The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism Beatriz Colomina

Moller House. The staircase leading from the entrance hall into the living room.

To LIVE IS TO LEAVE TRACES, writes Walter Benjamin, in discussing the birth of the interior. In the interior these are emphasized. An abundance of covers and protectors, liners and cases is devised, on which the traces of objects of everyday use are imprinted. The traces of the occupant also leave their impression on the interior. The detective story that follows these traces comes into being... The criminals of the first detective novels are neither gentlemen nor apaches, but private members of the bourgeoisie., There is an interior in the detective novel. But can there be a detective story of the interior itself, of the hidden mechanisms by which space is constructed as interior? Which may be to say, a detective story of detection itself, of the controlling look, the look of control, the controlled look. But where would the traces of the look be imprinted? What do we have to go on? What clues? There is an unknown passage of a well-known book, Le Corbusiers Urbanisme (1925), which reads: Loos told me one day: A cultivated man does not look out of the window; his window is a ground glass; it is there only to let the light in, not to let the gaze pass through.2 It points to a conspicuous yet conspicuously ignored feature ofLoos houses: not only are the windows either opaque or covered with sheer curtains, but the organization of the spaces and the disposition of the built-in furniture (the immeuble) seems to hinder access to them. A sofa is often placed at the foot of a window so as to position the oc1 Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in Rflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp. 155-156. 2 Loos maffirmait un jour: Un homme cultiv ne regarde pas par la fentre; sa fentre est en verre dpoli; elle nest l que pour donner de la lumire, non pour laisser passer le regard. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris, 1925), p. 174. When this book is published in English under the title The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York, 1929), the sentence reads: A friend once said to me: No intelligent man ever looks out of his window; his window is made of ground glass; its only function is to let in light, not to look out of (pp. 185-186). In this translation, Loos name has been replaced by a friend. Was Loos nobody for Etchells, or is this just another example of the kind of misunderstanding that led to the mistranslation of the title of the book? Perhaps it was Le Corbusier himself who decided to erase Loos name. Of a different order, but no less symptomatic, is the mistranslation of laisser passer Ie regard (to let the gaze pass through) as to look out of, as if to resist the idea that the gaze might take on, as it were, a life of its own, independent of the beholder. This could only happen in France!

2 3

Flat for Hans Brummel, Pilsen, 1929. Bedroom with a sofa set aga inst the window. Muller House, Prague, 1930. The raised sitting area in the Zimmer der Dame with the window looking onto the living room.

cupants with their back to it, facing the room (figure 2). This even happens with the windows that look into other interior spaces- as in the sittin g area of the ladies lounge of the Milller house (Prague, 1930) (figure 3) Moreover, upon entering a Loos interior ones body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved throu gh, rather than the upcoming space or the space outside. With each turn , each return look, the body is arrested. Looking at the photograph s, it is easy to imagine oneself in these precise, static positions, usuall y indicated by the unoccupied furniture. The photographs suggest th at it is intended that these spaces be comprehended by occupation, by using this furniture, by entering the photograph, by inhabiting it.3
3

The perception of space is not what space is but one of its representations; in this sense built space has no more authority than drawings, photographs, or descriptions.

 In the Moller house (Vienna, 1928) there is a raised sitting area off the living room with a sofa set against the window. Although one cannot see out the window, its presence is strongly felt. The bookshelves surrounding the sofa and the light coming from behind it suggest a comfortable nook for reading (figure 4). But comfort in this space is more than just sensual, for there is also a psychological dimension. A sense of security is produced by the position of the couch, the placement of its occupants, against the light. Anyone who, ascending the stairs from the entrance (itself a rather dark passage), enters the living room, would take a few moments to recognize a person sitting in the couch. Conversely, any intrusion would soon be detected by a person occupying this area, just as an actor entering the stage is immediately seen by a spectator in a theater box (figures 1,5). Loos refers to the idea of the theater box in noting that the smallness of a theater box would be unbearable if one could not look out into the large space beyond.4 While Kulka, and later Mlinz, read this comment in terms of the economy of space provided by the Raumplan, they overlook its psychological dimension. For Loos, the theater box exists at the intersection between claustrophobia and agoraphobia.5 This spatial-psychological device could also be read in terms of power, regimes of control inside the house. The raised sitting area of the Moller house provides the occupant with a vantage point overlooking the interior. Comfort in this space is related to both intimacy and control. This area is the most intimate of the sequence of living spaces, yet, paradoxically, rather than being at the heart of the house, it is placed at the periphery, pushing a volume out of the
4 Ludwig Mnz and Gustav Knstler, Der Architekt Adolf Loos (Vienna and Munich, 1904), pp. 130-131. English translation: Adolf Loos, Pioneer of Modern Architecture (London, 1966), p. 148: We may call to mind an observation by Adolf Loos, handed down to us by Heinrich Kulka, that the smallness of a theatre box would be unbearable if one could not look out into the large space beyond; hence it was possible to save space, even in the design of small houses, by linking a high main room with a low annexe. 5 Georges Teyssot has noted that The Bergsonian ideas of the room as a refuge from the world are meant to be conceived as the juxtaposition between claustrophobia and agoraphobia. This dialectic is already found in Rilke. Teyssot, The Disease of the Domicile, Assemblage 6 (1988): 95.

Moller House, Vienna, 1928. The raised sittinll area off the livinll room.

Moller House. Plan of elevated ground floor, with the alcove drawn more narrowly than it was built.

Moller House. Plan and section tracing the journey of the gaze from the raised sitting area to the back garden.

Moller House. View from the street.

street faade, just above the front entrance. Moreover, it corresponds with the largest window on this elevation (almost a horizontal window) (figure 6). The occupant of this space can both detect anyone crossing-trespassing the threshold of the house (while screened by the curtain) and monitor any movement in the interior (while screened by the backlighting). In this space, the window is only a source of light (not a frame for a view). The eye is turned towards the interior. The only exterior view that would be possible from this position requires th at the gaze travel the whole depth of the house, from the alcove to the living room to the music room, which opens onto the back garden (figure 7). Thus, the exterior view depends upon a view of the interior. The look folded inward upon itself can be traced in other

Loos interiors. In the Muller house, for instance, the sequence of spaces, articulated around the staircase, follows an increasing sense of privacy from the drawing room, to the dining room and study, to the ladys room (Zimmer der Dame) with its raised sitting area, which occupies the center, or heart, of the house (figures 3,8).6 But the window of this space looks onto the living space. Here, too, the most intimate room is like a theater box, placed just over the entrance to the social spaces in this house, so that any intruder could easily be seen. Likewise, the view of the exterior, towards the city, from this theater box, is contained within a view of the interior. Suspended in the middle of the house, this space assumes both the character of a sacred space and of a point of control. Comfort is paradoxically produced by two seemingly opposing conditions, intimacy and control. This is hardly the idea of comfort which is associated with the nineteenth-century interior as described by Walter Benjamin in Louis-Philippe, or the Interior.7 In Loos interiors the sense of security is not achieved by simply turning ones back
6

There is also a more direct and more private route to the sitting area, a staircase rising from the entrance of the drawing room. . 7 Under Louis-Philippe the private citizen enters the stage of history .... For the private person, living space becomes, for the first time, antithetical to the place of work. The former is constituted by the interior; the office is

Muller House. Plan of the main floor.

Muller House. The library.

on the exterior and immersing oneself in a private universe- a box in the world theater, to use Benjamins metaphor. It is no longer the house that is a theater box; there is a theater box inside the house, overlooking the internal social spaces. The inhabitants of Loos houses are both actors in and spectators of the family scene-involved in, yet detached from, their own space. The classical distinction between inside and outside, private and public, object and subject, becomes convoluted . The theater boxes in the Moller and Mller houses are spaces marked as female, the domestic character of the furniture contrasting with that of the adjacent male space, the
its complement. The private person who squares his account with reality in his office demands that the interior be maintained in his illusions. This need is all the more pressing since he has no intention of extending his commercial considcrations into social ones. In shaping his privatc environment he represses both. From this spring the phantasmagorias of the interior. For the private individual the private environment represents the universe. In it he gathers remote places and the past. His drawing room is a box in the world theater. Walter Bcnjamin , Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, in Reflections, p. 154. 8 This can, to mind Freuds paper A Child is Being Beaten (1919) where, as Victor Burgin has written, the subjcct is positioncd both in the

libraries (figure 9). In these, the leather sofas, the desks, the chimney, the mirrors, represent a public space within the house - the office and the club invading the interior. But it is an invasion which is confined to an enclosed room - a space which belongs to the sequence of social spaces within the house, yet does not engage with them. As Mnz notes, the library is a reservoir of quietness, set apart from the household traffic. The raised alcove of the Moller house and the Zimmer der Dame of the Mller house, on the other hand, not only overlook the social spaces but are exactly positioned at the end of the sequence, on the threshold of the private, the secret, the upper rooms where sexuality is hidden away. At the intersection of the visible and the invisible, women are placed as the guardaudience and on stage-whcre it is both aggressor and aggressed. Victor Burgin, Gcometry and Abjection , AA Files, no. 15 (Summer 1987): 38. The mise-en-scne of Loos interiors appears to coincide with that of Freuds unconscious. Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, pp. 175-204. In relation to Freuds paper, see also: Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, 1986), pp. 209-210.

ians of the unspeakable.9 But the theater box is a device which both provides protection and draws attention to itself Thus, when Mnz describes the entrance to the social spaces of the Moller house, he writes: Within, entering from one side, ones gaze travels in the opposite direction till it rests in the light, pleasant alcove, raised above the living room floor. Now we are really inside the house.10 That is, the intruder is inside, has penetrated the house, only when his/her gaze strikes this most intimate space, turning the occupant into a silhouette against the light.11 The voyeur in the theater box has become the object of anothers gaze; she is caught in the act of seeing, entrapped in the very moment of control.12 In framing a view, the theater box also frames the viewer. It is impossible to abandon the space, let alone leave the house, without being seen by those over whom control is being exerted. Object and subject exchange places. Whether there is actually a person behind either gaze is irrelevant:
I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. The window if it gets a bit dark and if I have reasons for thinking

that there is someone behind it, is straightway a gaze. From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.13

In a criticism of Benjamins account of the bourgeois interior, Laura Mulvey writes: Benjamin does not mention the fact that the private sphere, the domestic, is an essential adjunct to the bourgeois marriage and is thus associated with woman, not simply as female, but as wife and mother. It is the mother who guarantees the privacy of the home by maintaining its respectability, as essential a defence against incursion or curiosity as the encompassing walls of the home itself Laura Mulvey, Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home, Visual and Other Pleasures (London, 1989). 10 Mnz and Knstler, Adolf Loos, p. 149. 11 Upon reading an earlier version of this manuscript, Jane Weinstock pointed out that this silhouette against the light can be understood as a screened woman, a veiled woman, and therefore as the traditional object of desire. 12 In her response to an earlier version of this paper, Silvia Kolbowski pointed out that the woman in the raised sitting area of the Moller house could also be seen from behind, through the window to the street , and that therefore she is also vulnerable in her moment of control.
9

Architecture is not simply a platform that accommodates the viewing subject. It is a viewing mechanism that produces the subject. It precedes and frames its occupant. The theatricality of Loos interiors is constructed by many forms of representation (of which built space is not necessarily the most important). Many of the photographs, for in stance, tend to give the impression that someone isjust about to enter the room, that a piece of domestic drama is about to be enacted. The characters absent from the stage, from the scenery and from its props - the conspicuously placed pieces offurniture (figure 10 )- are conjured up.14 The only published photograph of a Loos interior which includes a human figure is a view of the entrance to the drawing room of the Rufer house (Vienna, 1922) (figure 11). A male figure, barely visible, is about to cross the threshold through a peculiar opening in the wall.15 But it is precisely at this threshold, slightly off stage, that the actor/intruder is most vulnerable, for a small window in the reading room looks down onto the back of his neck. This house, traditionally considered to be the prototype of the Raumplan, also contains the prototype of the theater box.

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1 , Freuds Papers on Technique 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1988), p. 215. In this passage Lacan is refering to Jean-Paul Sartres Being and Nothingness. 14 There is an instance of such personification of furniture in one of Loos most autobiographical texts, Interiors in the Rotunda (1898), wherc he writes: Every piece of furniture, every thing, every object had a story to tell, a family story. Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, trans. Jane 0. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1982), p.24. 15 This photograph has only been published recently. Kulka s monograph (a work in which Loos was involved) presents exactly the same view, the
13

 In his writings on the question of the house, Loos describes a number of domestic melodramas. In Das Andere, for example, he writes:
Try to describe how birth and death, the screams of pain for an aborted son, the death rattle of a dying mother, the last thoughts of a young woman who wishes to die .. . unfold and unravel in a room by Olbrich! Just an image: the young woman who has put herself to death . She is lying on the wooden Door. One of her hands still holds the smoking revolver. On the table a letter, the farewell letter. Is the room in which this is happening of good taste? Who will ask that? it is just a room!
16

11

Rufer House, Vienna, 1922. Entrance to the living room.

One could as well ask why it is only the women who die and cry and commit suicide. But leaving aside this question for the moment, Loos is saying that the house must not be conceived of as a work of art, that there is a difference between a house and a series of decorated rooms. The house is the stage for the theater of the family, a place where people are born and live and die. Whereas a work of art, a painting, presents itself to critical attention as an object, the house is received as an environment, as a stage. To set the scene, Loos breaks down the condition of the house as an object by radically convoluting the relation between inside and outside. One of the devices he uses is mirrors which, as Kenneth Frampton has pointed out, appear to be openings, and openings which can be mistaken for mirrors.17 Even more enigmatic is the placement, in the dining room of the Steiner house (Vienna, 1910) (figure 12), of a mirror just beneath an opaque window.I8 Here, again, the window
same photograph, but without a human figure. The strange opening in the wall pulls the viewer toward the void, toward the missing actor (a tension which the photographer no doubt felt the need to cover). This tension constructs the subject, as it does in the built-in couch of the raised area of the Moller house, or the window of the Zimmer der Dame overlooking the drawing room of the Mller house. 16 Adolf Loos, Das Andere, no.1 (1903): 9. 17 Kenneth Frampton, unpublished lecture, Columbia University, Fall 1986.

10

Adolf Loos fiat, Vienna, 1903. View from the living room into the fireplace nook.

is only a source of light. The mirror, placed at eye level, returns the gaze to the interior, to the lamp above the dining table and the objects on the sideboard, recalling Freuds studio in Berggasse 19, where a small framed mirror hanging against the window reflects the lamp on his work table. In Freudian theory the mirror represents the psyche. The reflection in the mirror is also a self-portrait projected onto the outside world. The placement of Freuds mirror on the boundary between interior and exterior undermines the status of the boundary as a fixed limit. Inside and outside cannot simply be separated. Similarly, Loos mirrors promote the interplay between reality and illusion, between the actual and virtual, undermining the status of the boundary between inside and outside. This ambiguity between inside and outside is intensified by the separation of sight from the other senses. Physical and visual connections between the spaces in Loos houses are often separated. In the Rufer house, a wide opening establishes between the raised dining room and the music room a visual connection which does not correspond to the physical connection. Similarly, in the Moller house there appears to be no way of entering the dining room from the music room, which is 70 centimeters below; the only means of access is by unfolding steps which are hidden in the timber base of the dining room (figure 13).19 This strategy of physical separation and visual connection, of framing, is repeated in many other Loos interiors. Openings are often screened by curtains, enhancing the stagelike effect. It should also be noted that it is usually

12

Steiner House, Vienna, 1910. View of the dining room showing the mirror beneath the window.

13

Moller House. View from the music room into the dining room. In the center of the threshold are steps that can be let down.

It should also be noted that this window is an exterior window, as opposed to the other window, which opens into a threshold space. 19 The reflective surface in the rear of the dining room of the Moller house (halfway between an opaque window and a mirror) and the window on the rear of the music room mirror each other, not only in their locations and their proportions, but even in the way the plants are disposed in two tiers. All of this produces the illusion, in the photograph, that the threshold between these two spaces is virtual-impassable, impenetrable.
18

But the breakdown between inside and outside, and the split between sight and touch, is not located exclusively in the domestic scene. It also occurs in Loos project for a house for Josephine Baker (Paris, 1928) (figures 14,15) -a house that excludes family life. However, in this instance the split acquires a different meaning. The house was designed to contain a large top-lit, double-height swimming pool, with entry at the second-floor level. Kurt Ungers, a close collaborator of Loos in this project, wrote:
The reception rooms on the first floor arranged round the pool -a large salon with an extensive top-lit vestibule, a small lounge and the circular cafe- indicate that this was intended not for private use but as a miniature entertainment centre. On the first floor, low passages surround the pool. They are lit by the wide windows visible on the outside, and from them, thick, transparent windows are let into the side of the pool, so that it was possible to watch swimming and diving in its crystal-clear water, flooded with light from above: an underwater revue, so to speak 20 [authors emphasis)

14 15

Project for a house for Josephine Baker in Paris, 1928. Model. Josephine Baker House. Plans of first and second floors .

As in Loos earlier houses, the eye is directed towards the interior, which turns its back on the outside world; but the subject and object of the gaze have been reversed. The inhabitant, Josephine Baker, is now the primary object, and the visitor, the guest, is the looking subject. The most intimate space-the swimming pool, paradigm of a sensual space-occupies the center of the house, and is also the focus of the visitors gaze. As Ungers writes, entertainment in this house consists in looking. But between this gaze and its object-the body-is a screen of glass and water, which renders the body inaccessible. The swimming pool is lit from above, by a skylight, so that inside it the windows would appear as reflective surfaces, impeding the swimmers view of the visitors standing in the passages. This view is the opposite of the panoptic view of a theater box, corresponding instead to that of the peephole, where subject and object cannot simply exchange places.21
Letter from Kurt Ungers to Ludwig Munz, quoted in Mnz and Knstler, Adolf Loos, p. 195. 21 In relation to the model of the peepshow and the structure of voyeurism, see Victor Burgins project Zoo.
20

The mise-en-scene in the Josephine Baker house recalls Christian Metzs description of the mechanism of voyeurism in cinema:

But the archi tecture of this house is more complicated. The swimmer might also see the reflection, framed by the window, of her own slippery body superimposed on the disembodied eyes of the shadowy figure of the spectator, whose lower body is cut out by the frame. Thus she sees herself being looked at by another: a narcissistic gaze superimposed on a voyeuristic gaze. This erotic complex of looks in which she is suspended is inscribed in each of the four windows opening onto the swimming pool. Each, even if there is no one looking through it, constitutes, from both sides, a gaze. The split between sight and the other physical senses found in Loos interiors is explicit in his definition of architecture. In The Principle of Cladding he writes: the artist, the architect, first senses the effect [authors emphasis] that he intends to realize and sees the rooms he wants to create in his minds eye. He senses the effect that he wishes to exert upon the spectator [authors emphasis]. ... homeyness if [it is] a residence.23 For Loos, the interior is preoedipal space, space before the analytical distancing which language entails, space as we fell it, as clothing; that is, as clothing before the existence of readymade clothes, when one had to first choose the fabric (and this act required , or I seem to remember as much, a distinct

It is even essential ... that the actor should behave as though he were not seen (and therefore as though he did not see his voyeur), that he should go about his ordinary business and pursue h is existence as foreseen by the fiction of the fi lm, th at he should carry on with his antics in a closed room, taking the utmost care not to notice that a glass rectangle has been set into one of the walls, and that he lives in a kind of aquarium. 22
16 Diagram from the Trait de Passions of Ren Descartes.

gesture of looking away from the cloth while feeling its texture, as if the sight of it would be an obstacle to the sensation). Loos seems to have reversed the Cartesian schism between the percep tual and conceptual (figure 10). Whereas Descartes, as Franco Rella has written, deprived the body of its status as the seat of valid and transmissible knowledge (In sensation, in the experience that derives from it, harbours error),24 Loos privileges the bodily experience of space over its mental construction: the architect first senses the space, then he visualizes it. For Loos, architecture is a form of covering, but it is not the walls that are covered. Structure plays a secondary role, and its primary function is to hold the covering in place: The architects general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet and the floor and the tapestry on the wall required structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architects second task25
24 Franco Rella, Miti e figure del moderno (Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1981), p.13 and note 1. Ren Descartes, Correspondance avec Arnould et Morus, ed. G. Lewis (Paris, 1933): letter to Hyperaspistes, August 1641. 25 Loos, The Principle of Cladding, p. 66

Christian Metz, A Note on Two Kinds of Voyeurism, in The imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I977), p. 96. 23 Adolf Loos, The Principle of Cladding (1898), in Spoken into the Void, p.66.

22

17

AdolfLoos flat. Lina Loos bed room.

The spaces of Loos interiors cover the occupants as clothes cover the body (each occasion has its appropriate fit). Jose Quetglas has written: Would the same pressure on the body be acceptable in a raincoat as in a gown, in jodhpurs or in pajama pants? ... All the architecture of Loos can be explained as the envelope of a body. From Lina Loos bedroom (this bag of fur and cloth) (figure 17) to Josephine Bakers swimming pool (this transparent bowl of water), the interiors always contain a warm bag in which to wrap oneself It is an architecture of pleasure, an architecture of the womb.26 But space in Loos architecture is not just felt. It is significant, in the quotation above, that Loos refers to the inhabitant as a spectator, for his definition of architecture is really a definition oftheatrical architecture. The clothes have become so removed from the body that they require structural support independent of it. They become a stage set. The inhabitant is both covered by the space and detached from it. The tension between sensation of comfort and comfort as control disrupts the role of the house as a traditional form of repre 26

sentation. More precisely, the traditional system of representation, within which the building is but one of many overlapping mechanisms, is dislocated. Loos critique of traditional notions of architectural represen tation is bound up with the phenomenon of an emergent metropolitan culture. The subject ofLoos architecture is the metropolitan individual, immersed in the abstract relationships of the ci ty, at pains to assert the independence and individuality of his existence against the leveling power of society. This battle, according to Georg Simmel, is the modern equivalent of primitive mans struggle with nature, clothing is one of the battlefields, and fashion is one of its strategies.27 He writes: The commonplace is good form in society .. .. It is bad taste to make oneself conspicuous through some individual, singular expression .... Obedience to the standards of the general public in all externals [is] the conscious and desired means of reserving their personal feelings and their taste.28 In other words, fashion is a mask which protects the intimacy of the metropolitan being. Loos writes about fashion in precisely such terms: We have become more refined, more subtle. Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by various colors, modern man needs his clothes as a mask. His individuality is so strong that it can no longer be expressed in terms of items of clothing . . .. His own inventions are concentrated on other things.29 Significantly, Loos writes about the exterior of the house in the same terms that he writes about fashion: When I was finally given the task of building a house, I said to myself: in its external appearance, a house can only have changed as much
The deepest conflict of modern man is not any longer in the ancient battle with nature, but in the one that the individual must fight to affirm the independence and peculiarity of his existence against the immense power of society, in his resistance to being levelled, swallowed up by the social-technological mechanism. Georg Simmel, Die Grosstadt und das Geistleben (1903). English translation: The Metropolis and Mental Life, in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago, 1971), pp. 324-339. 28 Georg Simmel, Fashion (1904), ibid. 29 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime (1908), trans. Wilfried Wang in The Architecture of Adolf Loos (London, 1985), p.103.
27

Jos Quetglas, Lo Placentero, Carrer de la Ciutat, no. 9-10, special issue on Loos (Januarv 1980): 2

as a dinner jacket. Not a lot therefore .... I had to become signifi cantly simpler. I had to substitute the golden buttons with black ones. The house has to look inconspicuous.30
The house does not have to tell anything to the exterior; instead , all its richness must be manifest in the interior.31

Loos seems to establish a radical difference between interior and exterior, which reflects the split between the intimate and the social life of the metropolitan being: outside, the realm of exchange, money, and masks; inside, the realm of the inalienable, the nonexchangeable, and the unspeakable. Moreover, this split between inside and outside, between senses and sight, is genderloaded. The exterior of the house, Loos writes, should resemble a dinner jacket, a male mask; as the unified self, protected by a seamless fac<ade, the exterior is masculine. The interior is the scene of sexuality and of reproduction, all the things that would divide the subject in the outside world. However, this dogmatic division in Loos writings between inside and outside is undermined by his architecture. The suggestion that the exterior is merely a mask which clads some preexisting interior is misleading, for the interior and exterior are constructed simultaneously. When he was designing the Rufer house, for example, Loos used a dismountable model that would allow the internal and external distributions to be worked out simultaneously. The interior is not simply the space which is enclosed by the fac<ades. A multiplicity of boundaries is established, and the tension between inside and outside resides in the walls that divide them, its status disturbed by Loos displacement of traditional forms of representation. To address the interior is to address the splitting of the wall. Take, for instance, the displacement of drawing conventions in Loos four pencil drawings of the elevation of the Rufer
30 Adolf Loos, Architecture, ibid ., p.107 31 Adolf Loos, Heimat Kunst (1914), in Trolzdem (essays 1900-1930) (Innsbruck, 1931).

18

Rufer House. Elevations.

house (figure I8).Each one shows not only the outlines of the faade but also, in dotted lines, the horizontal and vertical divisions of the interior, the position of the rooms, the thickness of the floors and the walls. The windows are represented as black squares, with no frame. These are drawings of neither the inside nor the outside but the membrane between them: between the representation of habitation and the mask is the wall. Loos subject inh abits this wall. This inhabitation creates a tension on that limit, tampers with it. This is not simply a metaphor. In every Loos house there is a point of maximum tension and it always coincides with a threshold or boundary. In the Moller house it is the raised alcove protruding from the street faade, where the occupant is ensconced in the security of the interior, yet detached from it. The subject of Loos houses is a stranger, an intruder in his own space. In Josephine Bakers house, the wall of the swimming pool is punctured by windows. It has been pulled apart, leaving a narrow passage surrounding the pool, and splitting each of the windows into an internal window and an external window. The visitor literally inhabits this wall, which enables him to look both inside, at the pool, and outside, at the city,

but he is neither inside nor outside the house. In the dining room of the Steiner house, the gaze directed towards the window is fold ed back by the mirror beneath it, transforming the interior into an exterior view, a scene. The subject has been dislocated: unable to occupy the inside of the house securely, it can only occupy the insecure margin between window and mirror.32 Like the occupants of his houses, Loos is both inside and outside the object. The illusion ofLoos as a man in control of his own work, an undivided subject, is suspect. In fact, he is constructed, controlled, and fra ctured by his own work. In the Raumplan, for example, Loos constructs a space (without having completed the working drawings), then allows himself to be manipulated by this construction. The object has as much authority over him as he has over the object. He is not simply an author.33 The critic is no exception to this phenomenon. Incapable of detachment from the object, the critic simultaneously produces a new object and is produced by it. Criticism that presents itself as a new interpretation of an existing object is in fact constructing a completely new object. On the other hand, readings that claim to be purely objective inventories, the standard monographs of Loos-Munz and Kunstler in the 1960s and Gravagnuolo in the 1980s-are thrown off-balance by the very object of their control. Nowhere is this alienation more evident than in their interpretations of the house for Josephine Baker. Munz, otherwise a wholly circumspect writer, begins his appraisal of this house with the exclamation: Africa: that is the
The subject is not only the inhabitant of the space but also the viewer of the photographs, the critic and the architect. See in this respect my article Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interior of Loos, AA Files, no. 20 (1990): 13-14, which develops this point further. 33 Loos distrust for the architectural drawings led him to develop the Raumplan as a means of conceptualizing space as it is felt, but, revealingly, he left no theoretical definition of it. Kulka noted: he will make many changes during construction. He will walk through the space and say: I do not like the height of this ceiling, change it! The idea of the Raumplan made it difficult to finish a scheme before construction allowed the visualization of the space as it was. 34 Mnz and Knstler, Adolf Loos, p.195.
32

image conjured up more or less firmly by a contemplation of the model, but he then confesses not to know why he invoked this image.34 He attempts to analyze the formal characteristics of the proj ect, but all he can conclude is that they look strange and exotic. What is most striking in this passage is the uncertainty as to whether Miunz is referring to the model of the house or to Josephine Baker herself He seems unable to either detach himself from this project or to enter into it. Like Munz, Gravagnuolo finds himself writing things without knowing why, reprimands himself, then tries to regain control:
First there is the charm of this gay architecture. It is not just the dichromatism of the facades but -as we shall see- the spectacular nature of the internal articulation that determines its refined and seductive character. Rather than abandon oneself to the pleasure of suggestions, it is necessary to take this toy to pieces with analytical detachment if one wishes to understand the mechanism of composition.35 [authors emphasis]

He then institutes a regime of analytical catgories (the architectural introversion, the revival of dichromatism, the plastic arrangement) which he uses nowhere else in the book. And he concludes:
The water flooded with light, the refreshing swim, the voyeuristic pleasure of underwater exploration- these are the carefully balanced ingredients of this gay architecture. But what matters more is that the invitation to the spectacular suggested by the theme of the house for a cabaret star is handled by Loos with discretion and intelectual detachment , more as a poetic game, involving the mnemonic pursuit of quotations and allusions to the Roman spirit, thall as a vulgar surrender to the taste of Hollywood. [authors emphasis]

Gravagnuolo ends up crediting Loos with the detachment (from Hollywood, vulgar taste, feminized culture) in
35

Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), p.191.

handling the project that the critic himself was attempting to regain in its analysis. The insistence on detachment, on reestablishing the distance between critic and object of criticism, architect and building, subject and object, is of course indicative of the obvious fact that Munz and Gravagnuolo have failed to separate themselves from the object. The image of Josephine Baker offers pleasure but also represents the threat of castration posed by the other: the image of woman in waterliquid, elusive, unable to be controlled, pinned down. One way of dealing with this threat is fetishization. The Josephine Baker house represents a shift in the sexual status of the body. This shift involves determinations of race and class more than gender. The theater box of the domestic interiors places the occupant against the light. She appears as a silhouette, mysterious and desirable, but the backlighting also draws attention to her as a physical volume, a bodily presence within the house with its own interior. She controls the interior, yet she is trapped within it. In the Baker house, the body is produced as spectacle, the object of an erotic gaze, an erotic system of looks. The exterior of this house cannot be read as a silent mask designed to conceal its interior; it is a tattooed surface which does not refer to the interior, it neither conceals nor reveals it. This fetishization of the surface is repeated in the interior. In the passages, the visitors consume Bakers body as a surface adhering to the windows. Like the body, the house is all surface; it does not simply have an interior. In the houses of Le Corbusier the reverse condition of Loos interiors may be observed. In photographs windows are never covered with curtains, neither is access to them hampered by objects. On the contrary, everything in these houses seems to be disposed in a way that continuously throws the subject towards the periphery of the house. The look is directed to the exterior in such deliberate manner as to suggest the reading of these houses as frames for a view. Even when actually in an exterior, in a terrace or in a roof garden, walls are constructed to frame the landscape, and a view from there to the interior, as in a canonic photograph of Villa Savoye (figure 19), passes right through it to the framed landscape (so that

19

Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1929. Jardin suspendu.

20

Villa Savoye. View of the entrance hall.

21

Villa Savoye. View of the kitchen.

22 23

Villa Garches, 1927. View of the kitchen. Villa Savoye. View of the roof garden.

in fact one can speak about a series of overlapping frames). These frames are given temporality through the promenade. Unlike Adolf Loos houses, perception here occurs in motion. It is hard to think of oneself in static positions. If the photographs of Loos interiors give the impression that somebody is about to enter the room, in Le Corbusiers the impression is that somebody was just there, leavIng as traces a coat and a hat lying on the table by the entrance of Villa Savoye (figure 20) or some bread and ajug on the kitchen table (figure 21; note also that the door here has been left open, further suggesting the idea that we have just missed somebody), or a raw fish in the kitchen of Garches (figure 22). And even once we have reached the highest point of the house, as in the terrace of Villa Savoye in the sill of the window which frames the landscape, the culminating point of the promenade, here also we find a hat, a pair of sunglasses, a little package (cigarettes?) and a lighter (figure 23), and now, where did the gentleman go? Because of course, you would have noticed already, that the personal objects are all male objects (never a handbag, a lipstick, or some piece of womens clothing). But before that. We are following somebody, the traces of his existence pre-

For other interpretations of these photographs of Le Corbusiers villas presented in the Oeuvre complte see: Thomas Schumacher, Deep Space, Shallow Space, Architectural Review (January 1987): 37-42; Richard Becherer, Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scne, Modulus 18 (1987): 6387; Alexander Gorlin, The Ghost in the Machine: Surrealism in the Work of Le Corbusier, Perspecta 18 (1982); Jos Quetglas, Viajes alrededor de mi alcoba, Arquitecture 264-265 (1987): 111-112.
36

sented to us in the form of a series of photographs of the interior. The look into these photographs is a forbidden look. The look of a detective. A voyeuristic look.36 In the film LArchitecture daujourdhui (1929) directed by Pierre Chenal with Le Corbusier,37 the latter as the main actor drives his own car to the entrance of Villa Garches (figure 24), descends, and enters the house in an energetic manner. He is wearing a dark suit with bow tie, his hair is glued with brilliantine, every hair in place, he is holding a cigarette in his mouth. The camera pans through the exterior of the house and arrives at the roof garden, where there are women sitting down and children playing. A little boy is driving his toy car. At this point Le Corbusier appears again but on the other side of the terrace (he never comes in contact with the women and children). He is puffing his cigarette. He then very athletically climbs up the spiral staircase which leads to the highest point of the house, a lookout point. Still wearing his formal attire, the cigarette still sticking out of his mouth, he pauses to contemplate the view from that point. He looks out. There is also a fIgure of a woman going through a house in this movie. The house that frames her is Villa Savoye. Here there is no car arriving. The camera shows the house from the distance, an object sitting in the landscape, and then pans the outside and the inside of the house. And it is there, halfway through the interior, that the woman appears in the screen. She is already inside, already contained by the house, bounded. She opens the door that leads to the terrace and goes up the ramp toward the roof garden, her back to the camera. She is wearing informal clothes and high heels and she holds to the handrail as she goes up, her skirt and hair blowing in the wind. She appears vulnerable. Her body is fragmented, framed not only by the camera but by the house itself, behind bars (fIgure 25). She appears to be moving from the inside of the house to the outside, to the roof garden. But this outside is again constructed as an inside with a wall wrapping the space in which an opening with the proportions of a window frames the landscape. The woman continues walking along the wall, as if protected by it, and as the wall makes a curve to form the solarium, the

24 25

Villa Garches. Still from LArchitecture daujourdhui, 1929. Villa Savoye. Still from LArchitecture daujourdhui. Une maison ce nest pas une prison: laspect change a chaque pas.

37 A copy of this film is held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. About this movie see J. Ward, Le Corbusiers Villa Les Terrasses and the International Style, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983, and by the same author, Les Terrasses, Architectural Review (March 1985): 64-69. Richard Becherer has compared it to Man Rays movie Les Mystres du Chteau du D (setting by Mallet-Stevens) in Chancing it in the Architecture of Surrealist Mise-en-Scne.

woman turns too, picks up a chair, and sits down. She would be facing the interior, the space she has just moved through. But for the camera, which now shows us a general view of the terrace, she has disappeared behind the plants. That is, just at the moment when she has turned and could face the camera (there is nowhere else to go), she vanishes. She never catches our eye. Here we are literally following somebody, the point of view is that of a voyeur. We could accumulate more evidence. Few photographs of Le Corbusiers buildings show people in them. But in those few, women always look away from the camera: most of the time they are shot from the back and they almost never occupy the same space as men. Take the photographs of Immeuble Clart in the Oeuvre complete, for example. In one of them, the woman and the child are in the interior, they are shot from the back, facing the wall; the men are in the balcony, looking out, toward the city (figure 26). In the next shot, the woman, again shot from the back, is leaning against the window to the balcony and looking at the man and the child who are on the balcony (figure 27). This spatial structure is repeated very often, not only in the photographs but also the drawings of Le Corbusiers projects. In a drawing of the Wanner project, for example, the woman in the upper floor is leaning against the veranda, looking down at her hero, the boxer, who is occupying the Jardin suspendu. He looks at his punching bag. And in the drawing Ferme radieuse, the woman in the kitchen looks over the counter toward the man sitting at the dining room table. He is reading the newspaper. Here again the woman is placed inside, the man outside, the woman looks at the man, the man looks at the world. But perhaps no example is more telling than the photo collage of the exhibit of a living room in the Salon dAutomne 1929, including all the equipment of a dwelling, a project that Le Corbusier realized in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand. In this image which Le Corbusier has published in the Oeuvre complete, Perriand herself is lying on the chaise-longue, her head turned away from the camera. More significant, in the original photograph employed in this photo collage (as well as in another photograph in the Oeuvre complete which shows

26

Immeuble Clarte, Geneva, 1930-32. View of the interior.

27

Immeuble Clarte. The terrace.

28

Charlotte Perriand in the chaise-longue against the wall. Salon dautomne 1929.

29

Chaise-longue in the horizontal position.

the chaise-longue in the horizontal position), one can see that the chair has been placed right against the wall. Remarkably, she is facing the wall. She is almost an attachment to the wall. She sees nothing (figures 28, 29). And of course for Le Corbusier-who writes things such as I exist in life only on condition that I see (Precisions, 1930) or This is the key: to look ... to look/observe/see/imagine/invent, create (1963), and in the last weeks of his life: I am and I remain an impenitent visual (Mise au Point)-everything is in the visual. 38 But what does vision mean here? We should now return to the passage in Urbanisme which opens this paper (Loos told me one day: A cultivated man does not look out of the window .. . ) because in that very passage he has provided us with a clue to the enigma when he goes on to say: Such sentiment [that of Loos with regard to the window] can have an explanation in the congested, disordered city where disorder appears in distressing images; one could even admit the paradox [of a Loosian window] before a sublime natural spectacle, to a sublime.39 For Le Corbusier the metropolis itself was too sublime. The look, in Le Corbusiers architecture, is not that look which would still pretend to contemplate the metropolitan spectacle with the detachment of a nineteenth-century observer before a sublime, natural landscape. It is not the look in Hugh Ferriss drawings of The Metropolis of Tomorrow, for example.40 In this sense, the penthouse that Le Corbusier did for Charles de Beistegui on the Champs-Elysees, Paris (1929-31) becomes symptomatic (figures 30, 31). In this house, originally intended not to be inhabited but to serve as a frame for big parties, there was no
Pierre-Alain Crosset, Eyes Which See, Casabella 531-532 (1987): 115. Un tel sentiment sexplique dans la ville congestionne ou le desordre apparait en images affligeantes; on admettrait mme le paradoxe en face dun spectacle natural sublime, trop sublime. Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, pp.174-176. 40 Le Corbusier makes reference to Hugh Ferriss in his book La Ville radieuse (Paris: Vincent, Freal & Cie., 1933), when he writes as caption accompanying a collage of images contrasting Hugh Ferriss and the actual New York with the Plan Voisin and Notre Dame: The French tradition-Notre Dame and the Plan Voisin (horizontal skyscrapers) versus the American line (tumult, bristling, chaos, first explosive state of a new medievalism). The Radiant City (New York: Orion Press, 1967), p.133.
38 39

30

Apartment Charles de Beistegui, Paris, 1929-31.

32

Apartment Beistegui.

31

Apartment Beistegui. View from the living room

electric lighting. Beistegui wrote: the candle has recovered all its rights because it is the only one which gives a living light.41 Electricity, modern power, is invisible, it does not illuminate the dwelling, but activates the doors and moves the walls.42 Electricity is used inside this apartment to slide away partition walls, operate doors, and allow cinematographic projections on the metal screen (which unfolds automatically as the chandelier rises up on pulleys), and outside, on the roof terrace, to slide the banks of hedges to frame the view of Paris: En pressant un bouton electrique, la palissade de verdure secarte et Paris apparait43 (figure 12). Electricity is used here not to illuminate,
41 Charles de Beistegui interviewed by Roger Baschet in Plaisir de France, (March 1936): 26-29. Cited by Pierre Saddy, Le Corbusier chez les riches: lappartement Charles de Beistegui, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuit, no. 49 (1979): 57-70. About this apartment, see also Appartement avec terrasses, LArchitecte (October 1932): 102-104. 42 Llectricit, puissancc moderne, est invisible, elle nclaire point la demeure, mais actionne les portes et dplace lcs murailles .... Baschet, interview with Charles de Beistegui, Plaisir de France (March 1936). 43 Pierre Saddy, Le Corbusier e lArlecchino, Rassegna 3 (1980).

to make visible, but as a technology offraming. Doors, walls, hedges, that is, traditional architectural framing devices, are activated with electric power, as are the built-in cinema camera and its projection screen, and when these modern frames are lit, the living light of the chandelier gives way to another living light, the flickering light of the movie, the flicks. This new lighting displaces traditional forms of enclosure, as electricity had done before it.44 This house is a commentary on the new condition. The distinctions between inside and outside are here made problematic. In this penthouse, once the upper level of the terrace is reached, the high walls of the chambre ouverte allow only fragments of the urban skyline to emerge: the tops of the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Sacre Coeur, Invalides, etc. (figure 33). And it is only by remaining inside and making use of the periscope camera obscura that it becomes possible to enjoy the metropolitan spectacle (figure 34). Tafuri has written: The distance interposed between the penthouse and the Parisian panorama is secured by a technological device, the periscope. An innocent reunification between the fragment and the whole is no longer possible; the intervention of artifice is a necessity. 45 But if this periscope, this primitive form of prosthesis, this artificial limb, to return to Le Corbusiers concept in LArt decoratif daujourdhui, is necessary in the Beistegui apartment (as also was the rest of the artifice in this house, the electrically driven framing devices, the other prostheses) it is only
Around the time that the Beistegui apartment was built, La Compagnie parisienne de distribution dlectricit put out a publicity book, LElectricit la maison, attempting to gain clients. In this book, electricity is made visible through architecture. A series of photographs by Andr Kertesz present views of interiors by contemporary architects, including A. Perret, Chausat, Laprade, and M. Perret. The most extraordinary one is probably a closeup of a horizontal window in an apartment by Chausat, a view of Paris outside and a fan sitting on the sill of the window. The image marks the split between a traditional function of the window, ventilation, now displaced into a powered machine, and the modern functions of a window, to illuminate and to frame a view. 45 Manfredo Tafuri, Machine et mmoire: The City in the Work of Le Corbusier, in Le Corbusier, ed. H. Allen Brooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 203.
44

33

Apartment Beistegui. La chambre ciel ouvert.

34

Apartment Beistegui. Periscope

because the apartment is still located in a nineteenth-century city: it is a penthouse in the Champs-Elysees. In ideal urban conditions, the house itself becomes the artifice. For Le Corbusier the new urban conditions are a consequence of the media, which institutes a relationship between artifact and nature that makes the defensiveness of a Loosian window, of a Loosian system, unnecessary. In Urbanisme, in the same passage where he makes reference to Loos window, Le Corbusier goes on to write: The horizontal gaze leads far away .... From our offices we will get the feeling of being look-outs dominating a world in order .... The skyscrapers concentrate everything in themselves: machines for abolishing time and space, telephones, cables, radios. 46 The inward gaze, the gaze turned upon itself, of Loos interiors becomes with Le Corbusier a gaze of domination over the exterior world. But why is this gaze horizontal? The debate between Le Corbusier and Perret over the horizontal window provides a key to this question.47 Perret maintained that the vertical window, la porte jenetre, reproduces an impression of complete space because it permits a view of the street, the garden, and the sky, while the horizontal window, la fenetre en longueur, diminishes ones perception and correct appreciation of the landscape. What the horizontal window cuts from the cone of vision is the strip of the sky and the strip of the foreground that sustains the illusion of perspectival depth. Perrets porte jenetre corresponds to the space of perspective. Le Corbusiers fenetre en longueur to the space of photography. It is not by chance that Le Corbusier continues his polemic with Perret in a passage in Precisions, where he demonstrates scientifically that the horizontal window illuminates better. He does so by relying on a photographers chart giving times of exposure. He writes:
I have stated that the horizontal window illuminates better than
46 47

the vertical window. Those are my observations of the reality. Nevertheless, I have passionate opponents. For example, the following sentence has been thrown at me: A window is a man, it stands upright This is fllle if what you want are words. But I have discovered recently in a photographers chart these explicit graphics; I am no longer swimming in the approximations of personal observations. I am facing sensitive photographic film that reacts to light. The table says this: ... The photographic plate in a room illuminated with a horizontal window needs to be exposed four times less than in a room illuminated with two vertical windows .. .. Ladies and gentlemen ... We have left the Vignolized shores of the Institutes. We are at sea; let us not separate this evening without having taken our bearings. First, architecture: the pilotis carry the weight of the house above the ground, up in the air. The view if the home is a categorical view, without connection with the ground.48 [authors emphasis]

The erected man behind Perrets porte jenetre has been replaced by a photographic camera. The view is free-floating, without connection with the ground, or with the man behind the camera (a photographers analytical chart has replaced personal observations). The view from the house is a categorical view. In framing the landscape the house places the landscape into a system of categories. The hOllse is a mechanism for classification. It collects views and, in doing so, classifies them. The house is a system for taking pictures. What determines the nature of the picture is the window. In another passage from the same book the window itself is seen as a camera lens:
When you buy a camera, you are determined to take photographs in the crepuscu lar winter of Paris, or in the brilliant sands of an oasis; how do you do it? you use a diaphragm. Your glass panes, your horizontal windows are all ready to be diaphragmed at will. You will let light in wherever you like.49
48

Le Corbusier, Urbanisme, p. 186. About the debate between Perret and Le Corbusier see: Bruno Reichlin, The Pros and Cons of the Horizontal Window, Daidalos 13 (1984), and Beatriz Colomina, Le Corbusier and Photography, Assemblage 4 (1987).

Lc Corbusier, Prcisions sur un tat prsent de larchitecture et de lurbanisme (Paris: Vincent, Freal & Cie, 1930), pp. 57-58. 49 Ibid., pp. 32-33

If the window is a lens, the house itself is a camera pointed at nature. Detached from nature, it is mobile. Just as the camera call be taken from Paris to the desert, the house can be taken from Poissy to Biarritz to Argentina. Again in Precisions, Le Corbusier describes Villa Savoye as follows:
The house is a box in the air, pierced all around, without interruption, by a fenetre en longueur . . .. The box is in the middle of meadows, dominating the orchard ... . The simple posts of the ground Aoor, through a precise disposition, cut up the landscape with a regularity that has the efIect of suppressing any notion of front or back of the house, of side of the house ... . The plan is pure, made for the most exact of needs. It is in its right place in the rural landscape of Poissy. But in Biarritz, it would be magnificent ... . I am going to implant this very house in the beautiful Argentinian countryside: we will have twenty houses rising from the high grass of an orchard where cows continue to graze.50

which, then, certain views become possible. The house is no more than a series of views choreographed by the visitor, the way a filmmaker effects the montage of a film.52 This is also evident in Le Corbusiers description of the process followed in the construction of the petite maison on the shores of Lake Leman:
I knew that the region where we wanted to build consisted of 10 to 15 kilometers of hill s along the lake. A fixed point: the lake; another, the magnificent view, frontal; another, the south, equally frontal. Should one first have searched for the site and made the plan in accordance with it That is the usual practice. I thought it was better to make an exact plan, corresponding ideally to the use one hoped from it and determined by the three factors above. This done, to go out with the plan in hand to look for a suitable site.53

The house is being described in terms of the way it frames the landscape and the effect this framing has on the perception of the house itself by the moving visitor. The house is in the air. There is no front, no back, no side to this house. 51 The house can be in any place. The house is immaterial. That is, the house is not simply constructed as a material object from
50 51

Ibid., pp. 136-138. This erasure of the front, despite the insistence of traditional criticism that Le Corbusiers buildings should be understood in terms of their faades, is a central theme of Le Corbusiers writings. For example, about the project for the Palace of the Nations in Geneva he wrote: Alors, me dira-t-on inquiet, vous avez construit des murs autour ou entre vos pilotis afin de ne pas donner langoissante sensation de ces gigantesques batiments en lair? Oh, pas du tout! Je montre avec satisfaction ces pilotis qui portent quelque chose, qui se doublent de leur reflet dans leau, qui laissent passer la lumiere sous les btiments supprimant ainsi toute notion de (devant) et de (derriere) de btiment. Precisions, p. 49 (my emphasis). 52 Significantly, Le Corbusier has represented some of his projects, like Villa Meyer and Maison Guiette, in the form of a series of sketches grouped together and representing the perception of the house by a moving eye. As has been noted, these drawings suggest film story boards, each of the images a still. Lawrence Wright, Perspective in Perspective (London: Routlede and Kegan Paul. 1983), pp. 240-241.

The key to the problem of modern habitation is, according to Le Corbusier, to inhabit first, placing oneself afterwards. (Habiter dabord. Venir se placer ensuite.) But what is meant here by inhabiting and placement? The three factors that determine the plan of the house-the lake, the magnificent frontal view, the south, equally frontal -are precisely the factors that determine a photograph. To inhabit here means to inhabit that picture. Architecture is made in the head, then drawn.54 Only then does one look for the site. But the site is only where the landscape is taken, framed by a mobile lens. This photo opportunity is at the intersection of the system of communication that establishes that mobility, the railway, and
53 54 55

Le Corbusier, Prcisions, p.127. Ibid., p.230. The geographical situation confirmed our choice, for at the railway station twenty minutes away trains stop which link up Milan, Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Geneva and Marseilles... Le Corbusier, Une Petite maison (Zurich: Editions dArchitecture,1954), p.8. The network of the railway is understood here as geography. The features or arrangement of place (geography according to the Oxford Dictionary) are now defined by the communication system. It is precisely within this system that the house moves: 1922, 1923 I boarded the Paris-Milan express several times, or the Orient Express (Paris-Ankara). In my pocket was the plan of a house. A plan without a site? The plan of a house in search of a plot of ground? Yes! Le Corbusier, Une Petite maison, p.5.

35

On a decouvert le terrain. Une Petite maison, 1954.

36

Le Plan est installe .... Une Petite maison, 1954.

the landscape.55 But even the landscape is here understood as a 10 to 15 kilometer strip, rather than a place in the traditional sense. The camera can be set up anywhere along that strip. The house is drawn with a picture already in mind. The house is drawn as a frame for that picture. The frame establishes the difference between seeing and merely looking. It produces the picture by domesticating the overpowering landscape:
The object of the wall seen here is to block off the view to the north and east, partly to the south, and to the west; for the ever-present and overpowering scenery on all sides has a tiring effect in the long run. Have you noticed that under such conditions one no longer sees? To lend significance to the scenery one has to restrict and give it proportion; the view must be blocked by walls which are only pierced at certain strategic points and there permit an unhindered view.56

a small human figure appears standing and next to it a big eye, autonomous from the figure, oriented towards the lake. The plan of the house is between them. The house is represented as that between the eye and the lake, between the eye and the view. The small figure is almost an accessory. The other drawing, Le Plan est install (Figure 36), does not show, as the title would indicate, the encounter of the plan with the site, as we traditionally understand it. (The site is not in the drawing. Even the curve of the shore of the lake in the other drawing has been erased.) The drawing shows the plan of the house, a strip of lake, and a strip of mountains. That is, it shows the plan and above it, the view. The site is a vertical plane, that of vision. Of course, there is no original in the new architecture, because it is not dependent on the specific place. Throughout his writings, Le Corbusier insists on the relative autonomy of
For example, in Le Corbusier and Franois de Pierrefeu, La Maison des hommes (Paris: Plon, 1942), he writes: Aujourdhui, la conformit du sol avec la maison nest plus une question dassiette ou de contexte immdiat, p. 68. It is significant that this and other key passages of this book were omitted in the English translation, The Home of Man (London: Architectural Press, 1948). 58 About his project for Rio de Janeiro, he writes: Here you have the idea: here you have artificial sites, countless new homes, and as for traffic-the Gordian knot has been severed. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, p. 224.
57

It is this domestication of the view that makes the house a house, rather than the provision of a domestic space, a place in the traditional sense. Two drawings published in Une Petite maison speak about what Le Corbusier means by placing oneself In one of them, On a decouverte Ie terrain (figure 35),
56

Ibid. , pp. 22-23

architecture and site.57 And in the face of the traditional site he constructs an artificial site.58 This does not mean that this architecture is independent from place. It is the concept place that has changed. We are not talking here about a site but about a sight. A sight can be accommodated in several sites. Property has moved from the horizontal to the vertical plane. (Even Beisteguis primary location from a traditional point of view, the address-Champs-Elysees-is completely subordinated by the view.59) The window is a problem of urbanism. That is why it becomes a central point in every urban proposal by Le Corbusier. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, he developed a series of drawings in vignette that represent the relation between domestic space and spectacle.60
This rock at Rio de Janeiro is celebrated. Around it range the tangled mountains, bathed by the sea. Palms, banana trees; tropical splendor animates the site. One stops, one installs ones armchair. Crack! a frame all around . Crack! the four obliques of a perspective. Your room is in stalled before the site. The whole sea-landscape enters your room( (figure 37)

First a famous sight, a postcard, a picture. (And it is not by chance that Le Corbusier has not only drawn this landscape from a postcard but has published it alongside the drawings in La Ville radieuse).62 Then, one inhabits the space in front of that picture, installs an armchair. But this view, this picture, is only constructed at the same time as the house.63 Crack! a frame all around it. Crack! the four obliques of a perspec In Prcisions he writes: La rue est independante de la maison. La rue est indpendante de la maison. Y rflchir, p.62. But it must be noted that it is the street that is independent from the house and not the other way around. 60 About the association of the notion of spectacle to that of dwelling, see Hubert Damisch, Les trteaux de la vie moderne, in Le Corbusier: Une Encyclopedie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987), pp. 252-259. See also Bruno Reichlin , LEsprit de Paris, Casabella 531-532 (1987): 52-63. 61 Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, p. 87. 62 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, pp. 223-225. 63 C. Damisch, Les trteaux de la vie moderne, p. 250.
59

37

Rio de Janeiro. The view is constructed at the same time as the house. La Maison des hommes, 1942 .

38

Rio de Janeiro. The highway, elevated 100 meters, and launched from hill to hill above the city. La Ville radieuse, I933

tive. The house is installed before the site, not in the site. The house is a frame for a view. The window is a gigantic screen. But then the view enters the house, it is literally inscribed in the lease.
The pact with nature has been sealed! By means available to town planning it is possible to enter nature in the lease. Rio de Janeiro is a celebrated site. But Algiers, Marseilles, Oran, Nice and all the Cote dAzur, Barcelona and many maritime and inland towns can boast of admirable landscapes.64

Again, several sites can accommodate this project: different locations, different pictures (like the world of tourism). But also different pictures of the same location. The repetition of units with windows at slightly different angles, different framings, as happens when this cell becomes a unit in the urban project for Rio de Janeiro, a project which consists on a six-kilometer strip of housing units under a highway on pilotis, suggests again the idea of the movie strip (figure 38). This sense of the movie strip is felt both in the inside and the outside: Architecture? Nature? Liners enter and see the new and horizontal city: it makes the site still more sublime. Just think of this broad ribbon iflight, at night ... 65 The strip of housing is a movie strip, on both sides. For Le Corbusier, to inhabit means to inhabit the camera. But the camera is not a traditional place, it is a system of
64 65

classification, a kind of filing cabinet. To inhabit means to employ that system. Only after this do we have placing, which is to place the view in the house, to take a picture, to place the view in the filing cabinet, to classify the landscape. This critical transformation of traditional architectural thinking about place can also be seen in La Ville radieuse where a sketch represents the house as a cell with a view (figure 39). Here an apartment, high up in the air, is presented as a terminal of telephone, gas, electricity, and water. The apartment is also provided with exact air (heating and ventilation).66 Inside the apartment there is a small human figure and at the window, a huge eye looking outside. They do not coincide. The apartment itself is here the artifice between the occupant and the exterior world, a camera (and a breathing machine). The exterior world also becomes artifice; like the air, it has been conditioned, landscaped-it becomes landscape. The apartment defines modern subjectivity with its own eye. The traditional subject can only be the visitor, and as such, a temporary part of the viewing mechanism. The humanist subject has been displaced. The etymology of the word window reveals that it combines wind and eye66 (ventilation and light in Le Corbusiers terms). As Georges Teyssot has noted, the word combines an element of the outside and an aspect of innerness. The separation on which dwelling is based is the possibility for a being to install himself 68 But in Le Corbusier this installation splits the subject itself, rather than simply the outside from the inside. Installation involves a convoluted geometry which entangles the division between interior and exteWhereas Loos window had split sight from light, Le Corbusiers splits breathing from these two forms of light. A window is to give light, not to ventilate! To ventilate we use machines; it is mechanics, it is physics. Le Corbusier, Prcisions, p. 56. 67 E. Klein, A Complete Etymological Dictionary of the english Language (Amsterdam, London, New York, 1966). Cited by Ellen Eve Frank in Literary Architecture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 263, and by Georges Teyssot in Water and Gas on all Floors, Lotus 44 (1944) : 90. 68 Ibid. 69 Le Corbusier had recommended that Madame Savoye leave a book for guests to sign by the entrance: she would collect many signatures, as La Roche had. But La Roche was also a gallery. Here the house itself became the object of contemplation, not the objects inside it.
66

Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, p. 87. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, p. 224.

39

Sketch in La Ville radieuse, 1933.

rior, between the subject and itself It is precisely in terms of the visitor that Le Corbusier has written about the occupant. For example, about Villa Savoye he writes in Precisions:69 The visitors, till now, turn round and round in the interior, asking themselves what is happening, understanding with difficulties the reasons for what they see and feel; they do not find anything of what is called a house. They feel themselves in something entirely new. And ...I do not think they are bored!70 The occupant of Le Corbusiers house is displaced, first because he is disoriented. He does not know how to place himself in relation to this house. It does not look like a house. Then because the occupant is a visitor. Unlike the occupant of Loos houses, both actor and spectator, both involved and detached from the stage, Le Corbusiers subject is detached from the house with the distance of a visitor, a viewer, a photographer, a tourist. In a photograph of the interior of Villa Church (figure 40), a casually placed hat and two open books on the table announce that somebody has just been there. A window with the traditional proportions of a painting is framed in a way that makes it read also as a screen. In the corner of the room a camera set on a tripod appears. It is the reflection on the mirror of the camera taking the photograph. As viewer of this photograph we are in the position of the photographer, that is, in the position of the camera, because the photographer, as the visitor, has already abandoned the room . The subject (the visitor of the house, the photographer, but also the viewer of this photograph) has already left. The subject in Le Corbusiers house is estranged and displaced from his own home. The objects left as traces in the photographs of Le Corbusiers houses tend to be those of a (male) visitor (hat, coat, etc.). Never do we find there any trace of domesticity, as traditionally understood.71 These objects also could be understood as standing for the architect. The hat, coat, glasses are definitely
Le Corbusier, Precisions, p. 136. It is not a casually placed cup of tea that we find, but an artistic arrangement of objects of everyday life, as in the kitchens of Savoye and Garches. We may speak here about still lifes more than about domesticity.
70 71

40

Villa Church, Ville d Avray, 1928-29.

his own. They play the same role that Le Corbusier plays as an actor in the movie Larchitecture daujourdhui, where he passes through the house rather than inhabits it. The architect is estraged from his work with the distance of a visitor or a movie actor. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances.72 Theater knows necessarily about emplacement, in the traditional sense. It is always about presence. Both the actor and the spectator are fixed in a continuous space and time, those of the performance. In the shooting of a movie there is no such continuity. The actors work is split into a series of discontinuous, mountable episodes. The nature of the illusion for the spectator is a result of the montage. The subject of Loos architecture is the stage actor. But while the center of the house is left empty for the performance, we find the subject occupying the threshold of this space. Undermining its boundaries. The subject is split between actor
72 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 230.

and spectator of its own play. The completeness of the subject dissolves as also does the wall that she is occupying. The subject of Le Corbusiers work is the movie actor, estranged not only from the scene but from his own person.73 This moment of estrangement is clearly marked in the drawing of La Ville radieuse where the traditional humanist figure, the inhabitant of the house, is made incidental to the camera eye: it comes and goes, it is merely a visitor. The split between the traditional humanist subject (the occupant or the architect) and the eye is the split between looking and seeing, between outside and inside, between landscape and site. In the drawings, the inhabitant or the person in search of a site are represented as diminutive figures. Suddenly that figure sees. A picture is taken, a large eye, autonomous from the figure, represents that moment. This is precisely the moment of inhabitation . This inhabitation is independent from place (understood in a traditional sense); it turns the outside into an inside: I perceive that the work we raise is not unique, nor isolated; that the air around it constitutes other surfaces, other grounds, other ceilings, that the harmony that has suddenly stopped me before the rock of Brittany, exists, can exist, everywhere else, always. The work is not made only of itself: the outside exists. The outside shuts me in its whole which is like a room.74 Le dehors est toujours un dedans (the outside is always an inside) means that the outside is a picture. And that to inhabit means to see. In La Maison des hommes there is a drawing of a figure standing and (again), side by side, an independent eye: Let us not forget that our eye is 5 feet 6 inches above the ground; our eye, this entry door of our architectural perceptions.75 The
Pirandello describes the estrangement the actor experiences before the mechanism of the cinematographic camera: The film actor feels as if in exile-exiled not only from the stage but also from himself With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice and the noises caused by its moving about, in order to be changed in to a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. Luigi Pi randello, Si Gira, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 229. 74 Le Corbusier, Prcisions, p. 78. 75 Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, p. 100.
73

eye is a door to architecture, and the door is, of course, an architectural element, the first form of a window.76Later in the book, the door is replaced by media equipment, the eye is the tool of recording.
The eye is a tool of registration. It is placed 5 feet 6 inches above the ground. Walking creates diversity in the spectacle before our eyes. But we have left the ground in an airplane and acquired the eyes of a bird. We see, in actuality, that which hitherto was only seen by the spirit.77

The window is, for Le Corbusier, first of all communication. He repeatedly superimposes the idea of the modern window, a lookout window, a horizontal window, with the reality of the new media: telephone, cable, radios, ... machines for abolishing time and space. Control is now in these media. Power has become invisible. The look that from Le Corbusiers skyscrapers will dominate a world in order is neither the look from behind the periscope of Beistegui or the defensive view (turned towards itself) of Loos interiors. It is a look that registers the new reality, a recording eye. Le Corbusiers architecture is produced by an engagement with the mass media but, as with Loos, the key to his position is, in the end, to be found in his statements about fashion. Where for Loos the English suit was the mask necessary to sustain the individual in metropolitan conditions of existence, for Le Corbusier this suit is cumbersome and inefficient. And where Loos contrasts the dignity of male British fashion with the masquerade of womens, Le Corbusier praises womens fashion over mens because it has undergone change, the change of modern time.
Woman has preceded us. She has carried out the reform of her dress. She found herself at a dead end: to follow fashion
Paul Virilio, The Third Window: An Interview with Paul Virilio, in Global Television , ed. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (New York and Cambridge, Mass.: Wedge Press and MIT Press, 1988), p.191. 77 Le Corbusier and Pierrefeu, The Home of Man, p.125.
76

and, then, give up the advantages of modern techniques, of modern life. To give up sport and, a more material problem , to be unable to take on the jobs that have made woman a fertile part of contemporary production and enabled her to earn her own living. To follow fashion: she could not drive a car; she could not take the subway, or the bus, nor act quickly in her office or her shop. To carry out the daily construction of a toilette: hairdo, shoes, buttoning her dress, she would not have had time to sleep. So, woman cut her hair and her skirts and her sleeves. She goes out bareheaded, barearmed, with her legs free . And she can dress in five minutes. And she is beautiful; she seduces us with the charm of her graces of which the designers have admitted taking advantage. The courage, the liveliness, the spirit of invention with which woman has revolutionized her dress are a miracle of modern times. Thank you! And what about us, men? A dismal state of affairs! In our dress clothes, we look like generals of the Grand Armee and we wear starched collars ! We are uncomfortable ...78

While Loos spoke, you will remember, of the exterior of the house in terms of male fashion, Le Corbusiers comments on fashion are made in the context of a discussion of the interior. The furniture in style (Louis XIV) should be replaced with equipmellt (standard furniture, in great part derived from office furniture) and this change is assimilated to the change that women have undertaken in their dress. He concedes, however, that there are certain advantages to male dressing:
The English suit we wear had nevertheless suceeded in something important. It had neutralized us. It is useful to show a neutral appearance in the city. The dominant sign is no longer ostrich feathers in the hat, it is in the gaze. Thats enough.79

Except for this last comment, The dominant sign ... is in the gaze, Le Corbusiers statement is purely Loosian. But at the same time, it is precisely that gaze of which Le Corbusier speaks that marks their differences. For Le Corbusier the interior no longer needs to be defined as a system of defense
78 79

Le Corbusier, Prcisions, pp. 106-107. Ibid. , p.107

from the exterior (the system of gazes in Loos interiors, for example). To say that the exterior is always an interior means, among other things, that the interior is not simply the bounded territory defined by its opposition to the exterior. The exterior is inscribed in the dwelling. The window in the age of mass communication provides us with one more flat image. The window is a screen. From there issues the insistence on eliminating every protuding element, devignolizing the window, suppressing the sill: M. Vignole ne soccupe pas des fenetres , mais bien des (entre-fenetres) (pilastres ou colonnes). Je devignolise par: Iarchitecture, cest des planchers eclairs80 Of course, this screen undermines the wall. But here it is not, as in Loos houses, a physical undermining, an occupation of the wall, but a dematerialization following from the emerging media. The organizing geometry of architecture slips from the perspectival cone of vision, from the humanist eye, to the camera angle. But this slippage is, of course, not neutral in gender terms. Male fashion is uncomfortable but provides the bearer with the gaze, the dominant sign, womans fashion is practical and turns her into the object of anothers gaze: Modern woman has cut her hair. Our gazes have known (enjoy) the shape of her legs. A picture. She sees nothing. She is an attachment to a wall that is no longer simply there. Enclosed by a space whose limits are defined by a gaze.

80

Ibid ., p. 53.