Rufer House, Adolf Loos

Liberating Space: Raumplan

Loos’s Raumplan questions the old notion of “void”. Loos believes that space is an enclosure, enclosing the typical middle class family of Joseph and Marie Rufer. Space to Loos should be the pinnacle element that dictates the form as it is where humans reside and spend their most time in, not the exterior. Loos started off with the family’s space, the bedroom, living, kitchen, etc. He then organises them into volumes, which acts as the fundamental blocks of the building. This results in the house being composed of interconnecting volumes, with split and multilevel construction and compositions of space. The Rufer house is somewhat a statement, or even a rhetoric, as the house was deliberately shaped as a cube, with totally blank walls and irregular fenestration. While the exterior is somewhat cold and nonsensical due to its window distribution, the space inside is highly ornamental, expressing his concerns on how architecture, form and ornaments should be related to daily life, not an object for the aristocracy to show off, as he wrote in Ornaments and Crime. Thus, to Loos, space should be the focus of all architecture.

Fig 1. Rufer House in a typical suburb of Vienna. It takes a simple cubic form.

Fig 2. Section. Spatial Organization of the Rufer House in relation to the function and daily life of the family. Green denotes auxiliary, storage spaces. Red denotes private areas for the family. Blue denotes areas where guests would come.

Fig 3. Section. Route, travelling from the main entrance, through the atrium and library, public domains, bedrooms, being more private to the attic, the family’s private auxiliary space. The interconnectivity of spaces marks the domains and zones of the different users.

Fig 3. Plan. Pink denotes the structural elements. It can be seen that only the exterior and and the centre column are structural elements, which allows Loos’s Raumplan to achieve its potential.

Fig 4. Site plan. Rufer House in typical Austrian neighborhood. Volumes of space placed according to the surrounding context, e.g. atrium by the driveway and the toilet by the backyard, which is more secluded.

Fig 5. Sketch. Showing the discrepancy of attention and material between the exterior form and the interior space. This shows how Loos uses in ornamenting and constructing space in providing warm space for the family, which is his aim of the construction.

 

Fig 6. Elevation. This shows how the facade and form are not Loos’s main considerations when designing. Space takes precedence. The windows have an illogical placement on the facade, yet, they work perfectly when seen from the space inside.

Bibliography

Fig 1. Wikiarquitectura. 2013. Rufer House. Image. https://en.wikiarquitectura.com/building/rufer-house/.

Fig 2. Wicht, Guillame. 2017. Rufer House Section. Image. Accessed October 10. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/515802963558997526/.

Fig 3. Wicht, Guillame. 2017. Rufer House Section. Image. Accessed October 10. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/515802963558997526/.

Fig 4. Self Produced

Fig 5. Self Produced

Fig 6. Rationalist Architecture. 2017. Rufer House Elevations. Image. Accessed October 10. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/320529698449835817/.

<Wu Chun Yiu, BAAS 2, Group B>