From houses on top of each other and a machine as their heart
Xaver Roos
On the hills next to Bordeaux, a horizontal stretched metal object protrudes beyond the surrounding forest. This is the Maison à Bordeaux built there between 1994 and 1998. As known, this house is designed in such a way partly in relation to its very peculiar program: Jean-François Lemoine was bounded to a wheelchair due to a car accident. “Contrary to what you would expect,” he told Rem Koolhaas, “I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house, because the house will define my world...".1 Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, wrote: “Koolhaas started with this — the client’s needs— not with the form “.2 Koolhaas proposed the house, or three houses on top of each other. The lower “house” is a series of caves carved out the hill and provides space for the most intimate life of the family. Staff members or guests have their own place in a separated onestorey-high, which is connected to the family house by the courtyard in between.
The third house is the metal upper level visually floating on the glass structure of the midlevel (second house), and has a bedroom area for the husband, wife, and children. The second house is divided into an outdoor and indoor area and connects the house with the surrounding garden. If you walk a bit, you find a clearing in the surrounding forest, in the middle a 3 by 25-meter swimming pool. Located on the straight between the Maison à Bordeaux and Bordeaux itself. Based on Jean François Lemoine’s physical limitation, Koolhaas changed and modified certain parts of the building. For example, he arranged the windows in the upper level in different heights, so that the client had an easy access to these. The heart of the building is an elevator platform that moves freely between the three different floors. By doing so, Koolhaas adds an object that can constantly change the overall space. It can become a part of the living space and the kitchen, or be used as an intimate office space, or maybe it can grant access to books, artworks, and the wine cellar. In order to achieve such result, also the building’s structure is quite exceptional. He moved almost all the living area on the first floor, which is formally detached from the rest of the house. This Detachment is the reason why the building seems like three houses on top of the other, although connected by the elevator’s vertical movement.
Paradoxes
As cleverly written by Vanstiphout, just because the house presents itself and is presented in terms of program, does not mean that the house denotes the program.3 Such statement can be used as a point of view to understand Koolhaas’ rhetorical play with modern architecture. After, as Koolhaas himself writes:
“It has always been our conviction that modern architecture is a hedonistic movement, that its abstraction, rigour and severity are in fact plots to crate the most provocative settings for the experiment that is modern life … [The “modified” Barcelona Pavilion] aimed to shock people into an awareness of the possible ‘hidden’ dimensions of modern architecture.”4
Koolhaas´ words refer to the Casa Palestra for the Milan Triennale in 1985 based on a transformation of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion. Mies’ work is in this case considered as the manifesto of modern architecture, and thus is “modified in order to set the advocates of modernism free from their own idealist rationalist ideals.5” By bending the geometry of the floorplan, the orthogonality and therefore one significant point of modern architecture is lost.
“Another ambition he brought to light in order to salvage modern architecture´s contemporary relevance”5 is the Villa dall´Ava. In this case, the Villa Savoye is almost made fun of by playing by playing with Le Corbusier’s five points. By transforming the cartesian grid of white pilotis into irrationally crooked stilts, they resemble a “newborn giraffe´s legs” more than the original structure.
Also, the unsteady orange fence, surrounding the pool on the roof, used for construction sites, makes fun of the “roof garden”. This artificially caused a contradiction, a paradox, a situation, that is made up of two opposite things, and that seems impossible but is true or possible (Le Corbusier’s roof garden and the Materiality of the fence).
Regarding the Maison à Bordeaux, we can easily argue that it is also full of paradoxes. A characteristic that, as said by Vanstipouth, actually “raises the stakes of how far OMA dares to let the real in [their work]”3
In order to analyze this quality of the building, we can list four main Paradoxes:
1. The most obvious one, the elevator:
By piercing a vertical shaft through a multilevel architecture and installing a moving platform that can engage with any level, the stability of the domestic architecture is overturned by an element of real instability that, as it offers new scenarios to inhabitants, also changes the architecture.7 Due to the hydraulic piston, the platform gives an appearance of effortlessness. It is not the first-time superimposed floors connected by elevators occur in Koolhaas’ work. Already in “Delirious New York: A retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”6 , he talks about a theorem from 1909 that describes the ideal performance of a skyscraper: stacked properties with different architectural styles, different lifestyles and ideologies connected by an elevator. 22 years later, the speculations have become reality within the “Downtown athletic club”, 38 superimposed platforms, with different possibilities of use connected by 13 elevators.6
2. Outer walls:
At one point on the lower floor, the outer wall breaks free from its usual orthogonality. By playing with the targeted contrast, the “modified” wall stands out and leaves the feeling of strangeness.
3. Windows and doors:
Contradiction between common expectations and reality by playing with their formal and functional aspects.
4. Another paradoxical element would be the primary construction:
The system of the structure of the Maison à Bordeaux appears to reverse the modernist principle of a rational method of construction. Instead, it deploys an intricate and surreal system of the supporting structure, which allows the visual disconnection between the three stacked houses.
Looking at the Maison à Bordeaux, with its guest house on the other side of the courtyard, one notices that the whole house is paradoxical. The simplicity of the guesthouse and the strange complexity of the main house create a contrast of two different things that seem impossible and yet work together.
Parody of a paradox
By using a set of archetypal forms to transform the architecture of the Maison à Bordeaux into a simplified version, this extreme abstraction makes it possible to induce the imagination of observers and access the essence of the building through the naive viewports of children.
As I refer to the metaphysical paintings by de Chirico, I wanted to revive certain aspects in the transformation:
1. Losing the scale by using perspective in an exaggerated, unreal forms
2. The theme of the clock as the paradox of an “eternal present”.8
Looking at the Villa dall`Ava, familiar objects like the orange construction fence, create a play of stereotypes which support the idea of the Parody. The transformation of the Elevator makes use of this method by increasing the number and changing the form of the hydraulic pistons. By treating the pistons as if they were Greek columns, they create an appearance of stability. Due to the vertical movement the columns get stretched and the expectation of the ratio between architrave (Platform) and the columns (hydraulic pistons) gets disturbed. The transformed elements keep the Paradoxes alive or make them even more paradoxical.
The Transformation intentionally makes fun of the Maison à Bordeaux: a parody of Koolhaas, as he did a parody of Le Corbusier.
A parody of a parody, or maybe a parody of a paradox. In any case, the new house is an alternative reality: a paranormal house; a reinvention of our contemporary canon, as if it were in a alternative universe.
The pool as a Paradox
Due to the research on the Maison á Bordeaux, it turned out that there is a pool right next to the house which points towards Bordeaux. It can be referred to “The story of the pool”, a short story Koolhaas wrote, when he proposed his plans for the Roosevelt Island in New York in the 1970s as an appendix to Delirious New York. The story is built around the interests of Russian modernist architects, who are escaping from the Stalinist oppression to New York. By using a floating pool as their bridge to cross the division between USA and USSR: “Due to the particular form of locomotion of the pool – its reaction to their own displacement in the water – they have to swim toward what they want to get away from and away from where they want to go.”6 The law of Mechanics paradoxically force the architects to swim in the opposite direction within their floating pool, in order to “float” into the direction they want to go. Transferring this to the context of the Maison á Bordeaux, “the new house could liberate the husband from the prison that their old house and the medieval city [Bordeaux] had become.”1 All in all, to use the pool as the liberator, the swimmer must swim toward Bordeaux to get to the Maison à Bordeaux.
Petit, Irony or self-critical opacity of postmodern architecture, 2013
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 1978
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 1978, p.152
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, 1978, p.309
Cottini, Luca, The Art of Objects: The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture