in the British home; the Danish Rasmussen shows that the British are a people of homes; while the French Viollet-le-Duc hails his island neighbors for their devoted focus on convenient inhabitation while neglecting courtesan appearances British homes from all periods share essential characteristics: a structure based on the wise use of materials and techniques; a highly-rened construction, rened through an extensive process of typological subdivision and specialization (precise like a machine; produced as would be a piece of furniture, or a boat); a volume of interior spaces, without porticos, loggias, or terraces; small and modest on the outside, rich and dense on the inside. In all British homes we see an accumulation of predened spaces, freely arranged yet densely interconnected within a very material structure (this, the opposite of the dematerialized Italian residence) In these homes there is no center, no hierarchy of spaces, no aesthetic-formal master plan. It is an open system The most direct materialization of the British model is thus found in the Georgian urban residence, which has led to contemporary row housing. Here we see the spatial complexity manipulated, ideally, on 3 levels From the street, one rises some steps to the middle oor (or one can descend to the lower level, where services are located, together with patio and access to the back of the building) Primary spaces appear at the front, near the entrance, differentiated by partial levels that are easy to access via a few steps here and thereEach oor develops its own organization The main staircase, itself a small-open-formal place, shifts form, position, and orientation from oor to oor, allowing the diverse oor plans to connect The overall organization lacks a center: there is no central living room to be found; if we ever encounter a central room, it shares importance with surrounding spaces There are not even any hallways (the modern hallway is a poor descendant of the central living room, a space of generic representation; the hallway is a space of negation, it does not shelter any particular activity, extinguishes tensions between rooms by isolating them from each other, and breaks the unity of the home) The volume is actually polycentric, all spaces are doted with particular importance (diverse from one another, in plan and section, due to the diversity in their particular purpose). Yet they relate to each other in

a well-calibrated combinatorial process Each space is unique in the shape of its perimeter, the shape of its voids, of its ceiling, its materials, and dense variety of lines (broken, oblique, curved, mixed) The interiors are highly nished in a combination of elements that are not as much ornament as they are actually embedded and interconnected mechanisms and installations (the architecture focuses directly on comfort, by merging with the furnishings) Each one of the 6 faces in each room is woven in with architectural elements concerned with inhabitation: the ceiling offers a sense of protection, in its structural exposure, and in its reduced height; a connection to nature is found in the use of oor topography; the protective value of walls is enhanced by the reduced and careful use of windows and varying material qualities (windows become places of their own, as in the example of the bow window, and are typically small and heavily subdivided, as if attempting to heal their piercing of the wall); the material qualities of walls are also used to connect particular areas within a room; doors do not reduce the materiality of the wall, but rather emphasize it in connected use of material and by becoming places rather than openings These homes are not spectacular; they represent the negation of the monument. They are not emblematic, because they do not yield any particular manifesto. They are not systematic, refuting denition. Their beauty does not reside in any particular characteristic (nor in its opposite). This is the ne equilibrium of opposites It is important to note that the polycentric example is to be distinguished from acentric and anticentric developments. The rst lack a center due to the absence of internal tensions. The second lack a center because of an excess of tensions. Acentric residences offer a fragmented volume that ignores any idea of a focal point (Ledoux-designed buildings such as the Mezieres residence; as well as extreme row houses). In anitcentric residences, the circulation-promenade is given such precedence that one loses any sense of pause or polarity (found in various homes designed by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and much of the work by the famous New York 5) Both of these nd a precedent in prison design (and thus represent spaces that are not domestic or appropriate to residential design). We see that residences must always be congured around the idea of center No other type of building offers such a strong value of end, shelter, rest Socially, the home is the point of reference of arrival and departure Both of its archetypes, the hut and the tent, offer a center. In the rst it is a void (the dome), in the second a solid (the post). The rst offers hierarchy around a common center, while the second presents the polarity of various related centers The most radical case of the void center is the closed space represented in all variations of the rotonda This absolute quality of center can be diluted, as seen in star-like congurations of residences such as the Malcontenta (this would later evolve into centers surrounded by groups of rooms with their own centers, and later in volumes where the center rises and irradiates laterally, nalizing in complex spaces where the central space is further intruded upon by its surrounding spaces) Polycentric combinations, as noted earlier, are typical of casatles and mountain dwellings (Northern European), characterized by lifestyles that are extremely private and specialized The most interesting contemporary organizations can be seen as combinations of these 2 types of center (one-center and many-centers), where one may nd a hierarchy of spaces within a common space. The heart of a residence is not necessarily a single solid or void, but rather an intermediate condition This is a rich combination that itself has historical precedents (in palaces of archaic Greece, residences of Pompeii, Imperial Roman residences, the classicism of the Renaissance, and in modern times, in Wrights Roberts residence, or Louis Kahns Fleisher residence; in all of these, the spaces, without losing their identity, oat in a type of magical web of tensions) Asymmetry is another important gift of British architecture to the contemporary concept of residential design. Symmetry is avoided in residential design, since it confers monumentality to a building, thus predisposing it to public, rather than private, use (asymmetry, avoiding obvious centrality, guarantees intimacy and privacy) In the British architecture under discussion, particular methods of asymmetry were employed. Noteworthy is the development of spaces along separate axes of symmetry, which are subsequently connected by extensions and new spatial connectors Connecting extension lines never run all the way through; shapes and orientations of edges are broken and rhythmic, and individual rooms are rotated slightly to gain isolation within the whole The staircase itself is an important tool, in connection with oors that vary in size and organization. It is able to relate disparate oors due to its ability to shift horizontal orientation and position while rising vertically The British home subsequently develops in America, in the 19th century A primary example are the Colonial homes of New England, result of a reduction of spaces and geometry, leading later to the invention of a new spatial continuity that would be fully developed by Frank Lloyd Wright The American home brings the internalized British volume into connection with the outside In residences such as Wrights Martin or Roberts, we see a perfect unity in the connection of the most protected spaces and those most open to nature In Wrights work we also see a development of the balance between polycentric and concentric qualities. Here individual spaces are connected through particular tensions, yet maintain an individual quality by virtue of their formal qualities Adolf Loos, who considered England to be the reference point for modern life, also spent some time in the United States. From British homes he learned the dispersion of interior space into diverse specialized centers. From the North American experience he derived continuity. These 2 converge in the concept of the raumplan Following the Mller residence, one can no longer conceive of residential space as anything less than a 3-dimensional continuum The raumplan (volumetric project) represents the most complete synthesis and clearest modern conquest of residential design. Its characteristics are: differentiation of rooms in plan and section; shift in room levels (internal topography); ascendant sequence of spaces; horizontal displacement of stairs and connections, leading to the generation of secondary transition spaces; interconnection of the

various spaces/rooms. Many of these were found in the original British homes, but Loos eliminates the non-essential He shows, like few others have been able to, following the centuries-long dualism between urban and rural, the possibility of reuniting the qualities of private and public in the home If anything is lacking in this perfect Loosian construction, it is the connection to outdoor spaces, something that is developed a bit later in the work of Josef Frank In America, the work of Wright will show connections to the concept of the raumplan, but this work is also distinguished by the fact that its dynamics are multi-directional (not unidirectional) Also from the time of Loos, we see the example of Le Corbusiers work, synthesis of interiors and exteriors, single and double heights This work is even more unidirectional and ascendant than the raumplan