Printed in 1869, An axonometric drawing of Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home exposed a modern house as a total environmental system. Each mechanical component was connected to a central flue. From evacuating foul air to distributing water, fresh air and power, the stack was also the focal organizing point for the house’s spaces and functions. Kitchen and bath areas were juxtaposed to this central distributing element. Shaping the house around its technical spaces evolved with this conceptualization and informed one of modernity’s key tenets, the division of served and service spaces. The construction and manufactured housing industries also followed suit with the development of standardized core elements that would facilitate the mass production of houses.
Services cores replaced the hearth of traditional dwellings, the centrally placed technical heart or the building’s engine would be a founding element of modern architecture. Somewhere between a specifically technological element and the representation of a talented architect’s capacity to contain all technical requirements in one excellently designed element, the service core is a design topic explored and considered by many.
Drawing is organizing and organizing is designing. The ability to coherently devise a strategy to motor a home represented a modern design skill. The centralized core defined this capacity and implemented a greater association of architecture and construction as technical elements and design elements were harmonized.
The core was expressed in a specifically modern manner and perhaps most stringently in Mies’ prototype for individualized living, the Farnsworth house. All of the houses technical elements were linked to one tube that connected the house to infrastructure and eliminated waste. One tube or one flue as in Beecher’s diagram from 1869. In the Farnsworth design, Mies illustrated two modern obsessions with drawing and representing space, the grid and the core, both were tools to regulate or rule over any design elements. Prefabricated or not, the core predesigned and established a guide for its user and eliminate any systematic entanglement. Mies’ core, contains in its essence, what drawing and representation are to architecture: language, a rationalizing element, clearly evoking what the building is, how it is organized and how it works all rolled into one simple concentric element.
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| Left: Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home Right: Mies' core at Farnsworth |
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