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Samuel & Blundell Jones The making of architectural promenade

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The term ‘architectural promenade’ has become a part of the language of modern architecture, yet it has been little discussed or investigated. We find it insufficient as a generic term to express a concern with the experience of moving through a building, for the promenade can mean different things to different people. To illustrate this point we make a comparison of the promenade in the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier – perhaps the promenade par excellence – and that of the almost contemporary Schminke House by Hans Scharoun. We have found many distinct differences. The emphasis in this essay is on the meaning and manipulation of space, something of deep concern to both architects and a topic that each of us has explored separately elsewhere.1

The Villa Savoye [1] is regarded as a key work in every architectural history book since F. R. S. Yorke’s The Modern House, and even graces the cover of Hitchcock and Johnson’s The International Style.2 Although Le Corbusier designed other villas that would have earned his reputation, Savoye definitively crowns his first period and his oeuvre would be unthinkable without it. The generous open site on the outskirts of Paris, rich clients, and a relatively open brief, allowed him the freedom to make a special architectural statement just when he was ready to do so, with time enough to hone the design through several versions. It became famous on paper, but was dogged with

technical problems and never worked well. By the end of the war and the German occupation the building had become derelict.3 Early in 1960, Le Corbusier returned to facilitate a restoration and proposed several significant changes but he died before anything could be done.4 The Villa was extensively restored in the 1970s under the auspices of UNESCO and the French Ministry of Culture, and is preserved largely as it appeared at its conception.

Hans Scharoun’s Schminke House [2] was a similarly luxurious house that consolidated the architect’s international reputation just before the Nazis drove his architecture underground.5 It stands next to the owner’s noodle factory on the edge of Löbau, a small town near Dresden. At the end of the war it became part of the German Democratic Republic and the owners fled to the west, so until 1989 the house remained unloved and relatively inaccessible, used as a kindergarten. Now restored, it also graces the covers of architectural histories.6 Since Scharoun was eight years Le Corbusier’s junior and was suppressed under twelve years of the Third Reich, he could only consolidate his reputation in the early 1960s and his international influence came later, but he is now ranked among the Modernist masters and the Schminke House is recognised as the key work of his first Modernist period.7 It marked the characteristic breakthrough in the use of free angles which has been his main legacy to late twentieth-century architecture.8

It is too easily forgotten how radical these two buildings must have seemed when first built, shockingly different from other structures near and far. With their flat roofs and unadorned white surfaces, they not only conformed to what later became known as the ‘International Style’,9 but also demonstrated shared concerns with functionalism, flowing space, transparency, and arrival by car. It is well known that the curved ground plan of the Villa Savoye was generated in response to the movements of a car, but a small axonometric in Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complète makes this idea about movement quite explicit [3]. Scharoun’s surviving sketches show that the Schminke House was at an early stage directly influenced by the Villa Savoye [4a-e]. Both

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criticismThis article compares Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye as exemplar of

promenade architecturale with Hans Scharoun’s Schminke House

which pursues the theme of movement in another way.

The making of architectural promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke HouseFlora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones

1 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, western corner

2 Hans Scharoun, Schminke House from garden

3 Axonometric sketch of Villa Savoye from Oeuvre Complète3

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4 Schminke House preliminary project called ‘Löbau 2’. This series of drawings preserved in Scharoun’s work file as greying prints has the title ‘Löbau 2’, suggesting it was already a second version. The house takes the northern corner of the plot to distance it from the factory and to gain optimal solar exposure for its rounded corner. Arrival is from the western street rather than the east, and the turn of the car is celebrated with a loop, but the pedestrian route to the terrace steps is also shown. Scharoun sketches the garden layout in some detail, even noting the

planting: there is lawn, flower beds, fruit trees and even a ‘Spielwiese’ (play-meadow). Floor plans seem naïve and columns are carelessly omitted, but they include telling conceptual information including room uses. The tapered form is headed by the round stairhall, panoramic living room and upper gallery, while the tail ends to north with the boiler flue. Responding to orientation, the house bursts from its corner towards sun and view, asymmetrical from the start. The perspective prioritises the corner view and terraces, and the sense of increasing transparency is evident

a Sketch perspective of project Löbau 2, 1930 (retraced)

b Site plan with contours: land falls towards the north-east. Noodle factory is bottom, proposed ‘Löbau 2’ top left, final house position mid right within square garden boundary

c–e Ground, first, and second floor plans of ‘Löbau 2’, the earliest surviving project for the Schminke House using the alternative site shown in fig 4b, top left. The bottom right corner faces south. These were traced off Scharoun’s freehand sketch plans on faded prints, line for line

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The making of architectural promenade Samuel & Blundell Jones

asymmetry and thrust of implied movement jutting out over the garden. Both houses were driven by ideas about the unfolding of route, but in Le Corbusier’s case there was an explicit theoretical advance, as he discarded the more utilitarian term circulation in favour of promenade. Although he had described Maison La Roche of 1923 [5] as ‘a little like a promenade architecturale’11 – tentative as the restricted site prevented its full development – the term was applied directly to the Villa Savoye: ‘In this house occurs a veritable promenade architecturale, offering aspects constantly varied, unexpected and sometimes astonishing.’12 The idea was, for Le Corbusier,

architects had built at the Weissenhofsiedlung of 1927 and Le Corbusier’s work was known to Scharoun through publications, so it is perhaps not surprising that Scharoun’s first sketches are a kind of homage to Savoye, showing the arrival of a car under a building on columns with generous terraces above. Even the directions of motion are the same, the vehicle circling anticlockwise and the pedestrians clockwise. Scharoun’s drawings are surprisingly crude for an architect already known for subtle and ingenious planning, even for fine detailing,10 and they differ in almost every respect from the finished building, but the perspective already prefigures the radical

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5 Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche promenade

6 Hans Scharoun, competition entry for Königsberg Stock Exchange, 1922, a plan based on pedestrian movement

7 Hugo Häring, competition entry for the Berliner Secession Gallery, 1926, first floor plan (redrawn). The staircase becomes the sculpture gallery

8 Hans Scharoun, Wohnheim at the Breslau Werkbund Exhibition 1929: the contained path onto the terrace

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building can be glimpsed as sketched by Le Corbusier in the Oeuvre Complète. Passing the trees, the car turns right into the clearing around the Villa. The southern facade remains purposely dumb and is lower than the northern, where the build up of rooftop solarium adds height [10]. The main accommodation is visibly concentrated at first floor level, since the rooms below, set back behind pilotis, are painted green to recede from view. The car drives within the pilotis on the right side of the building, past a curved screen of vertical slatted mullions with flashes of the internal hall. It turns a quarter circle to stop on axis outside the main door in the north side, a double metal door surrounded by glazing with a

connected with the picturesque, the film theories of Sergei Eisenstein, games of perspective, and scientific theories of space and time, as well as with the possibilities afforded by the careful curatorship of routes. It also drew on his idea of savoir habiter, which derived in turn from his interest in the rituals of ancient mystery religions such as Orphism.13 For Scharoun, rather literal ideas of flow were already explicit in early projects like his curving competition entry for Königsberg of 1922 [6] with a plan shaped by route, and Wegführung (literally way-leading) became a dominant concern in all his later work. He had also long been ready to accept the irregularities of a site and to build in an asymmetrical and irregular manner. The general vocabulary shared with his mentor Hugo Häring implicitly involved movement, concerned not so much with architectural objects as ‘happenings’, ‘processes’, and ‘occurrences’,14 and with the idea that form (or rather Gestalt) should not be imposed but rather discovered. Häring’s remarkable Secession art gallery project of 1926 [7] centred on the experience of ascending a staircase that was also a gallery room,15 a clear case of promenade inviting comparison with La Roche. He was slightly ahead of Scharoun for not until the Schminke House do we see the dawning of a new spatial sensibility related to shifts of angle and directional use of stairs. In earlier projects, staircases were tightly contained and routes constrained by parallel sides. A typical example is the path leading to the terrace of the Breslau Werkbund building of 1929 [8] which, bounded by low walls, compelled pedestrians unambiguously to follow through, rather than leaving them a choice and attracting them with an unfolding of views as at Schminke.

The drama of arrivalVilla Savoye was always intended as a weekend house, and its link with central Paris was the motor car, a piece of technological magic that appears alongside the Parthenon in Vers une architecture. The Villa stands at the top of a hill. Arrival by car takes you along a low rubble wall, past the white entrance lodge [9] and to the left along a line of trees through which the

9 Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye entrance lodge

10 Villa Savoye, south elevation

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single concrete step as threshold. This door marks the point where the column grid changes between the outside pilotis and the interior structure, so a beam protrudes centrally, supported by a lintel within [11, 12]. The visitor passes through to be confronted by the ramp, daylit from above in the otherwise gloomy hall [13]. The spiral stair to the left turns away, offering no real competition to the main route [14]. The visitor takes the ramp and proceeds upwards, guided by the steel handrail set in the solid balustrade, reaching a full left turn at half level. As the ramp continues to first floor, the hanging garden to the left is progressively revealed through horizontal glazing. Reaching the landing, the visitor veers right through the glazed door of the main living room: it is not directly opposite the ramp, though it could have been. The way divides [15]. It is equally possible to open the solid door into the hanging garden, a room open to the sky and roughly square in plan, a cloister-like space to stop and reflect. Although the tiles of the route are set on the diagonal, those of the hanging garden remain parallel to the walls, giving more sense of repose [16]. Out in the open the ramp continues, repeating the same pattern of movement. The balustrade on the

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11 a–c Villa Savoye, ground, first and second floor plans

12 Beam over front door

13 The ramp dominates the spiral staircase at the entry

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opening with view to the valley beyond. This is the famous last frame of the promenade. Close inspection reveals that the wall is set back from the side of the building, giving the frame a hitherto unsuspected depth. The whole promenade, which follows the topos of Jacob’s ladder so prevalent in the work of Le Corbusier [18], is a switchback journey from darkness to light in order to ‘find the sun’, augmented by the manipulation of colour, rhythm and proportion.16

right is solid, curving into a handrail. There is again a landing half-way, the wall just high enough to prevent views out. The visitor turns once more onto the last leg of the promenade, seeing the view actually entitled promenade architecturale in the Oeuvre Complète [17]. The balustrade to the left is now of steel tube, making the ramp more open and precarious. To the right, a white flue pipe anchors the flowing composition vertically. At the top is the solarium terrace, and the ramp ends opposite a rectangular

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14 The ramp of Villa Savoye

15 The first floor landing

16 The hanging garden

17 Promenade architecturale

18 Jacob’s ladder from Poésie sur Alger (1950)

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Schminke’s promenadeVisitors to the Schminke House would also arrive by car, seeing the two-storey house not frontally in the traditional way but stretched out on the diagonal before them like a ship steaming across the garden, its near end a cascade of steps, terraces, rising roofline and projecting winter garden, decidedly asymmetrical [19, 20]. The car enters the gates, swings around in the short drive, and draws up alongside a cantilevered steel canopy projecting from above the front door [21]. Canopy, wind-lobby and vestibule lead through to a point where the open-plan living room suddenly opens up as the visitor progresses, forcing a choice of direction [22]. Half the width of the passage is faced by the staircase, which starts straight but swings around 26° to the right, privileging a further swing to the right at the top as well as guiding ground floor visitors around. The wall to the left is blind, concealing the service quarters, but half right is a long volume serving as dining space with an end window opening to a near garden view. Another window admits light at the head of the stairs, but is half hidden by the hanging wall of the stair, a linear element setting further stress on the diagonal. As the visitor turns, the wide opening to the main living room comes into view, the right-angle turn seamlessly completed. The visitor is here presented with a richly layered but more conventionally parallel-sided perspective [23]. The long, light-filled living room gains sun from the right and views through floor-to-ceiling glazing on

19 Hans Scharoun, Schminke House as seen from street (pre-restoration)

20 South side as first built, with entrance canopy to left

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21 Entrance lobby and canopy

22 View on entry of diagonal stair and dining corner

23 The living room seen on axis with the solarium beyond. Sunlight comes from the right and the valley view is to left

24 Turn into the solarium from the living room, with the planted winter garden to the left and diagonal steps to the upper terrace beyond. The reflective lamp fitting with its projections and perforations announces the switch of angle

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Curiosity is whetted by the angled solarium with its marble floor and perforated ceiling, but the visitor must pass through its semi-obscured glass partition and turn left before gaining the long view of distant trees and hills.

Enticed further through floor-to-ceiling glass doors and into the outside air on a brick-floored terrace, the visitor reclaims the vertical dimension. Now the sunken garden with its large round pond appears [25], and one is poised above the landscape after a progress that was entirely horizontal. The garden, lavishly reworked and richly planted by Hermann Mattern and Herta Hammerbacher, invites – even demands – exploration. Steps from the terrace plunge to a central path, now of random crazy paving, which leads over a bridge between ponds and onward to rising borders, smaller paths of stepping stones leading up to the corner summerhouse. Contrasting areas of planting form a chain of outdoor rooms which reward further exploration, and the visitor looks back from the garden’s corner to see the house in its most famous and romantic view, jutting out and over [2, 26]. If progress to the first floor is permitted, a shallow right turn at the stair head opens into a passage towards a glazed door. Passing through, one is deflected left by a skewed wall onto the upper terrace and towards a one-person sized projecting bay addressed to the corner view and best panorama from the site.17

Similarities and differencesIn comparison with the prevalent brick and timber technology of 1930, both houses must have appeared weightless and transparent: Savoye revelling in its thin pilotis, daring cantilevers and continuous horizontal windows; Schminke boasting its fully glazed east end and terraces hanging in the air. Both exploited a new vocabulary of abstraction involving rendered and painted surfaces inside and out which removed material impact and evidence of structural support, but the two architects took different attitudes to the landscape. Both houses stand in relation to other elements: in the case of the Villa Savoye, the boundary wall, trees and lodge. But Le Corbusier treated his villa as an object of contemplation, his ‘Virgilian dream’, poising it above the ground as a pure free-standing whole with its main outdoor space on the first floor, and presenting the building’s exterior as an object for sculptural contemplation. Leaving the ground as pure greensward was essential to the concept, for any kind of differentiated garden would detract from the purity. Scharoun, by contrast, set Schminke’s long thin body as a barrier between drive and garden, requiring transition through the house to discover it. His building is no pristine object, and mundane service elements to the west are unseen backs. Instead of detaching the house from the ground he dug it in, creating a cellar with brick retaining walls, some of which rise into the ground floor. Passage through the house was horizontal, continuing into an elaborate and highly contrived garden, full of paths and outdoor rooms, and centred on water [27]. This was a landscape not to be looked upon but to be

the left, the built-in sofa suggesting an angle of contemplation that embraces both hearth and grand piano. Visible beyond is the yet brighter solarium [24], its winter garden set on the sunny right, while the angled glass partition slants leftwards, invoking curiosity about what is around the corner. The best view of the garden remains concealed, for the wall to the left is at first blind – a wall of books – but as the visitor progresses it opens to reveal the garden and to expose the end terraces.

25 Garden plan (redrawn)

26 House jutting out over garden

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tradition as a string of bedrooms including the east-facing main one, although the upper terrace is essential as a visible climax, even when unvisited [28b]. The sets of stairs, consistently and visibly placed on the same diagonal against the house’s main body, have an inviting and guiding role essential to the architectural character, and they do this even without having to be climbed. In Le Corbusier’s case, by contrast, the ramp is the clear choice to gain the first floor, and the visitor entering the terrace sees it rising further and is impelled to follow to the roof. Despite the existence of some late design versions without it,21 the Villa Savoye without ramp is surely unthinkable: it introduced a key component in Le Corbusier’s vocabulary and prompted countless ramp-dreams in others over the next half century. The ramp dramatises progress and route in drawings and photographs, successfully switching attention from facade – the traditional architect’s front – to the centre and inside of the house, necessitating imagined movement and supporting the idea that architecture is four-dimensional.22 This is not just due to the ramp itself, but to its position at the centre of the house, dividing inside from outside both horizontally and vertically. It brilliantly overcomes the danger of the building being too stratified and of swapping plan paralysé for coupe paralysée. This potential weakness may be the reason that sectional representations of the building are omitted from the carefully composed Oeuvre Complète.

inhabited and explored, and it even entered the house with the earth-floored and ponded winter garden, a device Scharoun was to repeat in many later houses [24]. For Le Corbusier the site was idealised, by definition flat, slight changes of level being corrected by bulldozer, but Scharoun accepted and exploited the drop between house and garden to create his drama of out and over. Similarly, Le Corbusier placed Savoye parallel to the site boundary for a commanding position visually, but compromised on the ideal north-south orientation, which is surprising given his advice to the visitor ‘to go and find the sun’.18 Scharoun set his house’s main body strictly on the east-west axis, allowing the conflict with the site boundary to provoke and enjoy its key 26° angle change [4b].

In line with the Jacob’s ladder topos, the Villa Savoye is about vertical movement. The placing of social rooms as piano nobile was a natural counterpart to placing garage and services beneath, following the tradition of Renaissance palaces where ground level was given over to goods, servants and stables. The terrace was the beloved roof-garden, and the solarium above offered yet purer contact with the heavens, set behind a screen for naked sunbathing: in early versions there were also second floor bedrooms.19 The house is a particularly good exemplification of plan libre because the three floor plans are so resolutely different. With his anti-normative approach, Scharoun had no such polemical intent, and his cellar plan went unpublished.20 Although the ground floor revels in transparency and freedom, his upper floor follows

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27 House seen from mid-garden path

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even sanitaryware had a significance, and the shock of meeting a naked wash basin for ritual cleansing on entering the Villa Savoye was no accident [32]. It was among the objects classified as objets-types, providing strong forms both small-scale and human, which occurred as incidents in the plan like the glasses and bottles in his Purist paintings. Curving bathroom walls were compositionally advantageous and even necessary for the making of plan libre, as a small-scale vocabulary setting curves and diagonals against the regulating grid, and in contrast with the well-proportioned geometry of the whole. Folding a wall around a bath or WC was further a celebration of the body movements within, part of savoir habiter, as Le Corbusier called the simple rituals of daily life. This meshed with his interest in the four elements, evoked at Savoye by the contrast between the blue bathroom with its mosaic-clad body-shaped recess and the fireplace of the salon. Scharoun’s place-making interest was as ritualistic as Le Corbusier’s but differently focused. It concentrated on the dining table and built-in sofa, the music corner and built-in winter garden. He was concerned more with creating purpose-designated rooms and sub-rooms, and setting them in designated wings with appropriate orientations. In earlier projects there had been a strong differentiation of territories, but in the open-plan areas, elements rattled about unconvincingly.25 At the Schminke House they came together [23, 28a]: the built-in sofa diagonally related

Small-scale place-makingLe Corbusier famously said ‘Une maison est une machine à habiter’, became known as a leader of ‘functionalism’ and, with the Charter of Athens, defined the four functions of the city as separate zones. Functionalism was therefore rhetorically important in his early work, but was a word he came to regret, even expressing abhorrence as it denied the ‘magical’ qualities of architecture.23 With Savoye there is clear zoning between ground with its service accommodation and the first floor, but not so much above, where living and sleeping mixes in various combinations in the developing versions, though first floor bedrooms generally occupy the south-east side. This is unusual for Le Corbusier who was fond of zoning; bedrooms and living rooms are, for example, segregated in the Villa La Roche. Scharoun was also interested in zoning, and consistently planned houses with separate appropriately orientated wings for sleeping, living and service, perfectly exemplified in his idealised ‘Weite’ house project of 1928.24 At Schminke these same territories are still clearly differentiated, with service to west and in the cellar, ground floor given to open-plan living rooms made as spacious as possible, and a dedicated bedroom floor with efficient cabin-like minor bedrooms and corridor storage.

In the late 1920s, Modernist concern for health and hygiene was widespread, sanitation was a pressing social concern, and Modernist architecture found one of its most effective roles in the sanatorium. Scharoun showed no great interest in expressing lavatories and bathrooms: he laid them out efficiently, but tucked them away in a discreet and conventional manner. For Le Corbusier, however,

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28 a, b Schminke House, final ground and first floor plans

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29 a, b Preliminary ground and first floor plans with straight stair (redrawn)

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to hearth and view; the wall of books giving way to full glass then multiple panes; the piano fitting a convenient corner beyond the hearth; a hint of winter garden with cacti to the right. The solarium beyond is brighter, has a marble floor, and visibly turns rightward, but arguably the greatest visual impact comes from the reflecting light fitting on the ceiling, a perforated plate with alternating domes and voids that picks up the change of territory and plan geometry in a new rhythm. This was just one of a series of artificial lighting devices with a crucial place-making role, identified in the ceiling plan with nine specific functions [30]. Even when switched off they provided a skyscape and measure to the space.

An essential rhythmIt is in the area of proportion and measure that the two houses are most different. For Le Corbusier an underlying geometric frame was essential. Buildings, like paintings, had an underlying geometric order that could be proved with regulating lines, and that gave them an innate sense of harmony, Purism’s primary aesthetic.26 Composition depended on an interaction of special incidents like stairs, ramp and irregular screens set against the regular background of the rational system. Columns were essential, vital for the moulding of space, and the pilotis were the first of the five points. As Colin Rowe remarked, its circular section, used so strategically in Savoye, ‘tended to push partitions away from the column’ which meant that it did not aid the delineation of structural cells. Further it ‘offered a minimum of obstruction to the horizontal movement of space’ and ‘tended to cause space to gyrate around it’.27 Scharoun relished equally the possibilities of the free

30 Schminke House, ground floor ceiling plan showing light fittings dedicated to specific uses

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plan, but for him there was no compelling rhythm, no abstract system, no magic proportions or regulating lines, and he had little affection for the column. He wondered impatiently why everything had to be straight,28 and was prepared to experiment with whatever angles and curves the situation might suggest. Schminke’s steel frame is no celebration of structure: instead the I-shaped columns are as light as possible, the visible ones few and thin. Scharoun even painted their sides different colours as camouflage, and the most unwanted column of all in the winter garden bore a multicoloured chequerboard pattern [24 – on right]. Developing plan versions show columns placed differently, revealing that, far from setting a primary rhythm like Le Corbusier’s, they were positioned contingently to allow space to flow unimpeded. This did not mean a lack of scale or rhythm, but rather that interacting rhythms were set by different elements, so the use of multi-paned windows in contrast with single large sheets of glass, for example, provides cues about scale and distance, but in a complex and varying way. In many works of that period Scharoun added patterns of repeated circles and squares as painted borders or etched on glass, which would throw the layers of the vista into relief, playing also with the effects of transparency.

For the author of the Poème de l’angle droit it would have been unthinkable to start planning with 45° or

31 Postcard from Scharoun to the clients ‘The life-ship at full steam ahead: it serves you best for a fresh and joyful struggle’

32 Villa Savoye, the basin on entry

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26°, which gave the best long view to the solarium and set it in the middle of the garden [4b, 25]. We know that the advantage of the diagonal stair was discovered late, for a completed design went to tender with the stair set on the entry axis [29a, b]. Only when the house proved too expensive and had to be reduced was the stair given its twist [28a, b]. Its new position let it mediate between the axis of entry and the main axis of the house, and it also came to share its angle with the external stairs at the east end, setting all vertical transitions consistently on the diagonal. Some of his earlier designs had skewed wings, but without much impact on interior space.29 The diagonal stair became a key element in Scharoun’s planning vocabulary, so that by the time of the Berlin Philharmonie of 1963, it became the main way to guide people through the building. It was his equivalent of the Corbusian ramp and perhaps more important, for the ramp was not included among the five points.

AsymmetryFor Modernist architects educated in the early twentieth century, the default method was to design symmetrical buildings with central axial approach, following the dominant Beaux-Arts teaching, even if the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts architecture had provided some alternatives.30 Under the leadership of figures such as Wright and Mendelsohn, Modernists of the 1920s struggled to escape such automatic symmetry, and in this battle both Savoye and Schminke play significant roles.31 Le Corbusier set up a house with more or less symmetrical facades that can be viewed frontally, but he chose fronts of four bays with a column in the middle denying entry, and the centre-line of Savoye is not the traditional axial route, but the division of the ramp. Only at the ramp’s end does the visitor occupy dead centre, and the turn is the traditional dogleg, both ramp and stair returning classically to their starting points. The movement of the car is reinterpreted rather more radically: it arrives not in an outdoor room – the traditional cour d’honneur – but under the house, entering to park there, an intrusion demonstrated by a diagonal. So while experience of entry is of the utmost importance, it breaks the Classical mould at almost every point. Even so, with his love of pure forms and regulating lines, and his platonic belief that ‘geometry is the daughter of the universe’,32 Le Corbusier produced a house of regular symmetrical form from the exterior, its formal qualities even elevated by suppression of material and texture. Whatever you believe about the mathematics of proportion or the legibility of regulating lines, it was a stunning composition. Its rectilinearity made it obedient to the convention of perspective, eminently photographable and transmissible through print.

Both buildings allude to nautical architecture in form and detail, but the Schminke House is most like a grounded ship, its prow projecting over the sunken garden. Scharoun even sent a jokey postcard to the client with a sailor on scrutinising the horizon with a telescope [31], envisaging the projecting corner of the

30° axes as Frank Lloyd Wright did, even worse to throw the protractor away and accept a naughty 26°. But Scharoun had long been experimenting with given site angles, and they had become an inspiration. With Schminke he had the problem that the garden and views were to the north, the owner’s large factory to the south. Initially, with the sketch design ‘Löbau 2’ [4] he had tried to set the house as far as possible from the factory while enjoying southern orientation, using the far corner of the site. A garden plan in his own hand indicates water, terraces, areas for play and sport, even flowers, fruit trees and a rockery: integration of house and garden was always in mind. But the valley view and existing garden were preferred, so the site next to the factory was chosen instead. Scharoun now aligned the main body of the house directly east-west, allowing both south light and views to the garden. Taking the angle of the eastern site boundary, he skewed both ends by

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he respects tradition with the universal cube and cylinder, and pursues consistency of scale and proportion supported by the theory of regulating lines. Geometric control is crucial and the regularity of the columns sets the rhythm against which organic shapes of lavatories and bathrooms are allowed to play. This has the advantage of readable perspectives, while Scharoun’s house is more difficult to visualise from photos. He departs further from the rules, disdaining the grid, treating structural columns expediently or disguising them, hiding complex framing behind hanging walls, and allowing apparent scale to change from one part to the next. His design strategy relies more on specific place-making with built-in sofa, dining table, bookshelves, solarium, greenhouse, dedicated lamps, and so on. This was not done without geometric discipline, but the rules are many and complex, not returning to a single rhythm. The Schminke House represents a freeing up of planning geometry that was taken further in the vernacular-clad houses built during the Third Reich, re-emerging after the war with a spatial and experiential architecture rather than an object-based one.35 There could scarcely have been more contrast in the two architects’ political circumstances in 1933, for while Le Corbusier’s burgeoning reputation was boosted by leadership of CIAM and the Charter of Athens, Scharoun was stuck in Nazi Germany, able neither to produce overtly Modernist work nor to publish, and not until the completion of the Philharmonie did he fully regain international recognition.

There remains the central question of the promenade. That it was of crucial importance to both architects is not in doubt, for in each house it marked a substantial advance in architectural vocabulary and spatial understanding. In Le Corbusier’s case the crucial gesture was the ramp, which invited and marked progressions, linked layers, and gave centre to the plan, while progressing also from inside to out. But like his staircases it returned to its point of departure with a forced end turn, that might be a bore trotting to and fro in daily use. Scharoun’s innovation was the diagonal stair, which he suddenly understood as a means of switching between axes and more generally controlling the sense of direction through the building. In addition, the 26° shift shared by the stairs against the dominant axis of the plan induced a dynamism that he was to exploit repeatedly, for beckoning staircases guide the spatial sequence in most of his later buildings. Like Asplund and Aalto he preferred a running stair to move through a building, shifting the point of arrival from floor to floor. It differentiates the floors, but is of course less economical than the dogleg and does not combine with a lift. In tall buildings the logic of service stacks takes over and the dogleg wins, but the whole experience of movement becomes subservient to the structural grid. When standardisation and prefabrication came to dominate in the 1950s and ’60s, the occasional Scharounian free stair, going where it wanted to and enticing one to follow, was a great relief, and its progeny are legion.

upper deck as a crow’s nest. Ocean liners had appeared in Vers une architecture and many architects admired the clean lines of ships, but Scharoun actually grew up in Germany’s busiest port, Bremerhaven. While developing his new architecture he visited shipyards in search of details.33 Porthole windows recur, and his Breslau Wohnheim of 1929 even boasts a structure like a ship’s bridge [8], but his pursuit of the ship-like was no mere affectation: it provided a radical alternative to the prevailing building culture both visually and technologically. Furthermore, ships were longitudinally asymmetrical, normally being approached from the side, while Scharoun’s house is not frontal, but approached on the diagonal and asymmetrically entered. Its S-shaped route depends on the angle-shift given by the site and the interplays at both ends, and stairs always run forward, moving on in plan as well as section and never returning to the same point. The whole concept is not just mobile but radically asymmetrical, everything contributing to the projection towards garden and view, from relative opacity at the west to maximum transparency at the north-east. His planning contradicts Le Corbusier’s in its ambiguity of angle, the turns in space presented in a new way to bring a sense of openness later defined as ‘aperspectivity’.34 The house is less photogenic than Savoye, and lives in print mainly through two images. The famous diagonal view of the solarium pushing out and over the garden [26] is advantageously exaggerated by a misread perspective due to the plan angle. The axial view of the living room [23], contrastingly allows a faithful perspective since the space is parallel-sided, and thrills with rich display of incident. The photographer must have worked hard on the print, though, to reconcile the contrasting lighting conditions.

ConclusionIt is impossible to discuss the difference in promenade between the two houses without also first noting some more general differences in the way they were conceived and what they represent. Both houses belong to the initial period of high Modernism with large areas of glass, abstract white surfaces, flat roofs and transparency between spaces, and both go out of their way to celebrate the arrival of the car. But while Villa Savoye represents an ideal in Le Corbusier’s work, intentionally exemplifying a vocabulary and modus operandi (including the five points) that is essentially normative, the Schminke House, like much of Scharoun’s other work, revels in its contingency, unrepeatable. The 26° angle shift that prompted some of its main design inventions, for example, is specific to the site, not re-applicable except as a very general principle. And while Savoye is triumphantly object-like, reducing its site to a panorama and playing its inside-outside games at first floor level, Schminke embeds itself in the land, engaging with an Arts and Crafts type of garden comprising trees, pond and many outdoor rooms, changing in scale, and even invading the house with plant beds. Although Le Corbusier challenges traditional conventions of symmetry and frontality,

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Jones first pointed this out in ‘Private Houses’, and acceptance seems to have been universal.

9. Established by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson with their eponymous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1932.

10. Scharoun had won the competition for the site plan of Siemensstadt against Gropius and the rest of the Modernist group, and had planned and built the most ingenious flats there. He had also built a block of flats on Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin highly praised by Julius Posener precisely for its fine detailing: see L’Architecture d‘aujourd’hui, no. 2 (1932), p. 47ff.

11. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète Volume 1 (Zurich: Les Éditions d’Architecture, 1946), p. 60.

12. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète Volume 2, 1929-1934 (Zurich: Les Éditions d’Architecture, 1946), p. 24.

13. See Samuel, Promenade.14. The verb geschehen, the noun

Vorgang, etc. The significance of this vocabulary was stressed by Scharoun’s wife Margit, his longstanding assistant Alfred Schinz, and by Häring’s secretary Margot Aschenbrenner.

15. See Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo Häring: The Organic versus the Geometric (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 1999), pp. 73-76.

16. For further detail see Samuel, Promenade.

17. For further discussion of the garden and its relation to the house see Peter Blundell Jones and Jan Woudstra, Some Modernist Houses and their Gardens Part 2: The House of the North and the Pleasure Pavilion, Die Gartenkunst, 1 (2002), 123-134.

18. Oeuvre Complète Volume 1, p. 187.19. See Benton, The Villas, which

includes plans of several versions.20. Not publicly seen as far as we know

until Klaus Kürvers’ essay in Funktionalismus 1927-1961, ed. by Max Risselada (Delft: Publicatiebureau Bouwkunde, 1997).

21. Again shown in Benton, The Villas.22. The central concept in Sigfried

Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1941).

23. André Wogenscky, Les Mains de Le Corbusier (Paris: Éditions de Grenelle, n. d.), p. 41. See also Colin St John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1994), p. 55 for a further critique of Le Corbusier.

24. An entry for an ideas competition held by Velhagen and Klasings

Notes1. Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier and the

Architectural Promenade (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011); Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (London: Gordon Fraser, 1978 and Phaidon, 1995).

2. F. R. S. Yorke, The Modern House (London: Architectural Press, 1934); Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922 (New York: Norton Press, 1961), first edition 1932.

3. For a critical history of the house see Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

4. This is discussed extensively in Josep Quetglas, Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Villa Savoye ‘Les Heures Claires’ 1928-1963 (Madrid: Rueda, 2004).

5. The Schminke House was the last house designed by Scharoun in an overtly Modernist way before the Nazis imposed a compulsory vernacular style, after which Scharoun was obliged to disguise his houses externally while continuing his experiments within. Peter Blundell Jones reported on this in his Hans Scharoun and more extensively in ‘Hans Scharoun’s Private Houses’ in The Architectural Review, December 1983, 57-63. He has speculated on the effects of this forced concentration on the interior more recently in ‘Hans Scharoun and the Interior’, in Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, ed. by Penny Sparke, Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble and Brenda Martin (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009), pp. 159-69.

6. Not only the covers of books on Scharoun such as Eberhard Syring and Jörg Kirschenmann, Scharoun 1893-1972: Outsider of Modernism (Cologne: Taschen, 1982) but also general histories such as Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). This represents a radical change of opinion from the earlier assumption that Scharoun’s exteriors were ugly.

7. The white rendered Modernist work between the Weissenhof house of 1927 and the Schminke House of 1932 constitutes a stylistically distinct period in Scharoun’s oeuvre which ended abruptly with the rise of the Nazis, not to be replicated in his work after 1945 in which the emphasis was more spatial.

8. The existence of working drawing plan versions with and without the diagonal stair is clinching evidence that it was discovered with this house. Peter Blundell

Monatshefte in 1928, vol. 18, for a modern house. The wings for living, sleeping and service are differentiated but the route is not much developed: see Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (1995), pp. 70-71. The same idea is present in the built version of his Weissenhof house, in the model house for the German Garden and Industry Exhibition at Liegnitz of 1928, and in the Möller house project of 1931.

25. For example the ‘Weite’ house project of 1928.

26. See Le Corbusier and Ozenfant ‘Purism’, reprinted translation in Modern Artists on Art, ed. by Robert L. Herbert (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964).

27. Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976), p. 145.

28. ‘Warum muss alles gerade sein?’ letter from Scharoun to Adolf Behne, 8 June 1923, cited in Hans Scharoun Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Texte, ed. by Achim Wenschuh (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1993), p 73.

29. Such as the Breslau Wohnheim of 1929 and Möller house project of 1931, which we do not have space here to illustrate.

30. Everywhere the irregular alternative met with conflict: in Germany Muthesius was attacked by the classicising Ostendorf, in Sweden National Romanticism gave way to classicising Swedish Grace, in England Charles Reilly achieved dominance with his Beaux-Arts method over the Arts and Crafts despite the efforts of W. R. Lethaby and Halsey Ricardo.

31. Both architects had planned buildings in the axial Classical manner. This is evident and well known in Corbusian examples like the Villa Schwob, but Scharoun too had felt obliged to plan following conventional Classical models in his Expressionist competition designs: see Gelsenkirchen Cultural Centre and Dresden Hygiene Museum, both 1920, included in Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun.

32. See Christopher Green, ‘The Architect as Artist’ in Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council Exhibition Catalogue, 1987), pp. 110-18.

33. Letter from Scharoun to Georg Claussen, Wesermünde, 1927, thanking him for a visit to the shipyard and requesting details, reprinted in Peter Pfankuch, Hans Scharoun (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1974), p. 77.

34. The use of the term in an architectural context occurred with the National Theatre Mannheim competition project 1953, in relation to ‘aperspective

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Peter Blundell Jones is Professor of Architecture at The University of Sheffield and the author of Modern Architecture Through Case Studies as well as monographs on Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring, and Gunnar Asplund.

Authors’ addressesProf. Flora SamuelProf. Peter Blundell JonesSchool of Architecture The University of SheffieldThe Arts Tower Western BankSheffields10 [email protected]@sheffield.ac.uk

theatre’, but the philosophical background was Jean Gebser, Ursprung und Gegenwart of 1948 which took aperspectivity as its central concept and was enthusiastically received by both Scharoun and Häring.

35. For examples of the houses of that period and a discussion of how enforced concentration on the interior may have biased the work permanently, see Blundell Jones, ‘Interior’.

Illustration creditsarq gratefully acknowledges:© Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hans-

Scharoun-Archiv, 2, 6, 8, 20, 22-24,

26-28, 30, 31Peter Blundell Jones, 1, 19, 21Peter Blundell Jones (redrawn after

Scharoun originals in the Akademie der Künste, Berlin), 4, 7, 29

© FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 2012, 3, 12-18, 32

Laurence Pattacini, 25Flora Samuel and Steve Coombs, 5,

9-11

BiographiesFlora Samuel is Professor and Head of Sheffield University School of Architecture. She has published extensively on Le Corbusier including Le Corbusier and the Architectural Promenade (2012).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.