This house was built in Vienna in 1922, it marks the culmination of the long creation process of the Raumplan, a method to develop architectural projects alert to architecture’s three-dimensional condition and to technical rigorousness as a means to discern right from wrong, in opposition to the idea of “style”. Through its process of design, the section—although still limited at the beginning to express the idea of Raumplan—becomes the ruler of the composition, facades subordinate to it, causing to use a divided plan split in its symmetry axis. The structural scheme comprises the perimeter walls and a central pillar (used also for plumbing fixtures). This system allows two half-floors able to receive loads of light brick partition walls, anticipating the concept of free plan. The system would produce its most polished version in the Müller House, built in Prague in 1930.

The ground plan measured 10 x 10 m (32.8 x 32.8 ft). The project comprised a four-story building, plus a semi-basement for service equipment and the caretaker’s lodging. As it happens in Steiner House, floor plans respond to privacy requirements to inhabit domestic spaces. In this way, the music room, the dining room and library are located in the first floor; two dormitories and related services are placed in the second floor; and the third floor contains servants’ area and a terrace. Even though the entrance matches the ground plan symmetry axis, slightly elevated over the terrain, the user is forced to turn right to find his way from the vestibule to the reception hall, and then follow the circulation to the music room, a more fluid and taller space open to the dining room and the porch. The latter extends beneath the elevated terrace over the garden. The library is attached to the vestibule, restraining the space as we also see in the Strasser House (1918-9). Rooms are directly connected through the stairwell, lit by a vast window facing north.

Straightforwardly, the house appears as a four-story pure prism, an answer to the Vienna-Potemkin masks, the “poor rich men’s” Vienna. In contrast to the interior spatial and material sumptuousness, Loos counterpoints four white plastered facades with a surprisingly empirical distribution of window openings. Only two elements seem to reduce these radical aspects: the cornice and a copy of a Parthenon frieze’s fragment, a reminder of the Greek Revival that would end with the Chicago Tribune. The most active façade faces south, it belongs to the music room porch, the dining room windows and main dormitories. Here we find a tense compensation between the cubic mass projected towards the front and the mass excavated in the façade, anticipating similar effects in the later Tzara House (1926) or Moller House (1928).

(F.A.P)