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The making of architectural promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke

House

Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones

Architectural Research Quarterly / Volume 16 / Issue 02 / June 2012, pp 108 - 124

DOI: 10.1017/S1359135512000437, Published online: 27 November 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1359135512000437

How to cite this article:

Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones (2012). The making of architectural promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke House.
Architectural Research Quarterly, 16, pp 108-124 doi:10.1017/S1359135512000437

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108 arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 design

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This article compares Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye as exemplar of
promenade architecturale with Hans Scharoun’s Schminke House
which pursues the theme of movement in another way.
The making of architectural promenade:
Villa Savoye and Schminke House
Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones
The term ‘architectural promenade’ has become a
part of the language of modern architecture, yet it
has been little discussed or investigated. We find it
insufficient as a generic term to express a concern
with the experience of moving through a building,
for the promenade can mean different things to
different people. To illustrate this point we make a
comparison of the promenade in the Villa Savoye by
Le Corbusier – perhaps the promenade par excellence –
and that of the almost contemporary Schminke
House by Hans Scharoun. We have found many
distinct differences. The emphasis in this essay is on
the meaning and manipulation of space, something
of deep concern to both architects and a topic that
1
each of us has explored separately elsewhere.
The Villa Savoye [1] is regarded as a key work in every
architectural history book since F. R. S. Yorke’s The
Modern House, and even graces the cover of Hitchcock
2
and Johnson’s The International Style. Although Le
Corbusier designed other villas that would have
earned his reputation, Savoye definitively crowns his
first period and his oeuvre would be unthinkable
without it. The generous open site on the outskirts of
Paris, rich clients, and a relatively open brief, allowed
him the freedom to make a special architectural
statement just when he was ready to do so, with time
enough to hone the design through several versions.
It became famous on paper, but was dogged with
3 directly influenced by the Villa Savoye [4a-e]. Both
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criticism
technical problems and never worked well. By the end
of the war and the German occupation the building
3
had become derelict. Early in 1960, Le Corbusier
returned to facilitate a restoration and proposed
several significant changes but he died before
4
anything could be done. The Villa was extensively
restored in the 1970s under the auspices of UNESCO
and the French Ministry of Culture, and is preserved
largely as it appeared at its conception.
Hans Scharoun’s Schminke House [2] was a
similarly luxurious house that consolidated the
architect’s international reputation just before the
5
Nazis drove his architecture underground. It stands
next to the owner’s noodle factory on the edge of
Löbau, a small town near Dresden. At the end of the
war it became part of the German Democratic
Republic and the owners fled to the west, so until
1989 the house remained unloved and relatively
inaccessible, used as a kindergarten. Now restored,
6
it also graces the covers of architectural histories.
Since Scharoun was eight years Le Corbusier’s junior
and was suppressed under twelve years of the Third
Reich, he could only consolidate his reputation in
the early 1960s and his international influence came
later, but he is now ranked among the Modernist
masters and the Schminke House is recognised as the
7
key work of his first Modernist period. It marked the
characteristic breakthrough in the use of free angles
which has been his main legacy to late twentieth-
8
century architecture.
It is too easily forgotten how radical these two
buildings must have seemed when first built,
shockingly different from other structures near and
far. With their flat roofs and unadorned white
surfaces, they not only conformed to what later
9
became known as the ‘International Style’, but also
demonstrated shared concerns with functionalism,
flowing space, transparency, and arrival by car. It is 1 Le Corbusier, Villa
well known that the curved ground plan of the Villa Savoye, western
corner
Savoye was generated in response to the movements
of a car, but a small axonometric in Le Corbusier’s 2 Hans Scharoun,
Schminke House
Oeuvre Complète makes this idea about movement from garden
quite explicit [3]. Scharoun’s surviving sketches show
3 Axonometric sketch
that the Schminke House was at an early stage of Villa Savoye from
Oeuvre Complète
criticism arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 109
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110 arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 design

4a

4 Schminke House planting: there is lawn, a Sketch perspective

preliminary project flower beds, fruit trees of project Löbau 2,
called ‘Löbau 2’. This and even a ‘Spielwiese’ 1930 (retraced)
series of drawings (play-meadow). Floor b Site plan with

preserved in plans seem naïve and contours: land falls
Scharoun’s work file as columns are carelessly towards the north-
greying prints has the omitted, but they east. Noodle factory
title ‘Löbau 2’, include telling is bottom, proposed
suggesting it was conceptual ‘Löbau 2’ top left,
already a second information including final house position
version. The house room uses. The mid right within
takes the northern tapered form is headed square garden
corner of the plot to by the round stairhall, boundary
distance it from the panoramic living room c–e Ground, first,
factory and to gain and upper gallery, and second floor
optimal solar exposure while the tail ends to plans of ‘Löbau 2’,
for its rounded corner. north with the boiler the earliest surviving
Arrival is from the flue. Responding to project for the
western street rather orientation, the house Schminke House
than the east, and the bursts from its corner using the alternative
turn of the car is towards sun and view, site shown in fig 4b,
celebrated with a loop, asymmetrical from the top left. The bottom
but the pedestrian start. The perspective right corner faces
route to the terrace prioritises the corner south. These were
steps is also shown. view and terraces, and traced off Scharoun’s
Scharoun sketches the the sense of increasing freehand sketch
garden layout in some transparency is plans on faded prints,
detail, even noting the evident line for line
4b

4c 4d 4e

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 design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 111

architects had built at the Weissenhofsiedlung of
1927 and Le Corbusier’s work was known to Scharoun
through publications, so it is perhaps not surprising
that Scharoun’s first sketches are a kind of homage to
Savoye, showing the arrival of a car under a building
on columns with generous terraces above. Even the
directions of motion are the same, the vehicle
circling anticlockwise and the pedestrians clockwise.
Scharoun’s drawings are surprisingly crude for an
architect already known for subtle and ingenious
10
planning, even for fine detailing, and they differ in
almost every respect from the finished building, but
the perspective already prefigures the radical
asymmetry and thrust of implied movement jutting
out over the garden. Both houses were driven by ideas
about the unfolding of route, but in Le Corbusier’s
case there was an explicit theoretical advance, as he
discarded the more utilitarian term circulation in
favour of promenade. Although he had described
Maison La Roche of 1923 [5] as ‘a little like a promenade
11
architecturale’ – tentative as the restricted site
prevented its full development – the term was
applied directly to the Villa Savoye: ‘In this house
occurs a veritable promenade architecturale, offering
aspects constantly varied, unexpected and sometimes
12
astonishing.’ The idea was, for Le Corbusier,

5 Le Corbusier’s Villa
La Roche promenade

6 Hans Scharoun,
competition entry
for Königsberg Stock
Exchange, 1922, a
plan based on
pedestrian
movement

7 Hugo Häring,
competition entry
for the Berliner
Secession Gallery,
1926, first floor plan
(redrawn). The
staircase becomes
the sculpture
gallery

8 Hans Scharoun,
Wohnheim at the
Breslau Werkbund
Exhibition 1929: the
contained path onto
the terrace

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connected with the picturesque, the film theories of building can be glimpsed as sketched by Le Corbusier
Sergei Eisenstein, games of perspective, and scientific in the Oeuvre Complète. Passing the trees, the car turns
theories of space and time, as well as with the right into the clearing around the Villa. The
possibilities afforded by the careful curatorship of southern facade remains purposely dumb and is
routes. It also drew on his idea of savoir habiter, which lower than the northern, where the build up of
derived in turn from his interest in the rituals of rooftop solarium adds height [10]. The main
13
ancient mystery religions such as Orphism. For accommodation is visibly concentrated at first floor
Scharoun, rather literal ideas of flow were already level, since the rooms below, set back behind pilotis,
explicit in early projects like his curving competition are painted green to recede from view. The car drives
entry for Königsberg of 1922 [6] with a plan shaped by within the pilotis on the right side of the building,
route, and Wegführung (literally way-leading) became past a curved screen of vertical slatted mullions with
a dominant concern in all his later work. He had also flashes of the internal hall. It turns a quarter circle to
long been ready to accept the irregularities of a site stop on axis outside the main door in the north side,
and to build in an asymmetrical and irregular a double metal door surrounded by glazing with a
manner. The general vocabulary shared with his
mentor Hugo Häring implicitly involved movement,
concerned not so much with architectural objects as
14
‘happenings’, ‘processes’, and ‘occurrences’, and
with the idea that form (or rather Gestalt) should not
be imposed but rather discovered. Häring’s
remarkable Secession art gallery project of 1926 [7]
centred on the experience of ascending a staircase
15
that was also a gallery room, a clear case of
promenade inviting comparison with La Roche. He
was slightly ahead of Scharoun for not until the
Schminke House do we see the dawning of a new
spatial sensibility related to shifts of angle and
directional use of stairs. In earlier projects, staircases
were tightly contained and routes constrained by
parallel sides. A typical example is the path leading to
the terrace of the Breslau Werkbund building of 1929
[8] which, bounded by low walls, compelled
pedestrians unambiguously to follow through,
rather than leaving them a choice and attracting
them with an unfolding of views as at Schminke.

The drama of arrival

Villa Savoye was always intended as a weekend house,
and its link with central Paris was the motor car, a
piece of technological magic that appears alongside
the Parthenon in Vers une architecture. The Villa stands
at the top of a hill. Arrival by car takes you along a
low rubble wall, past the white entrance lodge [9] and
to the left along a line of trees through which the 9

9 Le Corbusier, Villa
Savoye entrance
lodge

10 Villa Savoye, south

elevation

10

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 design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 113

single concrete step as threshold. This door marks

the point where the column grid changes between
the outside pilotis and the interior structure, so a
beam protrudes centrally, supported by a lintel
within [11, 12]. The visitor passes through to be
confronted by the ramp, daylit from above in the
otherwise gloomy hall [13]. The spiral stair to the left
turns away, offering no real competition to the main
route [14]. The visitor takes the ramp and proceeds
upwards, guided by the steel handrail set in the solid
balustrade, reaching a full left turn at half level. As
the ramp continues to first floor, the hanging garden
to the left is progressively revealed through
horizontal glazing. Reaching the landing, the visitor
veers right through the glazed door of the main
living room: it is not directly opposite the ramp,
though it could have been. The way divides [15]. It is
equally possible to open the solid door into the
hanging garden, a room open to the sky and roughly
11c
square in plan, a cloister-like space to stop and reflect.
Although the tiles of the route are set on the
diagonal, those of the hanging garden remain
parallel to the walls, giving more sense of repose [16].
Out in the open the ramp continues, repeating the
same pattern of movement. The balustrade on the

11 a–c Villa Savoye,

ground, first and
second floor plans

12 Beam over front door

13 The ramp dominates

the spiral staircase at
the entry

11b

12

11a 13

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14

14 The ramp of Villa

Savoye

15 The first floor landing

16 The hanging garden

17 Promenade
architecturale

18 Jacob’s ladder from

Poésie sur Alger
(1950)

15

right is solid, curving into a handrail. There is again a
landing half-way, the wall just high enough to
prevent views out. The visitor turns once more onto
the last leg of the promenade, seeing the view
actually entitled promenade architecturale in the Oeuvre
Complète [17]. The balustrade to the left is now of steel
tube, making the ramp more open and precarious.
To the right, a white flue pipe anchors the flowing
composition vertically. At the top is the solarium
terrace, and the ramp ends opposite a rectangular
opening with view to the valley beyond. This is the
famous last frame of the promenade. Close
inspection reveals that the wall is set back from the
side of the building, giving the frame a hitherto
unsuspected depth. The whole promenade, which
follows the topos of Jacob’s ladder so prevalent in the
work of Le Corbusier [18], is a switchback journey
from darkness to light in order to ‘find the sun’,
augmented by the manipulation of colour, rhythm
and proportion.
16

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 design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 115

Schminke’s promenade
Visitors to the Schminke House would also arrive by
car, seeing the two-storey house not frontally in the
traditional way but stretched out on the diagonal
before them like a ship steaming across the garden,
its near end a cascade of steps, terraces, rising
roofline and projecting winter garden, decidedly
asymmetrical [19, 20]. The car enters the gates, swings
around in the short drive, and draws up alongside a
cantilevered steel canopy projecting from above the
front door [21]. Canopy, wind-lobby and vestibule
lead through to a point where the open-plan living
room suddenly opens up as the visitor progresses,
forcing a choice of direction [22]. Half the width of
16 the passage is faced by the staircase, which starts
straight but swings around 26° to the right,
privileging a further swing to the right at the top as
well as guiding ground floor visitors around. The
wall to the left is blind, concealing the service
quarters, but half right is a long volume serving as
dining space with an end window opening to a near
garden view. Another window admits light at the
head of the stairs, but is half hidden by the hanging
wall of the stair, a linear element setting further
stress on the diagonal. As the visitor turns, the wide
opening to the main living room comes into view,
the right-angle turn seamlessly completed. The
visitor is here presented with a richly layered but
more conventionally parallel-sided perspective [23].
The long, light-filled living room gains sun from the
17 right and views through floor-to-ceiling glazing on

19

20

19 Hans Scharoun,
Schminke House as
seen from street
(pre-restoration)

20 South side as first

built, with entrance
canopy to left

18

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21

22 23

21 Entrance lobby and

canopy

22 View on entry of
diagonal stair and
dining corner

23 The living room seen

on axis with the
solarium beyond.
Sunlight comes from
the right and the
valley view is to left

24 Turn into the

solarium from the
living room, with the
planted winter
garden to the left and
diagonal steps to the
upper terrace
beyond. The
reflective lamp
fitting with its
projections and
perforations
announces the
switch of angle

24

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the left, the built-in sofa suggesting an angle of
contemplation that embraces both hearth and
grand piano. Visible beyond is the yet brighter
solarium [24], its winter garden set on the sunny
right, while the angled glass partition slants
leftwards, invoking curiosity about what is around
the corner. The best view of the garden remains
concealed, for the wall to the left is at first blind – a
wall of books – but as the visitor progresses it opens
to reveal the garden and to expose the end terraces.
25 Garden plan
(redrawn)
26 House jutting out
over garden
25
26
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design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 117
Curiosity is whetted by the angled solarium with its
marble floor and perforated ceiling, but the visitor
must pass through its semi-obscured glass partition
and turn left before gaining the long view of distant
trees and hills.
Enticed further through floor-to-ceiling glass
doors and into the outside air on a brick-floored
terrace, the visitor reclaims the vertical dimension.
Now the sunken garden with its large round pond
appears [25], and one is poised above the landscape
after a progress that was entirely horizontal. The
garden, lavishly reworked and richly planted by
Hermann Mattern and Herta Hammerbacher, invites
– even demands – exploration. Steps from the terrace
plunge to a central path, now of random crazy
paving, which leads over a bridge between ponds and
onward to rising borders, smaller paths of stepping
stones leading up to the corner summerhouse.
Contrasting areas of planting form a chain of
outdoor rooms which reward further exploration,
and the visitor looks back from the garden’s corner
to see the house in its most famous and romantic
view, jutting out and over [2, 26]. If progress to the
first floor is permitted, a shallow right turn at the
stair head opens into a passage towards a glazed
door. Passing through, one is deflected left by a
skewed wall onto the upper terrace and towards a
one-person sized projecting bay addressed to the
17
corner view and best panorama from the site.
Similarities and differences
In comparison with the prevalent brick and timber
technology of 1930, both houses must have appeared
weightless and transparent: Savoye revelling in its
thin pilotis, daring cantilevers and continuous
horizontal windows; Schminke boasting its fully
glazed east end and terraces hanging in the air. Both
exploited a new vocabulary of abstraction involving
rendered and painted surfaces inside and out which
removed material impact and evidence of structural
support, but the two architects took different
attitudes to the landscape. Both houses stand in
relation to other elements: in the case of the Villa
Savoye, the boundary wall, trees and lodge. But Le
Corbusier treated his villa as an object of
contemplation, his ‘Virgilian dream’, poising it above
the ground as a pure free-standing whole with its
main outdoor space on the first floor, and presenting
the building’s exterior as an object for sculptural
contemplation. Leaving the ground as pure
greensward was essential to the concept, for any kind
of differentiated garden would detract from the
purity. Scharoun, by contrast, set Schminke’s long
thin body as a barrier between drive and garden,
requiring transition through the house to discover
it. His building is no pristine object, and mundane
service elements to the west are unseen backs.
Instead of detaching the house from the ground he
dug it in, creating a cellar with brick retaining walls,
some of which rise into the ground floor. Passage
through the house was horizontal, continuing into
an elaborate and highly contrived garden, full of
paths and outdoor rooms, and centred on water [27].
This was a landscape not to be looked upon but to be
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118 arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 design
inhabited and explored, and it even entered the
house with the earth-floored and ponded winter
garden, a device Scharoun was to repeat in many
later houses [24]. For Le Corbusier the site was
idealised, by definition flat, slight changes of level
being corrected by bulldozer, but Scharoun accepted
and exploited the drop between house and garden to
create his drama of out and over. Similarly, Le
Corbusier placed Savoye parallel to the site boundary
for a commanding position visually, but
compromised on the ideal north-south orientation,
which is surprising given his advice to the visitor ‘to
18
go and find the sun’. Scharoun set his house’s main
body strictly on the east-west axis, allowing the
conflict with the site boundary to provoke and enjoy
its key 26° angle change [4b].
In line with the Jacob’s ladder topos, the Villa
Savoye is about vertical movement. The placing of
social rooms as piano nobile was a natural counterpart
to placing garage and services beneath, following the
tradition of Renaissance palaces where ground level
was given over to goods, servants and stables. The
terrace was the beloved roof-garden, and the
solarium above offered yet purer contact with the
heavens, set behind a screen for naked sunbathing: in
early versions there were also second floor
19
bedrooms. The house is a particularly good
exemplification of plan libre because the three floor
plans are so resolutely different. With his anti-
normative approach, Scharoun had no such
polemical intent, and his cellar plan went
20
unpublished. Although the ground floor revels in
transparency and freedom, his upper floor follows
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27
27 House seen from
mid-garden path
tradition as a string of bedrooms including the east-
facing main one, although the upper terrace is
essential as a visible climax, even when unvisited
[28b]. The sets of stairs, consistently and visibly placed
on the same diagonal against the house’s main body,
have an inviting and guiding role essential to the
architectural character, and they do this even
without having to be climbed. In Le Corbusier’s case,
by contrast, the ramp is the clear choice to gain the
first floor, and the visitor entering the terrace sees it
rising further and is impelled to follow to the roof.
Despite the existence of some late design versions
21
without it, the Villa Savoye without ramp is surely
unthinkable: it introduced a key component in Le
Corbusier’s vocabulary and prompted countless
ramp-dreams in others over the next half century.
The ramp dramatises progress and route in drawings
and photographs, successfully switching attention
from facade – the traditional architect’s front – to the
centre and inside of the house, necessitating
imagined movement and supporting the idea that
22
architecture is four-dimensional. This is not just
due to the ramp itself, but to its position at the centre
of the house, dividing inside from outside both
horizontally and vertically. It brilliantly overcomes
the danger of the building being too stratified and of
swapping plan paralysé for coupe paralysée. This
potential weakness may be the reason that sectional
representations of the building are omitted from the
carefully composed Oeuvre Complète.
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Small-scale place-making
Le Corbusier famously said ‘Une maison est une machine
à habiter’, became known as a leader of
‘functionalism’ and, with the Charter of Athens,
defined the four functions of the city as separate
zones. Functionalism was therefore rhetorically
important in his early work, but was a word he came
to regret, even expressing abhorrence as it denied the
23
‘magical’ qualities of architecture. With Savoye
there is clear zoning between ground with its service
accommodation and the first floor, but not so much
above, where living and sleeping mixes in various
combinations in the developing versions, though
first floor bedrooms generally occupy the south-east
side. This is unusual for Le Corbusier who was fond of
zoning; bedrooms and living rooms are, for example,
segregated in the Villa La Roche. Scharoun was also
interested in zoning, and consistently planned
houses with separate appropriately orientated wings
for sleeping, living and service, perfectly exemplified
24
in his idealised ‘Weite’ house project of 1928. At
Schminke these same territories are still clearly
differentiated, with service to west and in the cellar,
ground floor given to open-plan living rooms made
as spacious as possible, and a dedicated bedroom
floor with efficient cabin-like minor bedrooms and
corridor storage.
In the late 1920s, Modernist concern for health and
hygiene was widespread, sanitation was a pressing
social concern, and Modernist architecture found
one of its most effective roles in the sanatorium.
Scharoun showed no great interest in expressing
lavatories and bathrooms: he laid them out
efficiently, but tucked them away in a discreet and
conventional manner. For Le Corbusier, however,
28b
28a
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design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 119
even sanitaryware had a significance, and the shock
of meeting a naked wash basin for ritual cleansing
on entering the Villa Savoye was no accident [32]. It
was among the objects classified as objets-types,
providing strong forms both small-scale and human,
which occurred as incidents in the plan like the
glasses and bottles in his Purist paintings. Curving
bathroom walls were compositionally advantageous
and even necessary for the making of plan libre, as a
small-scale vocabulary setting curves and diagonals
against the regulating grid, and in contrast with the
well-proportioned geometry of the whole. Folding a
wall around a bath or WC was further a celebration
of the body movements within, part of savoir habiter,
as Le Corbusier called the simple rituals of daily life.
This meshed with his interest in the four elements,
evoked at Savoye by the contrast between the blue
bathroom with its mosaic-clad body-shaped recess
and the fireplace of the salon. Scharoun’s place-
making interest was as ritualistic as Le Corbusier’s
but differently focused. It concentrated on the
dining table and built-in sofa, the music corner and
built-in winter garden. He was concerned more with
creating purpose-designated rooms and sub-rooms,
and setting them in designated wings with
appropriate orientations. In earlier projects there
had been a strong differentiation of territories, but
in the open-plan areas, elements rattled about
25
unconvincingly. At the Schminke House they came
together [23, 28a]: the built-in sofa diagonally related
28 a, b Schminke House, 29 a, b Preliminary
final ground and first ground and first floor
floor plans plans with straight
stair (redrawn)
29b
29a
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to hearth and view; the wall of books giving way to
full glass then multiple panes; the piano fitting a
convenient corner beyond the hearth; a hint of
winter garden with cacti to the right. The solarium
beyond is brighter, has a marble floor, and visibly
turns rightward, but arguably the greatest visual
impact comes from the reflecting light fitting on the
ceiling, a perforated plate with alternating domes
and voids that picks up the change of territory and
plan geometry in a new rhythm. This was just one of
a series of artificial lighting devices with a crucial
place-making role, identified in the ceiling plan with
nine specific functions [30]. Even when switched off
they provided a skyscape and measure to the space.
An essential rhythm
It is in the area of proportion and measure that the
two houses are most different. For Le Corbusier an
underlying geometric frame was essential. Buildings,
like paintings, had an underlying geometric order
that could be proved with regulating lines, and that
gave them an innate sense of harmony, Purism’s
26
primary aesthetic. Composition depended on an
interaction of special incidents like stairs, ramp and
irregular screens set against the regular background
of the rational system. Columns were essential, vital
for the moulding of space, and the pilotis were the
first of the five points. As Colin Rowe remarked, its
circular section, used so strategically in Savoye,
‘tended to push partitions away from the column’
which meant that it did not aid the delineation of
structural cells. Further it ‘offered a minimum of
obstruction to the horizontal movement of space’
27
and ‘tended to cause space to gyrate around it’.
Scharoun relished equally the possibilities of the free
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30
30 Schminke House, 31 Postcard from 32 Villa Savoye, the
ground floor ceiling Scharoun to the basin on entry
plan showing light clients ‘The life-ship
fittings dedicated to at full steam ahead: it
specific uses serves you best for a
fresh and joyful
struggle’
plan, but for him there was no compelling rhythm,
no abstract system, no magic proportions or
regulating lines, and he had little affection for the
column. He wondered impatiently why everything
28
had to be straight, and was prepared to experiment
with whatever angles and curves the situation might
suggest. Schminke’s steel frame is no celebration of
structure: instead the I-shaped columns are as light
as possible, the visible ones few and thin. Scharoun
even painted their sides different colours as
camouflage, and the most unwanted column of all in
the winter garden bore a multicoloured
chequerboard pattern [24 – on right]. Developing
plan versions show columns placed differently,
revealing that, far from setting a primary rhythm
like Le Corbusier’s, they were positioned
contingently to allow space to flow unimpeded. This
did not mean a lack of scale or rhythm, but rather
that interacting rhythms were set by different
elements, so the use of multi-paned windows in
contrast with single large sheets of glass, for
example, provides cues about scale and distance, but
in a complex and varying way. In many works of that
period Scharoun added patterns of repeated circles
and squares as painted borders or etched on glass,
which would throw the layers of the vista into relief,
playing also with the effects of transparency.
For the author of the Poème de l’angle droit it would
have been unthinkable to start planning with 45° or
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31
32
30° axes as Frank Lloyd Wright did, even worse to
throw the protractor away and accept a naughty 26°.
But Scharoun had long been experimenting with
given site angles, and they had become an
inspiration. With Schminke he had the problem that
the garden and views were to the north, the owner’s
large factory to the south. Initially, with the sketch
design ‘Löbau 2’ [4] he had tried to set the house as
far as possible from the factory while enjoying
southern orientation, using the far corner of the
site. A garden plan in his own hand indicates water,
terraces, areas for play and sport, even flowers, fruit
trees and a rockery: integration of house and garden
was always in mind. But the valley view and existing
garden were preferred, so the site next to the factory
was chosen instead. Scharoun now aligned the main
body of the house directly east-west, allowing both
south light and views to the garden. Taking the angle
of the eastern site boundary, he skewed both ends by
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design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 121
26°, which gave the best long view to the solarium
and set it in the middle of the garden [4b, 25]. We
know that the advantage of the diagonal stair was
discovered late, for a completed design went to
tender with the stair set on the entry axis [29a, b].
Only when the house proved too expensive and had
to be reduced was the stair given its twist [28a, b]. Its
new position let it mediate between the axis of entry
and the main axis of the house, and it also came to
share its angle with the external stairs at the east
end, setting all vertical transitions consistently on
the diagonal. Some of his earlier designs had skewed
29
wings, but without much impact on interior space.
The diagonal stair became a key element in
Scharoun’s planning vocabulary, so that by the time
of the Berlin Philharmonie of 1963, it became the
main way to guide people through the building. It
was his equivalent of the Corbusian ramp and
perhaps more important, for the ramp was not
included among the five points.
Asymmetry
For Modernist architects educated in the early
twentieth century, the default method was to design
symmetrical buildings with central axial approach,
following the dominant Beaux-Arts teaching, even if
the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts architecture
30
had provided some alternatives. Under the
leadership of figures such as Wright and
Mendelsohn, Modernists of the 1920s struggled to
escape such automatic symmetry, and in this battle
31
both Savoye and Schminke play significant roles. Le
Corbusier set up a house with more or less
symmetrical facades that can be viewed frontally, but
he chose fronts of four bays with a column in the
middle denying entry, and the centre-line of Savoye is
not the traditional axial route, but the division of the
ramp. Only at the ramp’s end does the visitor occupy
dead centre, and the turn is the traditional dogleg,
both ramp and stair returning classically to their
starting points. The movement of the car is
reinterpreted rather more radically: it arrives not in
an outdoor room – the traditional cour d’honneur –
but under the house, entering to park there, an
intrusion demonstrated by a diagonal. So while
experience of entry is of the utmost importance, it
breaks the Classical mould at almost every point.
Even so, with his love of pure forms and regulating
lines, and his platonic belief that ‘geometry is the
32
daughter of the universe’, Le Corbusier produced a
house of regular symmetrical form from the
exterior, its formal qualities even elevated by
suppression of material and texture. Whatever you
believe about the mathematics of proportion or the
legibility of regulating lines, it was a stunning
composition. Its rectilinearity made it obedient to
the convention of perspective, eminently
photographable and transmissible through print.
Both buildings allude to nautical architecture in
form and detail, but the Schminke House is most like
a grounded ship, its prow projecting over the sunken
garden. Scharoun even sent a jokey postcard to the
client with a sailor on scrutinising the horizon with a
telescope [31], envisaging the projecting corner of the
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122 arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 design
upper deck as a crow’s nest. Ocean liners had
appeared in Vers une architecture and many architects
admired the clean lines of ships, but Scharoun
actually grew up in Germany’s busiest port,
Bremerhaven. While developing his new architecture
33
he visited shipyards in search of details. Porthole
windows recur, and his Breslau Wohnheim of 1929
even boasts a structure like a ship’s bridge [8], but his
pursuit of the ship-like was no mere affectation: it
provided a radical alternative to the prevailing
building culture both visually and technologically.
Furthermore, ships were longitudinally
asymmetrical, normally being approached from the
side, while Scharoun’s house is not frontal, but
approached on the diagonal and asymmetrically
entered. Its S-shaped route depends on the angle-shift
given by the site and the interplays at both ends, and
stairs always run forward, moving on in plan as well
as section and never returning to the same point. The
whole concept is not just mobile but radically
asymmetrical, everything contributing to the
projection towards garden and view, from relative
opacity at the west to maximum transparency at the
north-east. His planning contradicts Le Corbusier’s in
its ambiguity of angle, the turns in space presented
in a new way to bring a sense of openness later
34
defined as ‘aperspectivity’. The house is less
photogenic than Savoye, and lives in print mainly
through two images. The famous diagonal view of the
solarium pushing out and over the garden [26] is
advantageously exaggerated by a misread perspective
due to the plan angle. The axial view of the living
room [23], contrastingly allows a faithful perspective
since the space is parallel-sided, and thrills with rich
display of incident. The photographer must have
worked hard on the print, though, to reconcile the
contrasting lighting conditions.
Conclusion
It is impossible to discuss the difference in
promenade between the two houses without also
first noting some more general differences in the way
they were conceived and what they represent. Both
houses belong to the initial period of high
Modernism with large areas of glass, abstract white
surfaces, flat roofs and transparency between spaces,
and both go out of their way to celebrate the arrival
of the car. But while Villa Savoye represents an ideal
in Le Corbusier’s work, intentionally exemplifying a
vocabulary and modus operandi (including the five
points) that is essentially normative, the Schminke
House, like much of Scharoun’s other work, revels in
its contingency, unrepeatable. The 26° angle shift
that prompted some of its main design inventions,
for example, is specific to the site, not re-applicable
except as a very general principle. And while Savoye is
triumphantly object-like, reducing its site to a
panorama and playing its inside-outside games at
first floor level, Schminke embeds itself in the land,
engaging with an Arts and Crafts type of garden
comprising trees, pond and many outdoor rooms,
changing in scale, and even invading the house with
plant beds. Although Le Corbusier challenges
traditional conventions of symmetry and frontality,
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he respects tradition with the universal cube and
cylinder, and pursues consistency of scale and
proportion supported by the theory of regulating
lines. Geometric control is crucial and the regularity
of the columns sets the rhythm against which
organic shapes of lavatories and bathrooms are
allowed to play. This has the advantage of readable
perspectives, while Scharoun’s house is more
difficult to visualise from photos. He departs further
from the rules, disdaining the grid, treating
structural columns expediently or disguising them,
hiding complex framing behind hanging walls, and
allowing apparent scale to change from one part to
the next. His design strategy relies more on specific
place-making with built-in sofa, dining table,
bookshelves, solarium, greenhouse, dedicated lamps,
and so on. This was not done without geometric
discipline, but the rules are many and complex, not
returning to a single rhythm. The Schminke House
represents a freeing up of planning geometry that
was taken further in the vernacular-clad houses built
during the Third Reich, re-emerging after the war
with a spatial and experiential architecture rather
35
than an object-based one. There could scarcely have
been more contrast in the two architects’ political
circumstances in 1933, for while Le Corbusier’s
burgeoning reputation was boosted by leadership of
CIAM and the Charter of Athens, Scharoun was stuck
in Nazi Germany, able neither to produce overtly
Modernist work nor to publish, and not until the
completion of the Philharmonie did he fully regain
international recognition.
There remains the central question of the
promenade. That it was of crucial importance to
both architects is not in doubt, for in each house it
marked a substantial advance in architectural
vocabulary and spatial understanding. In Le
Corbusier’s case the crucial gesture was the ramp,
which invited and marked progressions, linked
layers, and gave centre to the plan, while progressing
also from inside to out. But like his staircases it
returned to its point of departure with a forced end
turn, that might be a bore trotting to and fro in daily
use. Scharoun’s innovation was the diagonal stair,
which he suddenly understood as a means of
switching between axes and more generally
controlling the sense of direction through the
building. In addition, the 26° shift shared by the
stairs against the dominant axis of the plan induced
a dynamism that he was to exploit repeatedly, for
beckoning staircases guide the spatial sequence in
most of his later buildings. Like Asplund and Aalto he
preferred a running stair to move through a
building, shifting the point of arrival from floor to
floor. It differentiates the floors, but is of course less
economical than the dogleg and does not combine
with a lift. In tall buildings the logic of service stacks
takes over and the dogleg wins, but the whole
experience of movement becomes subservient to the
structural grid. When standardisation and
prefabrication came to dominate in the 1950s and
’60s, the occasional Scharounian free stair, going
where it wanted to and enticing one to follow, was a
great relief, and its progeny are legion.
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Notes
1. Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier and the
Architectural Promenade (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2011); Peter Blundell
Jones, Hans Scharoun (London:
Gordon Fraser, 1978 and Phaidon,
1995).
2. F. R. S. Yorke, The Modern House
(London: Architectural Press,
1934); Henry-Russell Hitchcock
and Philip Johnson, The
International Style: Architecture since
1922 (New York: Norton Press,
1961), first edition 1932.
3. For a critical history of the house
see Tim Benton, The Villas of Le
Corbusier (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987).
4. This is discussed extensively in
Josep Quetglas, Le Corbusier, Pierre
Jeanneret, Villa Savoye ‘Les Heures
Claires’ 1928-1963 (Madrid: Rueda,
2004).
5. The Schminke House was the last
house designed by Scharoun in an
overtly Modernist way before the
Nazis imposed a compulsory
vernacular style, after which
Scharoun was obliged to disguise
his houses externally while
continuing his experiments
within. Peter Blundell Jones
reported on this in his Hans
Scharoun and more extensively in
‘Hans Scharoun’s Private Houses’
in The Architectural Review,
December 1983, 57-63. He has
speculated on the effects of this
forced concentration on the
interior more recently in ‘Hans
Scharoun and the Interior’, in
Designing the Modern Interior: From
the Victorians to Today, ed. by Penny
Sparke, Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble
and Brenda Martin (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2009), pp. 159-69.
6. Not only the covers of books on
Scharoun such as Eberhard Syring
and Jörg Kirschenmann, Scharoun
1893-1972: Outsider of Modernism
(Cologne: Taschen, 1982) but also
general histories such as Alan
Colquhoun, Modern Architecture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002). This represents a radical
change of opinion from the earlier
assumption that Scharoun’s
exteriors were ugly.
7. The white rendered Modernist
work between the Weissenhof
house of 1927 and the Schminke
House of 1932 constitutes a
stylistically distinct period in
Scharoun’s oeuvre which ended
abruptly with the rise of the Nazis,
not to be replicated in his work
after 1945 in which the emphasis
was more spatial.
8. The existence of working drawing
plan versions with and without
the diagonal stair is clinching
evidence that it was discovered
with this house. Peter Blundell
http://journals.cambridge.org
Jones first pointed this out in
‘Private Houses’, and acceptance
seems to have been universal.
9. Established by Henry-Russell
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson with
their eponymous exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in New
York, 1932.
10. Scharoun had won the
competition for the site plan of
Siemensstadt against Gropius and
the rest of the Modernist group,
and had planned and built the
most ingenious flats there. He had
also built a block of flats on
Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin
highly praised by Julius Posener
precisely for its fine detailing: see
L’Architecture d‘aujourd’hui, no. 2
(1932), p. 47ff.
11. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,
Oeuvre Complète Volume 1 (Zurich:
Les Éditions d’Architecture, 1946),
p. 60.
12. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret,
Oeuvre Complète Volume 2, 1929-1934
(Zurich: Les Éditions
d’Architecture, 1946), p. 24.
13. See Samuel, Promenade.
14. The verb geschehen, the noun
Vorgang, etc. The significance of
this vocabulary was stressed by
Scharoun’s wife Margit, his
longstanding assistant Alfred
Schinz, and by Häring’s secretary
Margot Aschenbrenner.
15. See Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo
Häring: The Organic versus the
Geometric (Stuttgart: Axel Menges,
1999), pp. 73-76.
16. For further detail see Samuel,
Promenade.
17. For further discussion of the
garden and its relation to the
house see Peter Blundell Jones and
Jan Woudstra, Some Modernist
Houses and their Gardens Part 2: The
House of the North and the Pleasure
Pavilion, Die Gartenkunst, 1 (2002),
123-134.
18. Oeuvre Complète Volume 1, p. 187.
19. See Benton, The Villas, which
includes plans of several versions.
20. Not publicly seen as far as we know
until Klaus Kürvers’ essay in
Funktionalismus 1927-1961, ed. by
Max Risselada (Delft:
Publicatiebureau Bouwkunde,
1997).
21. Again shown in Benton, The Villas.
22. The central concept in Sigfried
Giedion’s Space Time and Architecture
(Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 1941).
23. André Wogenscky, Les Mains de Le
Corbusier (Paris: Éditions de
Grenelle, n. d.), p. 41. See also Colin
St John Wilson, The Other Tradition of
Modern Architecture (London:
Academy, 1994), p. 55 for a further
critique of Le Corbusier.
24. An entry for an ideas competition
held by Velhagen and Klasings
 
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design arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 123
Monatshefte in 1928, vol. 18, for a
modern house. The wings for
living, sleeping and service are
differentiated but the route is not
much developed: see Blundell
Jones, Hans Scharoun (1995), pp.
70-71. The same idea is present in
the built version of his Weissenhof
house, in the model house for the
German Garden and Industry
Exhibition at Liegnitz of 1928, and
in the Möller house project of 1931.
25. For example the ‘Weite’ house
project of 1928.
26. See Le Corbusier and Ozenfant
‘Purism’, reprinted translation in
Modern Artists on Art, ed. by Robert
L. Herbert (New Jersey: Prentice
Hall, 1964).
27. Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the
Ideal Villa and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1976), p. 145.
28. ‘Warum muss alles gerade sein?’ letter
from Scharoun to Adolf Behne, 8
June 1923, cited in Hans Scharoun
Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Texte, ed. by
Achim Wenschuh (Berlin:
Akademie der Künste, 1993), p 73.
29. Such as the Breslau Wohnheim of
1929 and Möller house project of
1931, which we do not have space
here to illustrate.
30. Everywhere the irregular
alternative met with conflict: in
Germany Muthesius was attacked
by the classicising Ostendorf, in
Sweden National Romanticism
gave way to classicising Swedish
Grace, in England Charles Reilly
achieved dominance with his
Beaux-Arts method over the Arts
and Crafts despite the efforts of W.
R. Lethaby and Halsey Ricardo.
31. Both architects had planned
buildings in the axial Classical
manner. This is evident and well
known in Corbusian examples like
the Villa Schwob, but Scharoun too
had felt obliged to plan following
conventional Classical models in
his Expressionist competition
designs: see Gelsenkirchen
Cultural Centre and Dresden
Hygiene Museum, both 1920,
included in Blundell Jones, Hans
Scharoun.
32. See Christopher Green, ‘The
Architect as Artist’ in Le Corbusier,
Architect of the Century (London: Arts
Council Exhibition Catalogue,
1987), pp. 110-18.
33. Letter from Scharoun to Georg
Claussen, Wesermünde, 1927,
thanking him for a visit to the
shipyard and requesting details,
reprinted in Peter Pfankuch, Hans
Scharoun (Berlin: Akademie der
Künste, 1974), p. 77.
34. The use of the term in an
architectural context occurred
with the National Theatre
Mannheim competition project
1953, in relation to ‘aperspective
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124 arq . vol 16 . no 2 . 2012 design
theatre’, but the philosophical
background was Jean Gebser,
Ursprung und Gegenwart of 1948
which took aperspectivity as its
central concept and was
enthusiastically received by both
Scharoun and Häring.
35. For examples of the houses of that
period and a discussion of how
enforced concentration on the
interior may have biased the work
permanently, see Blundell Jones,
‘Interior’.
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
© Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Hans-
Scharoun-Archiv, 2, 6, 8, 20, 22-24,
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26-28, 30, 31
Peter Blundell Jones, 1, 19, 21
Peter Blundell Jones (redrawn after
Scharoun originals in the
Akademie der Künste, Berlin), 4, 7,
29
© FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London,
2012, 3, 12-18, 32
Laurence Pattacini, 25
Flora Samuel and Steve Coombs, 5,
9-11
Biographies
Flora Samuel is Professor and Head of
Sheffield University School of
Architecture. She has published
extensively on Le Corbusier including
Le Corbusier and the Architectural
Promenade (2012).
Peter Blundell Jones is Professor of
Architecture at The University of
Sheffield and the author of Modern
Architecture Through Case Studies as well
as monographs on Hans Scharoun,
Hugo Häring, and Gunnar Asplund.
Authors’ addresses
Prof. Flora Samuel
Prof. Peter Blundell Jones
School of Architecture
The University of Sheffield
The Arts Tower
Western Bank
Sheffield
s10 2tn
uk
f.samuel@sheffield.ac.uk
p.blundelljones@sheffield.ac.uk
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