Project 01-Precedents in Architecture : Rem Koolhaas, Villa Dall'Ava

THE ARCHITECT

Rem koolhaas is a dutch architect who earned recognition not as an architect but a writer. He then solidified his reputation by combining architecture, urban planning, research and writing. In many completed projects, his theoretical and practical designs were unknown. Koolhaas’s design work varies in so many different environments under so many different conditions, thus the end result is always different. He has been called a modernist and a deconstructivist. Villa Dell’Ava shows a deconstructed houses of Villa Savoye and Farnsworth House.

VILLA DALL’AVA

Koolhaas designed a glass pavilion for a family 20 minutes away from Paris. For this house, the client requested a glass house that consists a pool on the roof top, glass walls and a panoramic view of the Eiffel and Paris from the rooftop. The house contains a living room, dining room and a kitchen on the garden level with 2 hovering, perpendicular bedrooms on the first floor that are shifted in opposite directions to exploit the view. These 2 bedrooms are connected by the swimming pool that rests on the concrete structure.

The design approach has shown Koolhaas’s way of embracing Bernard Tschumi’s concept, “there is no architecture without violence, through a display of violent relationships between body and space”. The extended pillars or “stilts” that are arranged on a musical manner shows pathway movements of body and space. Another space that embodies this concept is the garden level. Starting from the circular staircase passing through a narrow pathway of the kitchen then passing through a slightly narrow space of the dining room then into an open space of the living room which the glass doors can be slide open.

DESIGN ELEMENTS

TRANSFORMATION

The initial shapes of the house are rectangular but through proper analysis, it defines according to site.

A subtracted form was cut which creates a hallow space beneath the hovering perpendicular bedrooms, thus creating an overhang on top.

The first floor is added for the 2 perpendicular bedrooms for the family.

FORMAL COLLISIONS OF GEOMETRY

Two perpendicular forms are interlocking with a horizontal form.

This also indicates spatial relationships where it is an interlocking space.

HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL ELEMENTS DEFINING SPACE

Horizontal elements can be seen from the 2 perpendicular elements that lies on the first floor, this creates an overhead plane.

Whereas the vertical elements are vertical linear elements which are established from the stilts of the entrance. The stilts define a space through musical arrangement.

OPENING SPACE-DEFINING ELEMENTS

The highlighted elements shows between planes of window-wall elements. From the plan above, the garden level draws moe attention than the view. One of the 2 transverse patio walls is a wall of corrugated metal,almost fully closed. The patio floor is made of ground glass and draws light into the storey below durng the day. The floor, the glass wall, and the metal wall not only reflect the sky and the light, but at night, when the floor is illuminated from below, the transform the patio into an empty lantern. In publications, the patio is called the "empty heart" of the house. This also means of turning the house meditatively inward is radicalised in the "house in the forest"(1992-1994).

CIRCULATION

The arrows shows the circulation of path and path space relationship whereas the green box shows the entrance - one from the stilts the other from the garage.

The bubble diagrams indicates space planning.

FORM OF THE CIRCULATION SPACE AND QUALITIES OF SPACE

Through the careful consideration of ritual, Koolhaas weaves domestic life into the architecture by creating smooth flowing circulation paths that branch into domains. The architecture retorts through the use of compression and release of space. For example, the tall, narrow, labyrinthine, ramped hallway compresses the flow of circulation before it releases and emerges onto the living room looking out into the back yard, in keeping with the dance of tension that Villa Dall’Ava eminates.