015 Machine as Heart: The House of Floirac

The house was completed in 1998 on a hill top outside Bordeoux in nothern of France.

Koolhaas suggests that it is not a house for an "invalid" but an architecture that denies "invalidity". The House is organised with a total of four vertical movement systems connecting three formally distinct floors.

0

Heavy Mass - Kitchen.

The base level in on entry courtyard with car access, framed by the house. The house is excavated from the hillside and likened by Koolhaas to a "sequence of caves" or "cellar" having the entry, kitchen, wine cellar and the television room. 

Highly Transparent.

The level is transparent, glass enclosed slice of living/dining and gallery/study areas structured into one large field of visual and functional encounters.

Heavy Mass - Sleeping.

The bedroom accomodating is enclosed in a horizontal slab pierced with hole sized windows, and disigned to appear as if suspended above the transparent living zone. 

The four vertical movement systems are three stairways and an open elevator.

A platform "the elevator" (3x3.5m) rises and decends on hydralic columns to align with each of the three floors. The platform has no walls or ballustrades, it becomes a part of each room it allign with, "The movement of the elevator changed, each time, the architecture of the house. A machine was its heart"

The four vertical movement system generates a highly connected spatial structure for the lower floors.

1. Mother's Stair

2. Guest's Stair

3. Children Stair

4. Father's Elevator

Father elevator - 

This is the "heart" of the house, where it transforms the architecture. The father controls the architecture and the position of the elevator becomes a signifir of his presence and obsence. The void is created. The central living space of the house is secure only when the father is present. 

The adult bedroom is structured in a loop with two bedrooms at once separated and connected by a bathroom and a balcony. 

The children bedroom form a mere traditional tree-like syntax which is in accessible to the father. Surveillance over children is the only function not applied to the father. 

The house is known as an innovative and imaginative house, have both formally and spatially. It combines a rethinking of the dialectic of inside/outside - as in Mies' Formsworth house, and vertical/horizontal - as in Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, but with greater programmatic dynamism and complexity, as in the Rietveld Schroder House. 

This social structure of the house is highly ringy on the lower levels, it is also conceptually tree-like with the elevator as its stem. It embodies new form of both liberation and social control. The structure of the house remains heirachical. 

Is this new spatial hierachy an accidental by product of Koolhaas obssetion with the elevator?

Koolhaas treats interiors space as fields of play that resists any relationship with social structuring, and a permeable spatial network is a primary design tactic. He wants to defy the social logic of space to free up the pragrammatic imperatives, that lock up architecture into the service of a highly ritualistic reproduction of social life. 

Kipnis suggests that:

"for Koolhaas, architecture is able...to engender provisional freedoms in a difinite situation, freedoms as the experiences, as the sensations and otherwise of undermiming select patterns of regulation and authority"

Koolhaas does indeedchallenge the primary genotypes of sociospatial reproduction, yet at the same time he generates illusions of an architecture that has been freed from spatial ideology. These illutions can be a cover of new practices of power or for more of the sane.