| YEZO Retreat in Northern Hokkaido Mountains in Japan, by international architecture studio LEAD |
UPDATE: Video here:
YEZO (Hokkaido, Japan, 2020) from LEAD on Vimeo.
.
“So, what about our windows?” It’s usually a half-asked question at some early stage of a project, about the colour of windows generally – which are usually picked by someone who has a favourite colour they see in a brochure – or about how many windows in a space – just holes punched in a wall -- but the placement and colour of your windows is more important than you might think.
Consider it from the point of view of perception, as architect Richard Neutra used to. Former Neutra apprentice John Blanton explains the importance of size and placement:
Studies in neuroscience in architecture will continue to show the benefits of bright, daylight rooms..
Lowering costs through simplicity was always a factor for [Neutra] so that the client could afford gracious social areas within a limited budget, which he took very seriously.
A room with a single exposure, especially a bedroom or business office, is the hardest to work with. Neutra’s answer was wall-to-wall windows, but not necessarily floor-to-ceiling. Extending them to the corners created light onto, and gained reflection from, the side walls. This accomplishes brightness with lessening of glare. Some light from those walls reflects back onto the solid portion of the window wall, again decreasing glare. Thus, a feeling of a dark cave wall with a single overly bright opening was avoided.
The effect of opening up the room is further enhanced because the eye flows to the nature beyond the glass, unhampered by the enclosure of dead corners. I have long believed that glare is caused by the eye’s rapid re-focusing between light and dark. This is stressful, which is why it is uncomfortable. Together with similar adjacent rooms, these wall-to-wall windows produced a long ribbon window on the exterior.
So it’s not enough just to punch a hole in your wall: to avoid the dark cave means more glass than you might have thought: and glass especially going to the corners, so light can fully wash the internal walls. (And feel free to even take the glass round onto the next wall plane itself to fully open up your corners!)
And bear this in mind when you’re hanging your curtains: make sure you have enough curtain rail to take all of your curtains well past their window when they’re open, and to draw them away from any adjacent wall lest they remain and cast the very shadow you’re trying to avoid.
Notice too that the exterior effect (the long ribbon window) is produced by the interior purpose, that purpose being to avoid glare and dark corners, and fully open up the space to nature outside the glass. This connection, Neutra believed and neuroscience has since confirmed, is essential for human health and well-being.
Bear in mind too, especially if fitting blinds, that because the brightest part of the ‘sky dome’ is directly above us, we will get most of our light through the window’s top-third, so unless you do want that dark cave you’d best avoid having your blinds bunch up at the top of your window.
So what about the colour of your windows, and the window walls? Does perception play a part in suggesting how to handle these? Sure does: to minimise the contrast between the outside brightness and the shadow unavoidably cast on the inside of your window joinery, Neutra always favoured the light-reflecting colour of silver. But for his window-walls themselves, something much richer:
The walls below Neutra’s continuous windows might have built-in cabinetry or in a colour different than the white side walls, perhaps the favorite colour of a child occupant. If white paint were to be used below the windows as on the side walls, that low band of paint would actually appear to look dirty because less light is being reflected there. However, because using a colour could detract from the view outdoors, which was his invariable goal because it promised the most actual health benefit, he did this on an individual basis. Ideally, his choice for this lower band was his chocolate “Neutra Brown.” This particular brown, it seems to me, is a “magic colour” in that the eye identifies it but does not attempt to focus on it, so its use is oddly comforting, as I have experienced.
Any post in this extended bank of windows was usually painted silver, another “magic” colour. It created the least amount of contrast with the incoming light, and it almost made any post disappear to create openness. Again, expansiveness! Additionally, Neutra ensured that any vertical sliding door jamb would be hidden on the exterior side of a post or wall. Likewise, he concealed the horizontal head of such door so that it was hidden within or behind the roof framing. Again, openness, rather than a sliding door frame silhouetted within the structural frame, which would pose another obstruction to our view of the outdoors. It is an experience so subtle that it is not seen other than subliminally.
All this gives us the “Neutra impact.” We do not look at his windows, we look through them.
That’s the reward of we get it all right: by starting from the inside out, letting the function dictate the form.
I hope this Mini-Tutorial has helped you see the placement and colour of your windows rather differently.
Feel free to check out all the other Architectural Mini-Tutorials for more fresh ways to see architecture.
* * * Pics used show Richard Neutra’s Hailey House, pics by Angeleno Living. Text quoted from Barbara Lamprecht’s wonderful Neutra blog.
[Cross-posted to the Organon Architecture blog]
.
Artist Connie Perkins loved this aesthetically charged corner of her small 130m2 Richard Neutra home so much that she moved her bed into the lounge so she could wake up with it every morning.
Now that’s love.
Can you see where it appears in the house?
[Photo by Julius Shulman. Plan by Barbara Lamprecht.]
Constance Perkins House, by Richard Neutra. Pic from Frank Lloyd Gallery.
Quick question before you start: Which famous novelist was killed by over-vigorous interior decorators.
Architect Richard Neutra has your answer: it was French naturalist writer Emile Zola.
Zola, said Neutra, “courageously advocated a consistent interrelation of all things, adherence to nature, indifference to conventions, and realistic logic.” In everything that is, but his boudoir. “When he came to build his own house in Meudon or furnish his apartment in the Rue de Boulogne, he certainly did not act like a champion of progress. His self-chosen physical environment was quite at variance with the spirit of his radical pronouncements.” And he died of it.
Neutra himself championed in architecture what he called naturalism – by which he meant “a return to nature by way of modern science.” Neutra biographer Sylvia Lavin says:
Neutra believed that the design choices made by your architect could kill you or thrill you, arguing for example that bad decor had done nothing less than murder Emile Zola. Neutra identified with Zola because he considered the writer a forefather of his own interest in [what he called] biorealism. But Neutra believed Zola had died from sleeping in an over-accessorised and hermetically sealed bedroom. ‘His doctrine of naturalism was one thing; his apartment was another. He lived and died at the hands of the vigorous interior decorators of his age.’
Emile Zola · Édouard Manet. Oil on canvas, 146 1/2 × 144 cm
The aim of the mid-century Californian “Case Study” Houses was to introduce to folk, now finished with war and ready to build, the many means both technological and material allowing design to improve the way they lived. All of them stressed what today is called “indoor-outdoor flow,” with broad openings made possible by the (then) new technology of sliding doors.
Richard Neutra’s Baily House was at the humble end of the spectrum of Case Study Houses—a small house for a young family, designed to live with nature and expand, centred around “a prefabricated utility element that contained centrally amassed plumbing and heating installations.”
Some of its features would be positively unwelcome today, especially that ubiquitous inside-outside connection. “Considering the outsides as part of the house was the solution that Richard Neutra found to face the lack of inside space. The kitchen, as an example, is opened to the backyard that -thanks to the pleasant Californian weather- could be used to have lunches and dinners or do outside house-works.” While adding greater comfort, modern air-conditioning however breaks these kinds of connections between indoors and out.
Planned to expand, the plan shows the house after its second (of three) series of extensions.
[Pics and quotes from Proyectos 7/Proyectos 8, and Mid-Century Home]
Emulating “mid-century modern” may be the latest fashion in architecture—but if the emulators were to learn from original mid-century moderns like Richard Neutra that could become a very good fashion indeed.
His “Troxell House” was built in 1956 for Sidney and Arilla Troxell and his family, sold in 2003 to architect Charles Scott Hughes who renovated and expanded it in 2005.
The house features a reflecting pool, glass walls, birch doors, radiant-heat pipes under the concrete floors, recessed lighting (and a catwalk outside the master bedroom to make it easier to clean the windows.)
Oh yes, it just sold--for US$3.55 million. Clearly, mid-century modern still sells.
More photos, and a short story here.
PS: if you follow film, you might feel only a deviant could live in a place like this…
Oyler House - Movie Villains from Mike Dorsey on Vimeo.
I was sure I’d blogged this house before, but for the life of me I can’t find a decent post on it. (Well, apart from this one.)
This is by far my favourite house by Neutra (pronounced NOI-tra). Designed in 1934 for film director Joseph von Sternberg, director of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. (Von Sternberg famously insisted that there be no door locks on the bathrooms, in case a temperamental actor or actress or two decided to end it all in the stalls.)
“I selected a distant meadow,” von Sternberg recounted later, “in the midst of an empty landscape, barren and forlorn, to make a retreat for myself, my books, and my collection of modern art.”
The building’s major space was a double-height living area surrounded by a balcony that was used as an art gallery. Displayed there were works by Gauguin, Kandinsky, Matisse, Léger, de Chirico, Kokoschka, Brancusi and Archipenko. Von Sternberg’s mirrored bath and bedroom, with a view of the rooftop reflecting pool, were the only rooms on the second floor.
On the first level, east of the living area, lay a studio and kitchen, followed by staff quarters and the garages, one for regular cars and a larger one for the Rolls-Royce. A specially designed space for the owner’s huge dogs was behind the garage. To enliven the otherwise simple, aluminium-clad façade, Neutra designed—in the best Hollywood manner—a series of remarkable “special effects,” which extended into the landscape. Most prominent was the high curvilinear wall around the front patio, which emphasized the streamlined personality of the house. A shallow moat-like lily pool surrounded the wall and, in broken stretches, the entire house. A long thin wall extended from the west façade, exaggerating the house’s size and dividing the front and rear gardens.
Head to the house’s website here to see a stunning slideshow of the Julius Shulman photographs of the house and, if you don’t already know, to discover which influential novelist lived here after Von Sternberg, where she began the novel that has come to define our times – the novelist who described the house as “unbelievably wonderful.”
Later, in answering a query from a fan, she [the novelist] described it as being “extremely modern—made of steel, glass and concrete, mostly glass. So you see, I’m the kind of ballplayer who endorses only what she really smokes—and smokes only what she really endorses.”
The Coonley House was another of Wright's masterpieces from his 'Prairie House' era -- presently being restored.
And it was pictures such as these from Wright's 'Wasmuth' portfolio, published in Europe in 1910, that inspired a new generation of young European architects to take the scales from their eyes and the artifice from their work and learn to make their architecture sing.
And pretty soon, young Austrians like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra were making their way to the US to work work with Wright and seek their fortunes.
Engineer, author and genius Robert A. Heinlein, one of my own favourite authors, used to contend that architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Neutra were geniuses in their own right, but they "needed to learn from the Gilbreths."
The Gilbreths were Frank & Lillian Gilbreth, famed in the fifties for their time-and-motion studies and work-flow studies to increase production efficiencies. Their skills were used mostly on the commercial front; on the domestic front however, and they were parents to twelve children, they suggested such time-saving techniques as using once bar of soap in each hand to speed up bathtimes. Explained one of the twelve later in Cheaper by the Dozen, "Yes, at home or on the job, Dad was always the efficiency expert. He buttoned his vest from the bottom up, instead of top down, because bottom up took only three seconds and top down took seven. For a while, Dad even tried shaving with two razors, but he finally gave that up - he grumbled, ‘I can save 44 seconds, but I wasted two minutes this morning putting this bandage on my throat.’ It wasn't the slashed throat that really bothered him - it was the two minutes."
Anyway, ever since I first read Heinlein's comment I wanted to know more about the Gilbreth's, and about Heinlein's own house in Colorado that he designed and built for himself in the late forties. And here it is, presented in a 1952 Popular Mechanics article in all its rude efficiency. It's an engineer's house all right, but he has learned form the Gilbreths.