The assembly line, the separation of tasks and the hierarchal
organization of the factory evolved from the models of Henry Ford and Frederic
Winslow Taylor transformed both architecture and building culture from
pre-industrial craft based output into a post-industrial task based output.
The standardization of production along with the housing crises of the
twentieth century gave modern architects a «predicament» that still haunts the
discipline today. The larger building industry industrialized and stereotyped
traditional housing forms while architects compared housing to automobile or
aircraft production in the search of novel aesthetics.
The Citrohan (Le Corbusier), the Dymaxion (Buckminter Fuller), the
Plas-2-point (Marcel Breuer), and the Meudon houses (Jean Prouvé) are notable
examples. A consistent scenario for living patterns also accompanied their
search for «the factory made house»(see
Herbert 1984): The modern man (or woman) would have more time for leisure. This
pattern helped establish the open plan as a standardized form of space
organization for the modern architect.
One notable example of this leisure intensive scenario for post-war
living was Marcel Breuer’s take on the open plan. Published in a December 1943 Arts
and Architecture article (on the design
of a bi-nuclear house : design for post-war living), the «by or bi nuclear»
house was proposed as a generic planning tool for the new «nuclear» family and
the variable modern activities
associated with it.
Breuer’s take on the open plan was the clear separation between day and
night spaces organized around the central nucleus of the house : an entry patio
for gardening and leisure activities. The receiving spaces were an open
composition for hosting lavish parties : modern man would only work three or
four days leaving the rest of the week to host friends or partake in other
hobbies. The night spaces were separate so the children could have their own
spaces for studying and sleeping.
The spatial organization seems to have somewhat percolated mid-century-modern
bungalow design and further into todays appreciated open
kitchen-living-dining-outdoor relationship. Although Marcel Breuer’s take on
post-war living patterns was not an industrialized output, he did organize his
custom designed houses around this approach.
The clearly defined bi-polar plan
perhaps even foreshadowed the case study house program’s experiments designed
by Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinnen and particularly Ralph Rapson’s case
study house #4 (the green belt house) which certainly exposed the separation of
day and night spaces separated by a central natural axis.
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| Marcel Breuer's prototype plan - the bi(by)nuclear house |
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