Villa dall’Ava, Paris by Rem Koolhaas, 1991
“Fansworth de Mies Van der Rohe, la Maison de Verre de Philip Johnson, la Villa Savoye de Le Corbusier; l’histoire de l’architecture au XXème siècle peut etre vue comme une suite de maisons individuelles. Elles partagent toutes un programme simple, un jardin, un salon; c’est une famille avec des enfants. Et parce que le programme est toujours le meme (it is so obvious)dans 90% des cas l’architecture est banale.En revenge, cette apparente simplicité du programme, parce qu’elle n’est contaminé par aucune domande spécifique, permet d’attaindre l’architecture la plus pure.” R. Koolhaas, Villa dall’Ava, documentaire
Villa dall’Ava arises from the assemblage of tensions of both an unstable, therefore dynamic and modern family and a suburban, traditonalist neighborhood. It is higly contextual but totally uncontextualized; its striking difference from the surrounding architecture and its alight and merge with the slope of the terrain, generate diagrams of forces that anchor it firmly on the ground while it aspires to fly away. The architecture is dynamic because it embodies the aspirations of the client, it points towards the future as a springboard. The Villa is also a careless and irreverent assemblage of quotations in detail, and it is precisely for this reason that it is home to a household without a nucleus, a reduced human aggregation, fluidly projected toward the metropolitan dimension. The individual house, along with its inhabitants, is in constant motion. In short, Villa dall'Ava is unconventional for an unconventional vision of dwelling, the "banality" of the program allows the architect to get to the essence of the concept of home in the contemporary condition; it is conceived in distracted movement or as a collection of contradictions, multiplicity of experiences and fragmented events, which are typical of contemporary lifestyle. Villa dall'Ava is the example of residential architecture that best represents this contemporary condition, made of accumulation of stimuli and absence of nostalgia both of masters of the past and the existing architectural forms or any inherited cultural dimension. Villa dall'Ava is unique, outstanding individual in the multitude of the mass (it stands out from the surrounding tissue as well as stand out the aspirations of both client and architect), is a continual "work in progress", is everything and anything, but above all it is a home.
The preciousness of Villa dall'Ava resides in two architectural considerations: the frantic accumulation of disturbing details and the multiplication of distributional devices, which seem to form a timeline of events and contents that are expected to take place. So, on the one hand the first component (strictly compositional) is enhanced by the photos of architecture while on the other hand, the second one (kinematic) is readable in plan and section but is explicitly visible in video.1Through these two architectural considerations, I'll discuss the quality and uniqueness of the Villa, demonstrating how it embodies the contradictory characteristics of the deepest core of contemporary society: that of the family.
Pt.1, Asemblage of details
Many details would worth to be mentioned but I will just focus on the most important ones, related to my argument.
Pilotis
Pilotis, as conceived by Le Corbusier, “raise the building above the ground (…) as a reversal of the classical podium that anchors the building to the earth (…) are agaist the traditional domestic basement”.2 Villa dall’Ava has a stoned basement, a glass podium and two types of pilotis: two almost surreal, lonley quotations of Ville Savoye (connected to parents’ volume) and a forest of stretched, twisted and colored pilotis that more than lifting up the building from the ground, kept it anchored to it. In fact, in elevation and section, it appears that the weight of parents' volume (whose pin is the kitchen downstairs) as a lever, tends to raise the box containing the daughter's bedroom… upwards. So the villa stores energy in this effort, energy that will explode in a shot at the moment of the dip in the pool, all directed towards the Eiffel Tower. Thus, the most unstable element of the family seems to definitely be the young daughter: although parents still partially retain the aura of Ville Savoye (pilotis and façade of their box), their daughter’s environment - the future - generates a burst of energy that fragments and confuses the architectural structure, as visible in the pilotis below her room.
Load barring wall
This element is the only, solitary quotation of traditional residential architecture in France. The structural wall, although one and not two as usual, still divides two realities; parents can't see inside the daughter's room and viceversa. However, it also unites the family through movement: the house does not have a center, even though the semi-trasparent membrane of the kitchen is centrally located, its presence is too light to worth of consideration. The true center of the house is a "non-centre" i.e. the continuous surface of the wall, because of its static nature it generates a tremendous dynamism. Around it the body moves, rotates, forces concentrate (like the pressure from the pool) and they are released (as the two room’s volumes) in the "moment" generated, in plan, by the volumes of house. The wall distributes and then becomes a unifying element of the family by connecting the boxes, differentiated as the entities of the inhabitants of the Villa. It is the only element that possess physical weight and "mass" quality along with the two boxes; the rest of architecture is fluidity, is public sphere, pleasantries and routine.
Interrupted, elongated window
The most beautiful detail, in my opinion, is the East façade: a photo shows the load barring wall abruptly stop the elongated window, demonstrating with arrogance the superiority of its meaning. What we see is a truncated sentence, a broken argument. This detail seems to speak directly to Le Corbusier saying "Yes, your point is very interesting, but we don't care anymore" because it is redundant and now tied to a bygone rethoric. That window is like a movie film randomly cut and pasted on an alien surface through the operation of montage which, according to Benjamin, allows the realization of the artwork.
Plastic, orange fence
On top of the roof-garden the Eiffel Tower appears visible among the small circular holes of the (seemingly) randomly placed plastic fence. Its violent orange catalyze the attention at the expenses of the surrounding views, so the landmark and the ambiguous surface somewhat dialogue. In spite of the consolidated surrounding urban fabric and the indisputable presence of the Eiffel Tower, the orange surface declares a transient and unstable condition, it represents a dangerous site, maybe also still in construction and thus perhaps symbolizes the growth phase of the girl who lives below. This bizarre detail, though, seems insecure and therefore generates an extra layer of tension which, in this case, is projected into space (thus the view of East Paris) by a linear narrative sequence. In fact, the movement starts from the parents’ roof garden and, with a dip or a look, overcomes the plastic barrier to direct, as a vector, to the heart of Paris. On the contrary, as Koolhaas states, the outer walls of the lots are inclusive and make the site itself as a "room", this implies an inner space even though the glass house at the ground floor negates interiority, they therefore merge in an ambiguous condition. Villa dall'Ava includes and simultaneously projects itself towards the outside, it is definitely the union of contradictions.
The Eiffel Tower-house dichotomy raises a subsequent reflection, a domestic space (a bourgeois one, as in this case) has always involved interior conditions, the fence per secreates an interior so the difference between the walled fence and the orange one exemplify the choice of a prevalent non-interiority (very different from from Le Corbusier’s roof-garden) and this non-interior is curiously also the main feature of Eiffel Tower’s architecture. Although different, both are spurning tradition.
Pt.2, Fluid kinematics
The instability of these forces, however, is recorded in the wholeness and completeness of architectural drawings. It is easy to read in the section the tripartition of the architecture and the functional differentiation between public and private sectors, but what is most striking is the multiplication of stairs, ramps and pathways within the home. Indeed, there are exactly eight stairs, one ramp, two horizontal paths, an undulating exterior and four external staircases; I would also include the curved surface of the kitchen as a device of movement since it channels but also reveals the fluidity of space. This obviously generates a multitude of experiences, enhanced by the variety of materials used. For example, the aluminum coating penetrates the glass box while the wooden cladding of the pillars become unifying element of the basement and the living room. With regard to considerations made above, in relation to the boxes’ game of forces, I want to emphasize that the presence (visible in the third section) of two inclined planes in the East-West section, once again bring out the forces that tend to catapult the architecture to the East. Therefore, following a reading of the four plans it is possible to trace Villa dall'Ava’s paths: a meandering pathway slaloms the distorted pilotis and allows access to the house (Koolhaas wants them to be experienced by those who access the Villa), in a spatial continuity (thanks to a double height) it is possible to access the living room, or through the twisting motion of a spiral staircase or by following the linear direction of the ramp. A stair, like the ladders of NYC fire escape, is the external, variable component (properly kinetic) that allows the direct access to the pool. Finally, two stairs lead from the living room floor to the private rooms.
I would say that it is possible to go through the house in three different speeds: the fast one of the stairs, the slower, contemplative one of the ramp and finally the randomic one enabled by the "fluid spaces." The latter are those of the living room, fluidly accessible to the inhabitants of the house and their guests and obviously the swimming pool. The material, in this case water, summarizes the contradictoriness of spaces, of thrust, of movements. All the convective motions within it, along with the act of swimming, sum up the complexity and dynamism of the entire architectural envelope. Thus here the pool welcomes the greatest possibility of movement within architecture, it focuses the energies of the house and when combined with the load barring wall, the two elements becomes the “not defined” but pulsating core of the Villa.
So, in conclusion, Villa dall’Ava can be considered as a successful assemblage that implies a multiplicity which permits a fragmented description of its inhabitants and their lifestyle (as both Deleuze and Adorno would argue). Koolhaas’ Villa can be considered as a successful piece of architecture because it pursues the contradictions that give value to the work of art. Its details are not ornamental, neither nostalgic, they just decompose an outdated syntax (carefully chosen within the language of high modernity) in the search of the new meaning of dwelling. We can thus say that he succeeds in his intentions because if we consider that he designs this building for a prominent journalist and if we also think of the role of mass media in the nineties, we suddenly realize how the multiplicity of stimuli of the Villa imply the reality of its inhabitants. The play of forces not only suggests the tensions that occur into the family itself in terms of “generations battle”, but also of the role of each member of the house. No other architecture would be able to freeze in space such discourses, that’s why Villa dall’Ava is the best of its kind.
Notes:
1. Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9rDOjAQu4E
2. Micheal Hays video on the Five point of the New Architecture
