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Spatial Efficiency on the Edge:

on Formal Excess and Surface Strategies

in Boundary Conditions

By lUKaS PaUER

“That’s all you need in life: a little place for your stuff. That’s all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.”George Carlin, “Stuff ”

Intentionally or unintentionally, architects create particular atmospheres that elicit an emotional response from their occupants. Because they vary under changing light and weather conditions, buildings can be seen as recipients for the changing emotions felt and projected by their inhabitants. People likewise develop an attachment to the spaces they occupy via the personal belongings that they fill them with, and which mediate their use of the space. For example, in the 17th century a room was not considered “furnished” in the eyes of the social upper classes and literates1 unless they found a place in it for their writing utensils. In contemporary practice, the inclusion of storage space permits an occupant to take advantage of a limited number of available square meters without sacrificing the essential functions of dwelling. Therefore, it primarily anticipates an economic principle. Yet the idea of endowing a wall surface with

“depth”—a paradoxical proposition—in order to accommodate the necessary storage space points us toward an equally, and richly, paradoxical notion that lies at the heart of the architectural discipline. Architecture provides our eyes with visual surfaces, which our brains all-too-easily interpret as “depthless” surfaces. However, these same surfaces are necessarily produced from masses endowed with weight and which take up space. Pure architectural surface, by definition, is not supposed to have any depth. In the reality of building construction, though, it must. Architects have long fought to reconcile these two poles—or alternatively embraced the tension between them. This essay shall investigate the variety of ways in which this fact was opportunistically addressed by spatial practitioners throughout history, attempting to draft a lineage that bridges across terminologies: the idea of surface “depth,” the architectural accommodation of “stuff,” the “equipped wall,” the “habitable wall,” the “thickened wall,” and the “poché.” Upon examination of the key mechanisms that allow for the inclusion of storage behind architectural surfaces, one observes that the architectural treatment of surface often walks a fine line between consciously designed spaces and spaces that cannot be used any other way. The architect effectively dedicates time to designing the invisible—something that cannot be seen and will not attract any design attention. Architects make choices about which things are hidden and which are not, about what is exaggerated and what is

architecture provides visual surfaces for our eyes, which our perceptive brain all-too-easily transforms into ‘depthless’ surfaces.

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understated. They base such choices on the effects they want to achieve. Thus, we may readily agree with the introductory quote that the “stuff ” of occupants must be attributed its proper place, whether it is our superfluous personal belongings or our seemingly indispensable appliances. The open question here, however, regards how we may give this “stuff ” a place in buildings. As the percentage of closet space in Western homes has progressively risen over the course of the past century, we give away part of the spaces we live in to auxiliary purposes with the ultimate promise of ameliorating our lives. Taking space away from a room and giving it over to storage is supposed to make use of the remaining space more productive. But how far should one go in converting useable space into auxiliary space, and what happens when the quantity of the latter begins to overtake that of the former? What are the essential characteristics of a highly space-efficient building?

1. t Gloag, A Social History of Furniture Design (1966)

2. u Gausa, The Metropolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture (2003)

3. u Singer, A History of Technology, Vol. 2 (1957)

Draw-top table

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To what extent does efficient design of storage space influence the structure, appearance or even the design strategy of a building? Presently, whether they are mobile or permanently installed, the guts of a house are operated with physical strength, air pressure, water, electricity, or fuel. Contemporary architects use the term “equipped wall” to refer to a physical wall that absorbs a variety of technical functions beyond its function of partitioning space.2 As equipped façade, the wall is no longer just a fine line separating interior from exterior, but also a management system. In a paradoxical way, the equipped wall takes up space in order to free up space, providing greater infrastructural efficiency for adjacent spaces. Equipped with space-taking mechanisms of space-saving storage space, it is associated with a range of different manual movements: pushing, pulling, rotating, folding, sliding, lifting, or some combination of these. These movements necessitate predetermined space for their execution, as well as specialized hardware to facilitate their technological function. In spite of these requirements, equipped walls allow for the integration of furniture, clutter or other interior components that would otherwise impede the efficient use of limited space. Historically, the primary type of specialized hardware enabling this convertibility was the hinge: hardware at the scale of a tiny mechanism.3 Renaissance cabinetmakers in France and the United Kingdom began with the production of strap hinges that could be used on many kinds of interior and exterior doors and cabinets. Apart from serving as simple, sturdy locking device for doors and other types of stationary frames, the hinge made possible the striking enlargement of an object’s available surface—eventually giving birth to the draw-top table, gate-leg table, flip-flop console, fall-front desk, and poudreuse dressing table. A spectrum of strap and butterfly hinges can be found on old desks and cabinets throughout Europe from around 1670 until the 18th century.

In the history of architecture, the term poché refers to a construction strategy that is capable of either disguising or revealing contents. As part of a design strategy, it centers on removing or literally masking out information. Eliminating technical evidence of construction, its intention is to create a high contrast between the form of the space on the one hand and the necessary construction elements defining it on the other hand. Poché underscores a distinction between the spaces that people occupy and the enclosure delineating it. As such, irreducible to either structure or service space, the poché has never really been subject to theorizing since it has been historically understood as a necessary kind of architectural excess— a leftover element that sustains formal unity through the mediation of contradictory spatial desires. A thickened, inhabited wall in Baroque architecture allowed for the simultaneous existence of a variety of uninterrupted figures within one body. The poché in Robert Adam’s Syon House, Francesco Borromini’s ‘San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane’, Leon Vaudoyer’s ‘Design for a Spherical House’, or Edward Lutyen’s ‘Papillon Hall’ unified vastly different figures in one plan. It is impossible to place a circular room in a square building without formal excess, but the Syon House does just that, and in doing so highlights the absurdity of the poché. Eventually, developments in small-scale mechanisms and furniture overlapped with

the poché has never really been subject to theorizing since it has been historically understood as a necessary kind of architectural excess.

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architectural developments at the scale of a room. A drive to hide the bed arose at a time when bed sheets, curtains and mattresses were a major household investment. Connected to the structural parts of the house, bedsteads formed an integral part of the construction of the timbered interior and were thus not considered as separate, mobile furniture. People usually slept half sitting up because it was thought that if one slept flat, all blood would go to the brain and kill the sleeping person. Drawers on wheels could be found underneath bedsteads where children could be put and then slid in for the night. In the latter half of the 19th century, the parlor was the defining room of the house. It was the showroom for a family’s treasures, which mirrored the social circle that it belonged to. At that time, propriety suggested keeping bed and bedroom out of view. Convertible beds allowed middle class families a somewhat

the murphy in-a-Dor Bed was a mechanized and, therefore, more economic version of the convertible bed.

Chaplin, one a.m. (1916)

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improvised constellation of programmatic activities. During a period of rigorous experimentation with structural and hybrid furniture, foldaway and pull-down beds were combined with fireplaces, pianos and desks. J. Higgins stood out with his innovative concept in 1870 for a parlor cabinet/bed. When it was closed, a cabinet appeared, suitable for a formal parlor. When it was open, a foldout mechanism revealed a mattress. A single room could now serve as both quasi-bedroom and fake-parlor. The more effectively an object could be hybridized with a bed, the handier it became. Due to advancements in technology and manufacturing, the Modernist movement responded to the changes sweeping over Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities shaped and informed the architecture and design of both domestic and urban spaces.

aires mateus, Centro de monitorização e investigação das Furnas (2010)

VERY VARY VERI

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With the triumph of the structural frame in the first part of the 20th century, the poché disappeared. Modernity’s ideals of continuity and transparency confronted the inefficiency of Baroque and Neoclassical plans, which wasted space with structural masonry. Suddenly, the wall was perceived as an element freed from its structural constraints—both physically and symbolically. One can trace the awareness of a transformative emptying out of interior space back to observations and studies made by the historian and critic Sigfried Giedeon in his ‘Mechanization Takes Command’ and by Reyner Banham in his ‘Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment.’ In these writings, the authors place the development of small-scale inventions or technologies, such as electricity and air conditioning, ahead of the classic supremacy of structure. Necessity seems to be the mother of invention.

4. u Kaye, There’s a Bed in the Piano: The Inside Story of the American Home (1998) 5. u Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948)

Foldaway and pull-down beds were combined with fireplaces, pianos and desks.

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Within the context of this modern revolution, one is tempted to probe the under-appreciated reciprocity between the emergence of new transportation interiors and domestic spatial practices. Today, Pullman kitchens and halls are synonymous with any one or two room apartment where living and sleeping areas are combined into a single room. The industrialist George Pullman developed an improved passenger train car after he had to spend a night on the seat of a train in 1857. The ‘Pullman Car’ contained beds for passengers, allowing them to sleep on cross-country trips. Curtains and bathrooms provided privacy, and the beds turned into seats when folded down. In 1876 the official French report on the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia included observations on the American furniture of the time: in contrast to European furniture, it was characterized by its use of fewer surface planes. In the eyes of the French critics, a new style had manifested itself on the other side of the Atlantic, and across all of the industrial arts. It was dubbed the ‘Pullman Car Style.’4

By the end of the 19th century, homeowners began replicating the luxury of a Pullman parlor car in the comfort of their own homes. This lead the way to one of the most popular space-saving designs: a mechanized and, therefore, more economic version of the convertible bed, which emerged in 1900 as the ‘Murphy In-A-Dor Bed.’ Its invention was meant to accommodate both W. L. Murphy and his wife in a downtown studio apartment in San Francisco. Because of this bed, the apartment was no longer limited to its function as a hybrid: parlor, dining room, or bedroom. Concurrent with the Pullman-inspired Murphy bed, convertible beds gained in popularity on trains and ships due to the rapid rate of industrialization, urbanization and according socio-technical agitations in spatial practice. The development and design of kitchen appliances, air conditioners and other elaborate everyday devices became the subject of architectural discourse. “The problem of the sleeping car is foreshadowed by the ship’s cabin.

As conveyances, both ship and train command a very restricted space. Yet railroad cars must be even more parsimonious with their space than must the larger ships,” Giedion observed at the time and went on to say that this “immediately poses the problem overshadowing all others: economy of space, how to secure adequate comfort for the traveler without pre-empting extra space.”5 The importance of mechanized furniture in the interiors of trains, ships and planes deserves additional consideration as an equally influential site of architectural invention. The ability to both disguise and deepen the space behind architectural surfaces was simultaneously a factor in as well as a reaction to the rising density of urban areas, which gradually was attracting greater interest and concern. In architecture and the urban discourse, the concept of density is interwoven with issues of surface area, depth and urban morphology. Hardly any other concept in the recent history of urbanism has led at different times to such different interpretations and evaluations. Whether related to urban fabric, inhabitants, or simply interaction, the term “density” was generally associated with social and political unrest at the beginning of the 20th century. A century earlier, dense urban conditions were synonymous with overcrowded apartments and unhygienic living conditions. It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that urban density became synonymous with urban variety and richness of experience. Inspired by proponents of CIAM’s ‘Athens

in a paradoxical way, the equipped wall takes up space in order to free up space, providing greater infrastructural efficiency for adjacent spaces.

VERY VARY VERI

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Charter,‘ modernist spatial practitioners developed an awareness of construction elements and their physical boundaries as interface. This interface was likely to be optimized based on the thoughts formulated by Giedion in his postulate of “liberated living.” The intention was to provide a maximum of “light, air and openness” for the physical well-being of the public at large. Practitioners relied on the observation that the energetically ideal shape of a building varies with its volume while a handful of architects specifically explored new forms of spatial organization through the enlargement of the amount of contact surface between exterior and interior. Le Corbusier’s 1930 ‘Ville Radieuse’ and his visions for the city of Algiers envisioned folded structures, meandering patterns and high-rises placed in Cartesian arrangements, which virtually reduced them to a single surface. By applying

Kahn, Exeter Academy Library (1972)

6. u oswalt, Wohltemperierte Architektur: Neue Techniken des energiesparenden Bauens (1994) 7. u Vassella, Louis I. Kahn: Silence and Light (1968) 8. u Cacciatore, Living the Boundary: Twelve Houses by Aires Mateus & Associados (2011)

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the strategy of folding, which recalls how the Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch constructed fractal curves with infinite length, Le Corbusier seemingly designed buildings without volume.6

Louis Kahn referred to his Beaux-Arts education in establishing his method for teaching and practice, especially in terms of the importance of composition. Foreshadowing Kahn’s thoughts about served and servant spaces, Beaux-Arts theory insisted upon a masonry architecture defined by palpable mass and weight, and in which clearly defined spaces ordered by hierarchy were to be composed and characterized by the structural solids themselves. Kahn and his civil engineer August Komendant agreed on the basic philosophy that a finished structure, whatever its purpose, must represent itself. From the moment of excavation to the finished structure, it must tell how it was made, and how elements were designed and constructed to carry out their function. According to Kahn and Komendant, a building’s structure must have its own identity, which tells us what its function is, and relates to its basic structure. Therefore, in order to functionalize structure, Kahn composed spaces hierarchically. Rather than working with mere lists of spatial program, Kahn sought to differentiate between desire and need, space for people and space for service or servicing needs, served space or servant spaces—which would ultimately enable him to use structural elements to not only carry loads and endow his buildings with identity but also to participate in making the building functional.7 While the served spaces belong to the people who experience the space as a derived quality of form, the servant spaces only belong to the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing needs, and also include the circulation and structure—a differentiation which would propose a stronger emphasis on experience than that found in the Modern architecture of the time. In the Larkin Building, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright placed the stairs, servicing towers, and ventilation shafts

at the corners of the building, repeatedly using vertical elements as servant components in his designs, which would trigger a genealogy of architectural design strategies from Kahn’s Trenton Bath House, the Richards Medical Research Laboratories, the Salk Institute, the Exeter Academy Library, and eventually to the Bowelism of Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini’s Centre Pompidou. In the 1970s, as figuration became a concern within a deliberately anti-modern agenda, the poché once again returned in the work of architects such as Michael Graves and Venturi Scott Brown. This notion of the poché reinforced traditional spatial relationships in which the leftover space contained structure, storage, or mechanical services. However, in its use, both traditional and abstract, it repeated classical forms within a Modernist construction methodology, making the existence of the poché all the more ironic. Seeking to reverse this traditional lineage of thought in relation to served and servant spaces, Aires Mateus developed an idea of the boundary in his work whereby matter gets thicker along the boundary, while the main and auxiliary spaces can be flipped.8 The traditional relation between main and auxiliary spaces is so clearly reversed that the former are conceived as a thick inhabited wall that can include the stairs, kitchen, storerooms, etc. as a habitable interstice, a sort of huge and pervasive servant space

this awareness of a transformative approach to emptying out interior space to convey a sense of emptiness is recent, and its legacy often overlooked.

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inside of which the basic geometric shape prevails. Thus, a viewer perceives a thick, black, massive wall, but the actual condition in reality is that the space is fully habitable and useable. This blackening of certain spaces in the architects’ drawings seeks to communicate and reinforce the idea of a moment in which servant and served spaces, positive and negative, solid and void, can be reversed. The persistence of the habitable interstice and equipped walls as containers of spaces with different hierarchies would eventually lead spatial practitioners to gradually refine a representation technique that emphasizes spatial rather than building values. As a representational technique in spatial practice, the act of graphically filling in a wall accounts for the space that the wall occupies. The shading-in, disguised as walls in planometric view, removes the technical information of construction. By creating a high contrast between the form of the space and the necessary construction elements that define it, it underscores a distinction between the space people occupy and its delineating enclosure. Throughout history, the mediation of contours in space to convey varying architectural conditions has been applied in different techniques such as Nolli’s ‘Pianta Grande di Roma’ and figure-ground representations. However, the examination and classification of selected physical conditions of storage across small-scale mechanisms, forms of dwelling, or modes of transportation probes the often unseen parallels in strategies for surface enlargement and innovations in the construction of space. This awareness of a transformative approach to emptying out interior space to convey a sense of emptiness is recent, and its legacy often overlooked. To begin to understand strategies for the enlargement of surface in the field of architecture perhaps ultimately involves rewriting architectural history through the lens of formal excess.

LUKAS PAUER (MAUD ‘14) studies urban design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and holds an MSc Arch ETH from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich).

VERY VARY VERI