ARCHITECTURE AT TU DELFT
NR. 6
Texts by Merijn Muller Dirk Somers Stefaan Vervoort
Works by Astrid Annaert Jan-Hendrik Beckx Jan-Paulus Hoogterp Titus Lammertse Laura Linsi Duarte Miranda Maxime Prananto Lies Quatanne Floris Schimmel Ines Terstappen Hamish Warren
STUDIO: DOLLS’ HOUSE CHAIR THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE INTERIOR
EXPLORING DOMESTIC INTERIORS The STUDIO booklets and research of the in the Netherlands. tween positions and
are compact publications that present the teaching chair The Architecture of the Interior at TU Delft The STUDIO series investigates the connection bedidactics of the Chair.
MSc2 spring 2014
PROLOGUE
CATALOGUE: TU DELFT
CATALOGUE: U GENT
EPILOGUE
07 Introduction Dirk Somers
20 Overview
36 Overview
50 Reflections Dirk Somers
22 Hamish Warren
38 Jan-Hendrik Beckx
24 Floris Schimmel
40 Ines Terstappen
26 Laura Linsi
42 Lies Quatanne
28 Titus Lammertse
44 Astrid Annaert
30 Duarte Miranda
46 Maxime Pranato
08 Idea as Model (and its Discontents) Stefaan Vervoort 14 References Dirk Somers
52 Literature 58 Biographies
32 Jan Paulus Hoogterp 34 Interludium
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Architecture of the Interior The dolls’ house of Petronella Oortman, built in 1686, is the most famous Dutch dolls’ house of the 17th Century. Fully furnished as an idealized interior, in a cabinet lavishly decorated with marquetry of tortoise shell, it was worth the price of a real canal house. Dolls’ houses were meant to impress, but they also conveyed the ideas held by the upper class of Amsterdam on home life. As such they were fine examples of material culture of the time. The Dutch-Belgian teaching team Merijn Muller and Dirk Somers of Bovenbouw architecten and Johannes Robbrecht has recognized the theme of the dolls’ house as a valuable architectural assignment. Dolls’ houses are an ideal testing ground. They offer a controlled universe, in which the only context is a cultural one, and even that can be manipulated. With a number of idiosyncratic references, provided by the teachers, students of the universities of Delft and Ghent went to work in two consecutive studios. The models were the exclusive products of the studios, no plans were drawn, no images produced. The results are well thought out and precious labors of love. They demonstrate very personal ideas on domestic architecture. They also show how these can mature into beautiful products, with the didactic experiment being what happens if the student is the architect, but also the construction laborer, carpenter, concrete pourer, furniture maker and even tailor. Dolls’ houses were never intended as a toy. And yet they show architecture at its most playful: full of material experiments, moving elements and other surprises. Eireen Schreurs Editor of the STUDIO series Chair The Architecture of the Interior
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Eireen Schreurs
PROLOGUE
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Prologue
Introduction This booklet brings together student designs from the MSc2 spring semester 2014 at TU Delft and the MSc1 autumn semester 2014 at Gent University. The Interiors MSc2 studio was the first experiment with a dolls’ house as a brief. The brief was received both with curiosity and scepticism. Is this commission viable? Have we not learned to make models that do NOT look like dolls’ houses? A set of reference interiors was offered to the students as a basis for discussion at the start-up. During the first 2 weeks, the exploration of the brief oscillated between conceptual thought and physical production. But after that period, everyone had gained confidence about where it was going. Enthusiasm grew by the week. During the final weeks the studio operated exclusively from the modelling studio. Students took an uncustomary amount of pride in their modelling work. Everyone experienced how the autonomy of the model object gave it a new aura. A true ‘objet d’art’ was being produced here. Not just a representation of something that was represented in other ways as well. The studio was concluded successfully. Experiments in wood, concrete and gypsum lined up next to furniture-like objects and more conventional architectural models. The designs generally reflected on the potential of the dolls’ house as a piece of architecture. The results were beautiful and diverse and always very positive. We resumed the Dolls’ house studio in Gent, during the autumn semester. This time, by referring to the work at TU Delft, the idea of a dolls’ house as a brief was much more established. We asked students to bring domestic life more accurately into focus. The work of Gunnar Asplund was used as a way of addressing the balance of figuration and abstraction. The models that were produced have a more explicitly domestic feel than those made at the TU Delft studio. The absence of a modelling studio in Gent did not lead to more conventional production. On the contrary, students experimented with dyeing gypsum, welding copper and even sewing. The studio lasted an entire semester, which was twice the time of the Delft MSc2. But the pace of the studio work was kept high, and the discussions went deeper than before. Ultimately, we can conclude that the dolls’ house provides a wonderful pretext to talk and to learn about the buildings we love. Dirk Somers Bovenbouw Architecture Chair The Architecture of the Interior
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Dirk Somers
Stefaan Vervoort
IDEA AS MODEL (AND ITS DISCONTENTS)
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Prologue
“This exhibition had its origins in a long-standing intuition of mine that a model of a building could be something other than a narrative record of a project or a building. It seemed that models, like architectural drawings, could well have an artistic or conceptual existence of their own, one which was relatively independent of the project that they represented.”1 With these words, architect Peter Eisenman introduced the exhibition and book project Idea as Model, organized at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), New York in 1976, and co-published by IAUS and Rizzoli in 1981 respectively. This project set out to advance an understanding of the scale model beyond its customary codification as an interlocutor between conceiving and making, between the origins of the architectural design and the building eventually realized. Eisenman, then-director of the IAUS, and curator Andrew MacNair asked 22 architects, artist-architects and architects’ teams to explore the model not as a conventional tool, but as a quasi-sovereign object. They called for objects that explore not “models of buildings as propaganda for the persuasion of clients,” but “the idea of a model as a conceptual as opposed to a narrative tool.”2 Thus distanced from naturalistic objects that substitute for a building, the objects assembled in Idea as Model were held as intimations of the ‘idea’ of the scale model, and of architecture more generally. At stake in the 1976 exhibition and the 1981 publication (which held documentation of 22 additional contributions by largely the same participants) was nothing less than the agency of the architectural scale model: its potential to gain a relative independence within the process of architectural design, and accordingly, to become itself an ‘actor’ within the creation of architecture. Both in 1976 and 1981, this experiment engendered several interesting objects. Stanley Tigerman’s Animal Crackers, a laconic and Pop-like house made from a cardboard cookie box, signalled the model’s position between object and sign, between the cultural creation of architecture and its social communication. The work stressed the obstinate materiality as well as what Tigerman later deemed the “realistic, materialistic representationalism” of the object.3 Amancio Guedes’s Godhouse, a wooden object carved from the “trunk of a figus lirata that grew too big, in the entrance of the Smiling Lion,” and which was described by the architect as a “temple as toy,” in turn delivered a reflection on the scale model as a nexus of totemic aspects (such as the souvenir) and the cognitive and psychological reality of the miniature (such as the dolls’ house).4
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Stefaan Vervoort
1 Peter Eisenman, ‘Preface’ in: Kenneth Frampton & Silvia Kolbowski (eds.), Idea as Model (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies/Rizzoli, 1981), 1. 2 Idem; and taken from the exhibition brief, cited in: Richard Pommer, “The Idea of ‘Idea as Model’” in: Idea as Model, op. cit., 3. 3 Stanley Tigerman, “A Theory” in: Suzanne Buttolph, Great Models: Digressions on the Architectural Model, The Student Publication of the School of Design, no. 27 (Raleigh: North Caroline State University, 1978), 78. Tigerman prompts a question relevant to the argument in this text: “There is a prevailing theory in architecture that the closer (in intention) a finished object is to its originating abstract concept, the more powerful that object will be. Now does that theory only apply to traditional ideas about Formalism/ Functionalism, or can it also relate to symbolic content such as the metaphorical possibilities in theories/buildings?” 4 Amancio Guedes, “Godhouse” in: Idea as Model, op. cit. (note 1), 44.
The scale of William Ellis’s Residence - a whitewashed, sculptural construction that lacked indicatory elements and closely resembled 1920s Constructivist sculpture, particularly Kazimir Malevich’s Architektons - was impossible to pin down, and injected a continuous oscillation of scale into the viewing process. And Oswald Mathias Ungers’s Morphology of the Cube, three permutations of a cube based on ribs and corners, planar elements, and volumetric elements respectively, evoked not an actual architectural design but rather those cognitive ‘transformations’ underlying Ungers’s design method.5 Each in their own, singular manner, these objects addressed a fragment of the wide scope of features and connotations intrinsic to the scale model. Yet the intuitions (and contradictions) that Eisenman saw underlying Idea as Model resonated most clearly in his own contributions to the show and the catalogue. Made in conjunction with the design of a single-family house erected in Hardwick, Vermont, in 1969-70, House II Transformations included a series of translucent Plexiglas slabs that represented six transformations underpinning the design process, sustained by a grid of 16 plastic columns mounted on a wooden plate. The object lacked all indicatory facades and a roof structure, as well as discernable facades and interiors. Not unlike the clichéd views on the dematerialization of art in canonical art and architectural criticism of the 1960s and 1970s, it explored ways in which the model could approach an undressed, bare and ‘conceptual’ core, a spatial diagram of sorts.6 In curator Oliver Elser’s words, House II Transformations evokes “an idea of the extremely complicated process of form generation,” a principle, Elser adds, best discerned when one imagines the model “not as simply transparent, but instead, entirely see-through, invisible even.”7 Here, Elser indicates the anti-aesthetic impulse underlying Eisenman’s object: House II Tranformations advanced the ideational nature of the scale model, put in direct opposition to the material and aesthetic features of the object. In Eisenman’s equally decisive as oneiric terms, it was cast as “a representation of ideas (as opposed to buildings).”8 So much, too, was confirmed in the catalogue photographs, in which the object is placed against a darkened background, visually releasing most of its material features and morphing into an etheric series of colour strips. The model, floating in thin air, was ostensibly exported from the architect’s mind only to now await some further materialization. Eisenman’s contribution to the catalogue, House X, both continued and redirected this inquiry. Produced in tandem with a residence for a couple in Bloomsfield Hills, Michigan, in 1975, the object, now distinctly material, flattened out like an axonometric drawing when seen from one oblique angle, yet raked into different, nonsensical directions when discerned from all other viewpoints.
5 “Mit dem Begriff der Transformation wird die Veränderung eines Zustands in einen anderen ausgedrückt,” Ungers wrote in 1983, “(d)as Denken in Transformationen (...) wirkt somit nicht einengend, sondern befreiend auf die Fantasie.” Oswald Mathias Ungers, Die Thematisierung der Architektur (German edition, originally 1983), ed. Walter A. Noebel, Deutsches Institut für Stadtbaukunst: Bücher zur Stadtbaukunst (Sulgen/Zürich: Niggli, 2011), 19. 6 See: Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973); Peter Eisenman, “Notes on Conceptual Architecture: Towards a Definition” (1970) in Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings 1963-1988 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 11-27. 7 Oliver Elser, “House II (Falk House)” in Das Architekturmodell - Werkzeug, Fetisch, Kleine Utopie, eds. Oliver Elser and Peter Cachola Schmal (Frankfurt / Zürich: Deutsches Architekturmuseum / Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 2012), 251. 8 Peter Eisenman, as cited in: David Shapiro & Lindsay Stamm, “A Poetics of the Model: Eisenman’s Doubt” in Idea as Model, op. cit. (note 1), 121.
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Prologue
Studio: Dolls’ House
“When you approached the titled model and moved around it, the model seemed like a distortion,” Eisenman noted in the catalogue, “(a)ny displacement from the fixed viewpoint at once revealed the falsity of the model.”9 In the architect’s view, this strategy instigated a rupture on two distinct levels. Firstly, it uncoupled the liaison between subject and object in the experience of the model, as the former was symbolically expelled from the illusionary, aesthetic orbit of the latter: “Simply because of its smaller scale with respect to the individual who walks around it,” Eisenman noted, “it challenges the traditional idea of possessing the model as an object. (...) The viewer is forcibly distanced from it.” Secondly, House X barred the model from logically substituting for a building, as the architectural design was only evoked in the oblique view (and using an axonometric projection at that). In Eisenman’s - again hermetic - terms, the model laid claim upon “another kind of object and another kind of reality,” that is, it stressed the model as “an idea in itself, (...) not a representation of anything.” Once more, the catalogue photographs of Eisenman’s contribution corroborate this double rift. Shown from different viewpoints, only one of which is ‘correct’, House X propagates itself as a self-reflexive operation that disjoined the model from all substitutionary logic. Eisenman’s second contribution explicitly set out to perturb the aesthetic experience in order to stress the autonomy of the object vis-à-vis both the subject and the building.10 To be clear, Eisenman’s texts and contributions did not invoke any historical precursors. House II Transformations and House X first and foremost connect to the architect’s own agenda at the time, which critiqued the humanist ideals in classical and modern architecture and aimed to resituate them within an ‘autonomous’ and ‘objective’ sphere instead. Nonetheless, his contributions to Idea as Model did conjure up the continuing and in fact historical unease of architects with the scale model. In Leon Battista Alberti’s architectural treatise De Re Aedificatoria (1485; translated in English as On the Art of Building in Ten Books, 1988), scale models were discussed not amongst the elements and strategies of architectural design (in Book I, on ‘Lineaments’) but at the very start of the description of the objects and techniques pertaining to building and material construction (in Book II, on ‘Materials’).11 The model was transposed between architectural design and its materialization - but it was nevertheless attributed to the latter rather than the former domain. This surprising categorization was due to Alberti’s reservations for the cunning, illusionary features of the scale model.
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Stefaan Vervoort
9 Ibid., 122. The following quotes all are derived from the Shapiro-Stamm interview, 121-123. 10 The axonometric perspective that, in contrast to perspectival drawing, symbolically focuses on the object, stressed this point. See also: Bruno Reichlin, “Perspective Refers to the Viewer, Axonometry Refers to the Object,” Daidalos, no. 6, 1982, 81-94. 11 See: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), book II, 33-38 & book IX, 312-313.
His critique that “models that have been coloured and lewdly dressed with the allurement of painting” did not convey “the facts” but rather strove “to attract and seduce the eye of the beholder,” originated precisely in a wariness for the scale model’s capacity to disrupt designo and erode the professionalization of the architect.12 The aesthetic and conceptual ambiguity of the model was held a threat to the very definition of the discipline set out in Alberti’s treatise. “Better than that,” Alberti continued, “models are not accurately finished, refined, and highly decorated, but plain and simple, so that they demonstrate the ingenuity of him who conceived the idea, and not the skill of the one who fabricated the model.” A similar warning for the cunning of the model occurs in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s 1615 treatise L’idea della architettura universale. For Scamozzi, models are corpi inanimati (unanimated bodies) that unleash their trickery upon the subject as he/she projects his/her fantasies onto the object: they are in need of “the voice of the architect or another expert figure to express in words and argumentatively demonstrate what they are, appending them with spirit and motion. (...) For all in all,” Scamozzi added, models “resemble little birds that are hardly discernable as masculine or feminine, and which may turn out as either eagles or crows once grown. For this reason, commissioners are fairly easily fooled under a cloak of models.”13 Thus echoing Eisenman’s rhetoric in Idea as Model, Alberti’s and Scamozzi’s writings warned against the hybrid, slippery, unpredictable nature of scale models. The material and visual features of the model - along with their mimetic and projective call upon the subject - seemed to require a distinct measure of self-censorship, or a type of interpretative-epistemological control by the architect. What these historical resonances indicate, then, is how the material and aesthetic formation of scale models have always met with anxiety in architectural theory and history. From the Renaissance onwards, scale models have been rhetorically and aesthetically curbed, and they continue to encounter much ignorance and conceptual platitudes today. Authors either situate the model in between the architect’s idea and the material object - as in “the model is an idea, and an object,” in Patrick Healy’s terms - or perceive it an ‘autonomous’ object detached from both building and viewing subject - Karen Moon characterizes Idea as Model as “the point at which the model’s independence became openly recognized.”14 All the while, objects are categorized on the basis of vapid conventions - such as ‘sketch’, ‘design’ or ‘presentation’ models - and definitions of the scale model vary with each singular account - from miniatures to formulas to 1:1 installations and paintings.15
12 Ibid., 34. In a footnote accompanying a remark on the historically unexamined status of the model, Eisenman freely quoted, from Alberti’s book II, that “it is better not to make impeccable finished and adorned model (...) but stripped and simple ones, so as to emphasize the strength of the concept.” Peter Eisenman, “The Representation of Doubt: At the Sign of the Sign” in: Eisenman, op. cit. (note 7), 150. 13 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (1615), pref. Franco Barbieri, trans. Werner Oechslin, Centro Internazionale die studi di architettura Andrea Palladio (Verona: Colpo di Fulmine, 1997), 52. Author’s translation. 14 Karen Moon, Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model (New York: Monacelli, 2005), 19-20; Patrick Healy, The Model and its Architecture, Delft School of Design series on architecture and urbanism (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008), 51. See also Werner Oechslin’s writings on idea materialis: Oechslin, “Architekturmodell – ‘Idea materialis’” in: Die Medien der Architektur, ed. Wolfgang Sonne (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011), 131–155. 15 For such definitions of the model, see: Marie-Ange Brayer, “Un objet ‘modèle’: la maquette d’architecture. Histoire critique d’un mode de représentation,” in “Architectures Expérimentales, 1950-2000”/ Collection Frac Centre, ed. Marie-Ange Brayer (Orléans: Edition HYX, 2005), 15-24; and Albert Smith, Architectural Model as Machine. A New View of Models from Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004).
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Prologue
Studio: Dolls’ House
Not only are these analyses unproductive (they often apply to drawings, renderings, pavilions, or in fact, any other type of object) but they also obscure the singularity of the scale model. Indeed, I would argue that the material and visual features of the object, which singularly confront the space of presentation and the viewing subject, and which concern the reception and dissemination of architectural objects rather than their role within architectural design, are crucial to the scale model. As we confront and project ourselves upon these miniatures, subject and object intertwine to evoke imaginary structures, buildings and cities - not “another kind of reality,” as Eisenman’s crypto-metaphysics had it, but a distinctly real and aesthetic relationship between the model-sign, architectural referent, and viewer. And as we cognitively and psychologically envision these models as if they were real, the body, that surplus of the aesthetic experience too large to enter, is necessarily left behind. Still, the body does not leave the aesthetic experience untouched: rather, it disturbs it, through a somatic confrontation with the object in space, which makes scale models oscillate between object and subject, presence and projection, in what is simultaneously a haptic form and an imaginative buoyance. As the body is detached and yet still central to the model, those objects that directly engage it - like the 1:5 models by artist Thomas Schütte, or the miniature-cum-furniture pieces by Michael Graves - strategically navigate a feedback loop of mind and body that is intrinsic to the scale model. Only when we acknowledge and explore these aesthetic features, the oft-discredited ambiguity of the model can begin to be disclosed. As Richard Pommer wrote, pointing to the discontents in Eisenman’s House X - “a helpless model (...) like a crab squashed on a beach”16 - and intimating the importance of the model’s sculptural formation: “(I)n its recoil from material reality, architectural speculation has not moved to the edges of pure idea. Nothing so radical! It has moved toward allusion; it has evoked the theater and movies, myth and architectural history, landscapes and paintings, and the processes of allusion themselves – reality at a distance. (...) But such a sensibility is not well conveyed in typical models or architectural drawings, or in any exhibition on demand. It is too dependent on nuance, circumstance, setting, detail, and even, ironically, on real buildings.”17
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Stefaan Vervoort
16 Richard Pommer, “Post-script to Post-mortem” in: Idea as Model, op. cit. (note 1), 10. 17 Pommer, op. cit. (note 2), 9.
Dirk Somers
REFERENCES
As a basis for the studio, we composed a catalogue of interior architecture. This selection of interiors was used as a starting point to explore the design of domestic environments. Most interiors are interesting with regard to the relationship between the compositional principles of the building and those of the interior. A lot of interiors follow a tectonic logic: profiling, framed spaces, structure and infill… from the classical interior until the early 20th Century the vocabulary of exterior and interior architecture remained fundamentally unchanged. There is a building language at play. These references allow for the integration of inner and outer form. Such reference material allows us to understand the interior as an expression of built form. Another, more modern compositional logic is the interplay of figuration and abstraction.
Designers such as Josef Frank, Asplund, Le Corbusier or Tony Fretton each developed a compositional feel for the balance between abstract planes and figurative moments. Staircases, chimneypieces, bay windows and cupboards produce domestic recognizability in the abstract space of the box. The principle of figuration and the principle of the tectonic can also overlap. The Goten rooms by Katsura, Shinohara’s houses, or James Gowan’s Dodd house are all examples of this. Many of the dolls’ house designs investigated this compositional richness. First of all the structure of the dolls’ house was established. Subsequently, the figurative potential of the structure was explored.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Prologue
Adolf Loos Villa Muller
Adolf Loos Villa Muller
Adolf Loos Villa Khuner
Alvar Aalto The Aalto House
Directors office from ‘David Hicks on decoration with fabric’
E.G. Asplund Summer House
Caption
Caption
Caption
M.H. Baillie Scott The White House
F.L. Wright Susan Lawrence Dana House
Gerrit Rietveld Slegers House
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Dirk Somers
Karl Friedrich Schinkel Schloss Charlottenburg
Pierro Portaluppi Villa Necchi Campiglio
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Prologue
Gio Ponti Villa Arreaza
Gunnar Asplund Villa Snellman
James Gowan Dodd House
Josef Frank Haus Beer
Josef Hoffmann Palais Stoclet
Kazuo Shinohara House in White
Katsura Imperial Villa New Goten Rooms
Tony Fretton Red House
Sir Edwin Lutyens Marsh Court
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Dirk Somers
Jacques Dupuis Maison Durien
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Sir John Soane Soane Museum
Studio: Dolls’ House
Prologue
Philip Webb Red House
Philip Webb Red House
Peter M채rkli Family House
Peter Celsing Villa Klockberga
Dusan Jurkovic House in Rezek
Luigi Blau Wohnturm in vier Ebenen
Luois I. Kahn Fisher Hosue
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Dirk Somers
Hamish Warren
Floris Schimmel
Laura Linsi
Titus Lammertse
Duarte Miranda
Jan Paulus Hoogterp
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
CATALOGUE: TU DELFT Teachers: Merijn Muller Dirk Somers
Hamish Warren The large book ‘Traditional Japanese Houses’, published by Rizzoli in 1983, offers an extensive documentation of Japanese dwellings and their construction. Its gloomy black and white pictures accompanied this project throughout the entire course. The model is a successful investigation into traditional Japanese wood constructions and their spatial potential. In the dolls’ house it is applied to the set-up of a typical North-European terraced house, with stairs in the back and an attic underneath the pitched roof. Panelled doors and wallpaper are combined with intricate knots of wooden beams. Filigree structures fulfil the role of heavy masonry walls, giving an unexpected lightness to the familiar image of the terraced house. The thin elements of the roof become heavier towards the bottom, ending up in life size legs that hold up the dwelling. It is because of this continuum of construction that the dolls’ house becomes an object that is somewhere between a scale-model and a piece of furniture.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Hamish Warren
Floris Schimmel The massive and closed appearance of this dolls’ house gives it a mystical appearance. It is only by removing the lighter inserts that the interior of the heavy MDF block can be appreciated. Suddenly a complex spatial play is revealed; inner balconies connect to double high rooms and stairs find their way inside the walls. The model is inspired by Scottish tower castles, with their thick walls that contain serving spaces. The rough MDF, stacked in layers of 18 mm, determined the size of steps and walls, enhancing the medieval feeling of the interior. In contrast to this heavy base, the inserts are of light frame construction. Here, the work of Louis Kahn comes to mind, with his wooden interiors that seem to extend into the elements of the facade and ultimately in the building as a whole. But the medieval ‘studiolo’ is another reference, where the fragment of a refined interior creates domesticity against rough and heavy walls.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Floris Schimmel
Laura Linsi Freed from the referential role that it has in a scale model, materiality in a dolls’ house can preserve its own identity. In this project, the expressive possibilities of casted gypsum are explored. It is influenced by the work of Belgian architect Juliaan Lampens, known for his dwellings made from bare concrete. In the model the walls, floors, ceilings and furniture are all constructed out of the same grey-pigmented plaster. As in a real building, the measurements of the various elements are determined by the restrictions of construction, leading to thick bookshelves and chunky benches. The process resulted in a strong and primitive object, with references to the late works of le Corbusier. Additionally, the spatial set-up is quite modern and has led to a three-dimensional dolls’ house that can be appreciated from all sides. It is through deep views inside the dark model that the complex relationships between the spaces are revealed.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Laura Linsi
Titus Lammertse The traditional dolls’ house has no facade: it is a collection of interiors, put next to and on top of each other. In this dolls’ house seven completely different interiors are stacked inside a slender tower. The rears of these rooms form the outer appearance, revealing the construction that holds up the lining of the interiors. It is akin to exhibiting the scaffolding of a stage design. Each interior is derived from a clear reference, ranging from paintings by Hammershøi to an early house by Mies van der Rohe. These references were carefully examined and translated to the model. The interiors are stacked like a collage and connected by an elevator. Consisting of a floor, a wall, a desk and a ceiling, the elevator is itself an interior fragment. As it slowly moves its way through the dolls’ house, it changes the appearance of the interiors and creates unexpected relationships between the different rooms.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Titus Lammertse
Duarte Miranda The archetypical dolls’ house is a section of a conventional dwelling; six or nine rooms are neatly stacked next to and above each other, from basement to attic. This dolls’ house starts from the same principle, even enhancing the familiarity thanks to the addition of a pitched roof. However, the conventions are challenged within this traditional set-up. As in the work of Alvaro Siza or Fernando Tavora, familiar elements such as rooms and stairs are subtly transformed. The introduction of splitlevels and oblique walls give the dolls’ house an unmistakably modern appearance.
But what is most striking about this object is its physicality. Constructed out of large pieces of casted gypsum, the interior exhibits a rich collection of rough textures. Seams between the elements are not hidden but are actually accented. The traces of production become part of the design, turning the model into an object rather than a scale model.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Duarte Miranda
Jan Paulus Hoogterp As they are essentially toys, many dolls’ houses offer the possibility of interaction: doors can be opened, facades can be removed or roofs can be lifted. This project has a spectacular take on the idea of interaction. Starting as a tower, the model can be transformed into a singlestorey patio dwelling by means of a few actions: two dolls’ houses for the price of one.
At the same time, the model is an investigation in the possibilities of building with wood. Each level of the tower is designed with a certain type of wood construction. These constructions are stacked logically, from heavy in the bottom to light on top. Despite the different structures, a coherent whole is created through the careful use of proportion and measurement.
The joy of alteration is further expressed in witty inventions, such as a hammock that turns 180 degrees, or a crack in the wooden base that becomes a pond in the patio. However, the design goes beyond being simply a gimmick, as all consequences of the transformation are carefully taken into account; spatial relations are designed to work in both the tower as in the bungalow, and horizontal surfaces are designed to function both as floor and ceiling.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: TU Delft
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Jan Paulus Hoogterp
Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House Sir Edwin Lutyens
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Interludium In the early 1920s, Sir Edwin Lutyens designed a dolls’ house for Queen Mary. It took 4 years to build and was completed in 1924. Queen Mary was 57 years old that year. The dolls’ house was never intended for play. The object was considered an historical document, a showcase for craftsmanship and an attraction to provide revenue for charity. Therefore, it was considered necessary to stock the house’s wine cellar with 1/12 bottles filled with good wines and to provide state of the art plumbing with water running through the pipes. Carpet manufacturers wove carpets, books were written for the library and electric lamps were fitted for the rooms. But none of these efforts elevate the object to the level of great architectural interest. The elevations show a dull Edwardian setup. The house’s interiors are a medley of classical palace interiors, all lacking the wit and invention we expect of a Lutyens design. This house was conceived to offer everyone a glimpse of the life of the royal family. Eventually, millions of British people would come and see the house, once it was placed on display. The history of the dolls’ house is a rich one. Lutyens’ take on the theme is just one of many that illustrate the power of the dolls’ house to attract, and its potential as an object of collection and display. But as in other areas, Lutyens would be the last architect to work on classical themes. After Lutyens, the dolls’ house lost its role as an intermediary between desired life and everyday life.
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Dirk Somers
Jan-Hendrik Beckx
Ines Terstappen
Astrid Annaert
Maxime Prananto
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Lies Quatanne
Catalogue: UGent
CATALOGUE: U GENT Teachers: Johannes Robbrecht Dirk Somers
Jan-Hendrik Beckx The model is conceived as a collage of recognisable elements from typical houses. This makes it appear quite ordinary at first glance. As the viewer continues to look, the combinations and different architectural styles of the elements conspire to tilt the familiar balance, while preserving a certain cohesion. Familiar features coagulate in unexpected ways. Furthermore, there is a search for a delicate definition between interior and exterior. This allows the spectator, or player, to visually and spiritually enter the house.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: UGent
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Jan-Hendrik Beckx
Ines Terstappen The Scottish tower house served as a basis for the design of this model. The massive perimeter of gypsum envelops the intimate scale and functional requirements of the domestic environment. Textures are determined by the tactile quality of the gypsum. A helix route is secretly woven through the towerlike structure. The monolith tower eventually turns into a stack of big blocks that allow the imagination to conceive an endless amount of other combinations.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: UGent
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Ines Terstappen
Lies Quatanne Four bays hold together the spaces of this dolls’ house. Frontal views provide wings that allow figures to enter the stage. Main stage and back stage are blurred. The boundaries between inner and outer space are vague. A colour code emphasises the layered character of the dolls’ house.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: UGent
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Lies Quatanne
Astrid Annaert This model consists of a composition of spaces connected to each other within the boundaries of a fixed straight volume. The repetition of constructive elements and monotone colours results in different layers of rooms with a varying approach, and different possibilities in terms of application. The contrast between recognisable elements and alternative ways of using them within the context of an unrealistic model of a house are central to this complex dolls’ house.
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Studio: Dolls’ House
Catalogue: UGent
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Astrid Annaert
Maxime Prananto Conceived as a string of thoughts and memories of domestic places, the dolls’ house is to be read as a long stroll from space to space. In each of these, the potential of self-projection is crucial. Elements of everyday life can be recognised and, at the same time, confused. The dolls’ house aspires to be an independent and all-inclusive object, diffusing the boundaries between architecture and furniture and between construction and fill. A unified sense of materiality brings together elements that we would otherwise consider as detached. This way, the dolls’ house manages to pose questions about its own conception.
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Catalogue: UGent
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Maxime Prananto
EPILOGUE
Dolls’ House Petronella Oortman, 1686
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Epilogue
Reflections on the making of a dolls’ house 1 One might assert that the dolls’ house is the most accessible feature in the universe of architectural representation. The miniature house uses the familiarities of domestic life to trigger the viewer’s curiosity. Taking a glimpse into the domestic atmosphere of a strange house has a voyeuristic aspect that is quite unlike gazing into any public building. The miniature house magnifies this aspect through the elimination of walls or roofs. Hence, the dolls’ house lives by grace of the tension between explicit intimacy and blatant exhibitionism. Seduction is not an effect of the dolls’ house; it is its raison d’être. 2 A key component of a successful dolls’ house is projection. Can we project ourselves inside the house? This mental transfer operates via a balance between visual accessibility and spatial intimacy. If the house is too open, we lack the desire to explore the interior. If the model house is too closed, it has the same effect. 3 The dolls’ house is always a collection. Traditionally, the miniature house is a collection of rooms that differ in character more than in size. Like in any collection, its merits lie in a consistent approach to diversity. What does the collection teach us? Is the collection well framed? Does it miss key elements, or conversely, does it suffer from excess? 4 A dolls’ house always refers to other buildings. A dolls’ house cannot exist without a reliance on other buildings. Yet the dolls’ house is, first and foremost, itself. A dolls’ house is a condensed derivative. The dolls’ house is architecture’s stock cube. 5 Our architectural take on the dolls’ house frees the model of its direct roll as a representation. The dolls’ house relies on the real world, but is not a reproduction of that world. Primarily, the dolls’ house represents itself. Cardboard is cardboard and balsa wood is balsa wood. Students become their own contractors. 6 There are no plans to a dolls’ house. At most, a number of construction drawings. But these should be burnt after the house is finished. In any case, students were not allowed to display drawings during their final presentation.
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Dirk Somers
Bibliography
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Lima, Z. R. M. d. A. (2013). Lina Bo Bardi. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Hultin, O., et al. (1996). The architecture of Peter Celsing. Stockholm, Arkitektur Förlag AB.
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Tony Fretton Architects (London) (2014). Buildings and their territories. Basel, Birkhäuser.
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Woodman, E. (2008). Modernity and reinvention the architecture of James Gowan. London, Black Dog.
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Witt-Dörring, C., et al. (2006). Josef Hoffmann interiors 1902-1913. Munich, Prestel.
Saito, Y. (2004). Louis I. Kahn Houses 1940-1974. Tokyo, Toto.
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Simon, A. and Knapkiewicz & Fickert (Zürich) (2012). Knapkiewicz & Fickert: Wohnungsbau. Zürich, Park Book.
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Spechtenhauser, K. (2007). Maison Blanche Charles-Edouard Jeanneret Le Corbusier history and restoration of the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, 1912-2005. Basel, Birkhäuser.
Maniaque-Benton, C. (2009). Le Corbusier and the Maisons Jaoul. New York, Princeton Architectural Press.
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Wilhide, E. Sir Edwin Lutyens : designing in the English tradition.
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Muthesius, H. and D. Sharp (2007). The English house in three volumes. London, Frances Lincoln.
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Villa Necchi Campiglio a Milano. Fonde Ambiente Italiano
Legler, D. and C. Korab (2006). At home on the prairie the houses of Purcell & Elmslie. San Francisco, Calif., Chronicle Books.
Kuper, M., et al. (2006). Gerrit Th. Rietveld casas = houses. Barcelona, Gili.
Snodin, M. and K. F. Schinkel (1991). Karl Friedrich Schinkel a universal man. New Haven, Yale University Press.
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Shinohara, K. (2011). Kazuo Shinohara casas houses. Barcelona, Gustavo Gili S.A.
Girouard, M. (1983). Robert Smythson & the Elizabethan country house (earlier: Robert Smythson and the architecture of the Elizabethan era, South Brunswick - N.J. 1967). New Haven London, Yale University Press.
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Knox, T. and D. Moore (2009). Sir John Soane’s Museum London. London etc., Merrell.
Merijn Muller studied Industrial Design and Architecture at TU Delft, where he graduated at the department of Interiors, Buildings and Cities. During his studies he worked for Kossmann.deJong Exhibition designers in Amsterdam and Stephen Taylor Architects in London. Since 2009 he has been working in Antwerp for Huiswerk Architecten, which became Bovenbouw Architectuur in 2011. As a part of these agencies he has been responsible for various projects, ranging from a small house-extension in Mortsel, to a large housing development in Mechelen. He taught as a guest-teacher, together with Dirk Somers, the MSc2 courses ‘Doll’s house Studio’ (2014) and ‘The Aedicula’ (2015).
Johannes Robbrecht holds a degree in civil engineering-architecture from the University of Ghent. Since 2002 he has been a collaborator at Robbrecht en Daem architecten, of which he became partner in 2012. Since 2009 he is a lecturer architectural design at the Universiteit of Ghent, department Architecture and Urban Planning.
Dirk Somers studied architecture in Antwerp and Milan and graduated in Urban and Environmental Planning at KULeuven. In 1999 he was Young Flemish Designer in the context of the first Meesterproef of the Flemish government architect. In 2001 he set up Huiswerk Architecten together with Erik Wieërs. As a passionate designer, he has built a repertoire with Huiswerk Architecten that receives both national and international acclaim. He regularly holds lectures on topics such as tectonics, materialization and urban architecture and often takes part at workshops and juries at universities in Flanders and abroad. Since 2003 Dirk Somers is teaching Architectural Design at Delft University of Technology. From September 2011 on he is also design professor at Ghent University. In October 2011, Huiswerk Architecten ceased to exist and Dirk Somers has set up a new office: Bovenbouw Architectuur. Bovenbouw Architectuur has recently had exhibitions at the Biënnale in Venice (2012), at the Architekturgalerie München (2013) and in 2014 in deSingel, Antwerp.
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Epilogue
Stefaan Vervoort (Antwerp/ Ghent, B) is a Research Organization Flanders (FWO) PhD candidate at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, with a research project entitled ‘Models as Sculpture’. His research focuses on the exchange between art and architecture in the postwar era, as well as on the material formation of modern and contemporary art museums. He is editor of Raymond Barion (with Mihnea Mircan and Stijn Maes, Antwerp: O.C.A.M./Extra City Kunsthal, 2014) and Luc Deleu - T.O.P. office: Orban Space (with Wouter Davidts and Guy Châtel, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2012) and curator of the exhibition Orban Space: Luc Deleu - T.O.P. office (with Wouter Davidts, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague (2013) and Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2013)). Articles and reviews have appeared in several catalogues and in the art and architecture journals Camera Austria, De Witte Raaf, Metropolis M, Oase, OPEN!, The Journal of Architecture and San Rocco.
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Colophon Students: Astrid Annaert Jan-Hendrik Beckx Jan-Paulus Hoogterp Titus Lammertse Laura Linsi Duarte Miranda
Maxime Prananto Lies Quatanne Floris Schimmel Ines Terstappen Hamish Warren
Docenten: Merijn Muller (TUDelft) Johannes Robbrecht (UGent) Dirk Somers (TUDelft, UGent)
Concept: Eireen Schreurs Copy editing: Talen UvA Edited by: Caspar Frenken, Sereh Mandias, Eireen Schreurs Graphic Design: Hans Gremmen Photos: Marius Grootveld (p16, 18, 20, 21-33, 36, 38-47) Images: All images and photographs presented in this booklet were provided by the authors and students, unless otherwise stated. The publisher has attempted to meet the conditions imposed by law for the use of the images. If we omitted any proper acknowledgement, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher. Cover image: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House by Sir Edwin Lutyens Spring 2015
To order a copy or pdf of this publication, please visit: www.tudeflt-architecture.nl/chairs/ the-architecture-of-the-interior/publications
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