Le Corbusier
During the early 1900s, Architects started experimenting
with plans, structure, tectonics, and materiality of residential housing. Among
this experimentation, a new form of architecture came on the horizon known as
the open floor plan system. Le Corbusier fathered this new system, which is also
known as the Dom-ino frame, in efforts to celebrate industrialization and
technology in architectural building process. This system consisted of an assembling
process “in which the columns and the floor plates constituted a prefabricated
system independent of walls and partitions (
Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 143).” Its construction freed up
more space, allowing the users more flexibility to design their own space,
whether it is decorated with color, wall partitions, or furniture, without
having to undergo the hassle of reformulating a structural system in order to
fit these things in a space. Le Corbusier himself even decorated some of his
buildings with colored plaster, transforming his design into an “abstract prism”
(
Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 144). As the years went on other,
Architects such as Mies van der Rohe and the last great architect of the modern
era, Louis Khan, began to pick up on this new style of architecture and
manipulated its concepts to fit their own.
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| Le Corbusier's Dom-ino frame (open floor plan) |
Mies van der Rohe
In his designs of a residential open plan, Mies van der Rohe
introduces a game of juxtaposition between the functions of a column and a wall.
Mies was more interested in creating architecture for residential housing,
which hold necessity and genuine meaning and purpose. He was a part of the avant-garde
movement of architecture, which sought to depreciate existing values of
architecture in order to make room for a more critical understanding of art and
society (
Hartoonian,
Winter, 1989, pg. 43). Mies took from Alberti’s
ideas about the column being the “principal ornament in all architecture.”
However, in his most famous homes, Barcelona Pavilion and the Tugendhat House,
he reverses Alberti’s syntax of column and wall. In these homes, the columns
read as load bearing elements while the wall displays its freedom from which
the column and wall are identical in nature and purpose (
Hartoonian,
Winter, 1989, pg 45).
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| Barcelona Pavilion |
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| Barcelona Pavilion floor plan on the right compare to a line and plane painting on the left |
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| Tugendhat House |
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| Tugendhat House Floor Plan |
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| Tugendhat House Interior view of the dinning area locate on the bottom center of the floor plan above |
Louis Khan
Louis Khan used views and the illumination of natural light
in a space to define his open plan. He believed that “sense of light is the
giver of all precedence, light belongs to that particular space.” Khan exercised
this theory in many of his works such as the Art Museum at Yale University, Jonas
Salk Institute, Kimbell Art Museum, and Exeter Library. In the Jonas Salk
Institute, the layout of the concrete buildings open up to the courtyard/plaza
and Pacific Ocean sky as a façade, experiencing its different hue of blues. When
designing the Kimbell Art Museum, he plays with natural light in open warehouse
spaces, giving the museum a homier, intimate appearance than just another
commercial building. Each of the rooms are 100 ft long consisting of a series
of halls with high and low spaces. Slits and beams placed on the ceiling in
some rooms brought in natural light, and by using curved vaults the light
spread more beautifully along the ceiling and wall.
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| Jonas Salk Institute (showing the view in the morning from the plaza) |
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| Jonas Salk Institute (showing the view during the day from the plaza) |
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| Kimbell Art Museum |
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| Kimbell Art Museum interior view |
It is truly magnificent to see how one’s intentions of an
open plan system to celebrate technology and encourage individualism progressed
and ends with an intent as a play of lights and views. In no way, shape, or
form are any of these methods or others not mentioned wrong. Like many other designs,
style, and theories of architecture, one architect will develop a concept or
design and other architects of his time and in later periods will try to
replicate this concept and design or desecrate it and come up with their own
modified version. These three men, Le Corbusier, Mies, and Khan definitely used
this open floor plan to their own advantage and executed their refined ideas
well in their designs; therefore making them some of the greatest architects of
their time and for generations to come. I am definitely sure that architects
after their era tried to modify their theories of the open plan system, but
they will always be known as the men who paved the way for these refinements of
the open plan.
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