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Joost Meuwissen, 'Houses of desire'. [Translated by John Rudge,] Archis, 8.1993, August (Doetinchem: Misset Bouw, [1993]), 64-80.

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Houses of desire

Joost Meuwissen

A free-standing house can be an attractive assignment for an architect these days because no collectivity, nothing of discipline and punish needs to be expressed. Once thought through to the end, it can be a 'house with no style'[i], i.e. its style is both free and general and coincides with architecture as art. It can be designed as a 'primary house', a structure in which the architect brings together all the formal changes that sooner or later play a part in his oeuvre in a reduced, schematic and hence conceptual fashion without this conceptuality necessarily being an existing concept 'in' architecture, not even the concepts 'house' or 'dwelling'. Rather, it is a concept ‘of’ architecture, what architecture is or could be, that is investigated[ii]. The secret of the assignment is this possibility of reduction without specialization, without specification, a reduction that retains architecture as a whole. From this point of view the free-standing house is a more theoretical than practical assignment, and this is underlined by the fact that practical issues such as urbanism, dwelling or garden can be quite simple or even totally absent. The ideal model that Mies was to devise was the patio house, which was in fact, curiously enough, another type of building – in the sense that a patio house could be regarded as the most free-standing dwelling type, one which has least to do with the responsibilities of the natural, urban and social environment[iii].

In his Shinkenchiku competition for a 'House with no style' – ­an openly critical response to the tragic Shinkenchiku competition for 'A style for the year 2000' of a few years back – Rem Koolhaas describes the winning entry as such a 'primary house', as a reduction to an architecture which, as he put it elsewhere, “as a result of the electronic revolution (...) has been relieved of responsibilities it has never been able to cope with, a new freedom which could be aggessively explored”[iv]. An architecture of greater modesty than in the past but with unforeseen possibilities: “The systematic suppression of elements triggers spectacular panoramas of use, uselessness, of unpredictable categories, It recharges 'what we have' and at the same time destabilises the entire notion of the house in an absolute anti-aesthetic way”[v].

If the house is no longer a concept, there remain only the complex relations between the attributes of dwelling, not 'dwelling' itself, or at least not dwelling as a purely existential or natural category. Everything then becomes furniture. Architectural elements such as door, patio, stair, column and even ftoor become furniture in a sea of dwelling as an idea of architecture, as an idea that architecture is consumed[vi]. Dwelling becomes consumption of architecture. If 'inside' and 'outside' are no longer natural categories but architectural substances which represent the intensiveness and extensiveness of dwelling attributes – their content and extent – the question is to what degree the extension of one piece of furniture is related to the entirely different extension of another, and whether this relation in turn is

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one of extensiveness or merely standing side by side intensively, whereby the latter possibility raises the question of whether this intensity is an existing architectural concept or a completely new content. To what degree does 'house with no style' change the style it ignores? To what degree does it recharge 'what we have '? Can such a change also imply an improvement or a solution to a problem that was insoluble within that style? If the ground plane is removed, not the floor on which people indulge in activities but an observable plane extending to infinity, does that mean that the next floor, the floor above your head, is also removed as a non-observable plane that equally extends to infinity? And if all the elements stand side by side and become vertical, is their internal stacking still understood to be a floor? These are the questions in the new laboratory called architecture.

Raoul Bunschoten: Skin of the Earth

In 'The Skin of the Earth' the house extends over the entire globe, as if the earth were the patio which all patio houses lead to, the definitive patio house, one with unlimited dimensions coinciding with the biosphere, so that the attributes of dwelling – door, bed, tricycle – are then designed on the basis not of their proximity but of the degree to which they in their proximity express the desire for distance; separate from the house, liberated from the house, whereby for example a door has its hinges a long way from where it opens and closes. The door can open in Latvia by being hinged in Uzbekistan. If the house is a planetary monad without scale, then the furniture elements have an indeterminate extent that evokes desire, as if for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The tragic coherence, the collective, tectonic and organic closed state of the 'house' is replaced by an expression of individual desire whose basic metaphors are shaped by those attributes of dwelling which are general enough for the story to appeal to everyone. If a closed door is an “awkward object”, if a door is normally a “constantly reopened wound of the house”, then this means that the melancholy feeling it evokes in its lack of independence could be replaced by a happier feeling if it became independent[vii].

'The Skin of the Earth' is a house, our house. It is the earth's crust, with the rarity of the air, the atmosphere and the stratosphere and then it stops – the biosphere, but with no emphasis on life, only on the higher and lower density of inorganic matter extending horizontally. Matter is extension and extension is matter. It is without limit because on the surface of the earth all limits are internal splits and fractures. Thus the horizon is not a natural phenomenon and the desire for distance is not necessarily a desire for distance in nature. The horizon is not a landscape but an internal fracture, a melancholy knife wound between earth and sky that can be stitched with thread, with architecture. Architecture is strands. If the horizon is horizontal the strands are vertical elements. In general architecture is no more than what is contained in its extension, a piece of the earth's crust, a lump of lava, even if it is concrete. But concrete resembles lava in that it is first fluid, then solidifies and finally crumbles.

Architecture is a piece of the earth's crust lifted, borne aloft and held together by strands and steel rods. The strands want a form of their own, a design of their own, in much the same way that a Greek column both held up a building and indicated its style but was itself not a building but a piece of furniture, an object, a 'royal object' according to Vitruvius. If

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the steel strands, arch supports, crutches, rods, sceptres and walking sticks which hold up the concrete – or ‘congealed vomit’ as Rem Koolhaas describes it[viii] - develop into forms they become elements which both move and make movement possible, as if architecture was an idea of furniture from the outset. The steel evolves into a hinge, to movement that holds together the lumps of lava. Or it goes a step further and becomes a wheel, with which the lumps of lava can move each other around. The prototype of an element on wheels is the tricycle since we learn to walk using one, and from that moment – from when we start walking – the architecture or house plays no further role in our life. With the invention of the wheel architecture ceases to exist. What follows is formulated regardless of architecture.

The tricycle, truly a kind of end to architecture, is followed for most people by the car, that baroque prosthesis, that monad with windows of deceit, in which people are confined more closely than in a prison cell and forced on German autobahns to watch infinitely slowly edited landscape films pass by with an infinitely receding horizon without the desire for distance ever being satisfied. For Raoul Bunschoten the tricycle is followed not by the four-wheeler but by the Viking ship, according to the architect a “vagina” in a swirling North Sea, like the opening up of the desired distance; probably the only structure in the history of architecture to express satisfactorily both the horizon and moving upright, both the horizon as cutting line and 'cutting the horizon' simultaneously expressed in a built elevation, as Piet Mondrian's horizontal and vertical did in paintings[ix].

In general the new means of communication have made dwelling many times more open and public than what the street still offers in the way of the collective. In Bunschoten's 'Skin' dwelling is no longer conceived within traditional distinctions between inside and outside, traffic versus residence, day and night, served and serving spaces or public and private. Anything that evokes a social straitjacket has been left out in favour of an individual appreciation of dwelling attributes whose meaning is fixed as generally accepted basic metaphors so that their design turns them free to give a different, better feeling. It is an individual perception of cultural phenomena. The experimental aspect of 'The Skin of the Earth' is not that it will not be built or lived in like a real house, since it is conceivable that this could still happen; it is that the architect restricts himself to basic metaphors. The project consistently favours a single story line, the horizon, the desire for distance, in which in the end only two historical events occur which can be accounted basic metaphors although experience of them will not be shared by everyone; probably for this reason they are not formulated within the project but only serve to indicate further directions. They are Piet Mondrian's horizontal and vertical and the Viking ship. Although both, one as an image and the other as a structure, outline an ideal model of architecture, they are too specific to be architectural concepts in the strict sense; both tend rather to bid farewell to 'what we have' in the way of architecture.

The difficulty with 'The Skin of the Earth' could be that the autobiographical story could be told by everyone because it stops before we learn to read. The tale of desire for distance is told as a natural succession of basic metaphors without these having any connection in themselves. Like a

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fracture in the earth's crust, they divide an equal condition in their design because what joins them, the house, has become merely extensiveness. The earth's crust may be a base rising

from the depths to liberate the elements from their miserable manifestation as part of the house, as being trapped in the house, by disturbing their shape; yet it also does this by materializing them, so that ultimately even the least material of them, the horizon as the aim of the story, becomes proximity. This, however, was in fact already brought about by the first assumption, the infinite extent of the house, which meant that distance was domesticated from the outset. One could assume that if the basic metaphors were to begin an intensive relationship, for example between door and bed or between window and horizon, they would mix together with their own extensions, their different internal extents, without the benefit of any external extensiveness of the house, however infinite. Materialization would then take a different course. It would have to be less material and hence more conceptual. One consequence would be that in the clash of basic metaphors, in the clash between tricycle and bed, not only would an event take place in the story so that it would become less general and more informative, so that the autobiography is no longer valid for everyone as a general condition of our relation to architecture; but also, and more important, that in the form of such a clash architectural concepts would recur which were to play no role in the story because they had nothing to tell – precisely those concepts from which the project had escaped. And yet this is exactly what happens in Rem Koolhaas's Linthorst House in Rotterdam. Here all extensiveness of the house as ground plane has been rejected, or at least not made the starting point; not in favour of the intensiveness of the house as a whole, for example the house as an egg, but in favour of intensities of separate furnishing elements set against each other directly, with no buffer, so that they can extend along their interface, itself invisible. 'Concealed, internal extension' could be this house's formula.

Rem Koolhaas: Body building

By presenting the Linthorst House as a “collage” of three dwelling types – dyke house, patio house and villa with garden[x] - the architect puts all emphasis on the interior where the three types overlap, not on the exterior. In this sense the types themselves could be thought of from the start as the interior. A dyke house is a house whose storeys are unclear, there being no obvious ground floor; one storey simply stops while another is not really a storey but turns into one. And a 'villa with garden' is a pleonasm, a formula which states that where the garden begins the villa ends. Two of the three types incorporate a denial. Only patio house is an entirely positive term.

A dyke house is normally built on a dyke, so that the front facade has one storey and the rear facade two, with the house forming a canopy over an abyss; this can be viewed as a romantic situation[xi] because the principal facade is the tall one at the rear from which a landscape is seen but which is not itself seen and can therefore be regarded almost as an interior element. The Linthorst House is the other way round. It has no ground floor which becomes an upper storey and finally a view. The ground floor stops, ceases, but this phenomenon is barely expressed in the front facade. The floor above has an uninterrupted view on both front and

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back from a strip window – with a window breast at the front and extending from floor to ceiling at the rear – yet the view has no direction because it is designed evenly on both sides, simply as 'outside', but also because the interior elements form a sequence in the other direction, across, and do not lead one's gaze. The element that would be most suitable for this, the Mies quote, the veined, flat wall that separates the living area from the other functions, has a symmetrical position in the cross section and emphasizes the middle rather than the ends. It has been domesticated and is in wood instead of marble, so that it no longer refers to the outside but only to the inside. It does not shine either and sunk within itself, reflects no light except its own. Moreover, despite its flatness it is not extendable, or rather if it extends it is done by other means. The panels which slide out at each end of the wall have no colour, no texture, no light and in fact no materiality. They are pure darkness. The veined Mies wall is extendable in the form of a negation, a denial not only of its extendability but above all of its intensity as an element of the interior of the house. The wall appears to stand, as a reference to Mies's heavy marble, but the extending panels hang, like wings, without touching the floor. The floor continues underneath unmoved and uninterrupted. When the wall extends, when it makes an evident movement, it flies away and loses touch with the floor. In this way architectural elements – wall and door – are used to define the wall as furniture, as mere interior.

There is the inner, textural movement of the veined wood along which the light steals but only on the outside; not, as with marble, in the depths of the spongy, absorbent material. The light immediately and continuously moves towards the outside and, as it were, evaporates. But when the wall extends, it makes do without light and without surface. Then only its hidden depths extend, not the surface making it part of the house. But the dark doors (one black and the other grey, grey in regard to the dark window breast of the front facade; one 'specifically' dark, the other 'unspecifically') are in turn planes rather than doors which slide out from the wall to just before the facade, not right up to it, in order not to interfere with it and so that the extendability of the Mies wall should be left as mere extendability. In their blackness and greyness they form anything but an inside surface for the incoming light, nor do they lead the eye outside. They cut off both light and view. In general a sliding door is pre-eminently an interior element because it is usually concealed in the darkness of its envelope. In their blackness and colourlessness these doors bring the darkness sliding in with them. The door handle is shaped like a full moon. Thus there is not a single link with the daylight which here, in the middle of the strip windows, behaves mainly like outside light but is quite indifferently cut through by the sliding doors, as if day were cut through by night, as an interruption, as if it were really always day and the night merely a temporary disturbance. The house does not give shape to a natural cohesion of day and night, as if in such a cohesion the occupants were helplessly condemned to such a natural condition, subject to a rhythm they have not chosen. The natural exterior is iconographically shut out. Asked about his experience of living in the house, the proud owner replied, “We have no curtains”[xii]. This draws attention to a very Dutch characteristic of the domestic culture pursued here but is also remarkable from the security point of view given that the owner was the Rotterdam alderman

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responsible for finance and art and later an alderman for the port, for the world's largest port, for the sea, for a depth extending over the entire globe. The architect may describe the Kralingen area of Rotterdam as an “arcadia within the metropolis”[xiii], but it is nonetheless the metropolis as both chaotic periphery and global condition.

'We have no curtains' means: we never look outside, rather in the way that on CNN the word 'foreign' is banned. As it grows dark no curtains are drawn. Evening falls without evoking a tactile reaction. Dwelling does not extend to outside. The 'villa with garden' has no terraces where the floor planes of the house could extend outside and ultimately define the substratum of the garden, the earth, as the fundamental and infinite base, the natural reference for the floor planes in the house. In contrast to Mies's country houses[xiv], here the terrace offers no proximity from which the garden is perceived as distance. The garden is not a visual presence representing a view of a landscape. It is a purely material presence, a heap of mud burying what could have been the garden right up to the house, with little firm ground. The layout of the house refers to no natural base. The narrow terrace running the full width of the facade without interruption, even seeming to extend under the facade as if the latter were floating above its own base, is not a floor plane reaching outside as part of a sequence of floor planes forming the transition to the garden and leading the eye outside. It is an almost mobile element that seems to move more from outside to inside than vice versa. In Mies's country houses the position of the glass facade is deliberately undetermined, or at any rate underdetermined, so as not to disturb the continuity of the succession of terraces. In the Rotterdam house, however, the position of the facade is underdetermined because the terrace extends along it rather than at right angles to it. The terrace functions as the virtual thickness of the facade, as its épaisseur, as material presence without the transparency of glass – a transparency, incidentally, which is only present from inside the house by day and from outside it by night. The consequence is that the position of the facade is really only determined internally, within the facade as an element, and not insofar as it is part of the house. In a sense the terrace could be called the margin of the facade as an item of furniture, the extension of the facade into furniture. Yet the result is that the eye is checked, as if the absent curtains had always been closed.

The house was conceived in the mid-eighties. Rem Koolhaas felt then that behind modernism's puritan front lay some of the most glorious experiments to be found anywhere[xv], as if the depressing look of the modern as a style was intended to keep the unrestrained enjoyment experienced there for itself, to keep it exclusive. So from the outset the 'hidden dimensions' of the modern were regarded as individual pleasure and not as the collective programme modernism had put forward. Nor was this individual pleasure to be derived, as if in a masochistic internalizing, from individual subjection to the discipline and punishment of the modern programmes. The early Exodus project (1972) may suggest something like this in its images and subtitle – 'prisoners of architecture' – but  the accompanying notes make it clear that this is not the intention[xvi]. The 'hidden dimensions' do not lie behind the veil of the modern style, as its programme, but conceal themselves 'in' the veil, like unavoidable weaving flaws, unavoidable because invisible; 'false facts' which can be

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rejected from the programmes but which creep back in the design, i.e. in the modern as style, like spies. “These false facts relate to the real world as spies to a given society: the more conventional and unnoted their existence, the better they can devote themselves to that society's destruction”[xvii].

This does not mean that a style derives the dynamics of its development from this kind of opposition between true and false facts, from a dialectic of construction and destruction, of puritanism and pleasure. Each element, each form, large or small, important or unimportant, can be seen as a possible disturbance of the style as a whole, just as everyone can be a spy and a spy can be everyone. But if everyone is a member of the secret police, without knowing about anyone else's membership, the result is not a more internalized citizenship or intensified social control but a widening of non­-communication in contact with others, of non-style in style, to the point where everything becomes incomprehensible and society ceases to function. The whole is destroyed by all its parts, but everyone has the feeling that he is the only one doing it. And conversely, since the whole need be destroyed only once, it is done by one person or a few at the same time, while everyone believes he has done it and is pleased with his success. In this sense architecture is a laboratory, in principle both individually and generally, and in the end there will be no essential difference between a 'house in the style of Mies' and a 'house with no style'. Mies was not only the modern architect with the least collective programmes and the most general style, but also the most individual in the sense outlined above.

What immediately strikes us in the Linthorst House as a 'false fact' is that the one Mies quotation, the veined wall, relates to the other Mies quotation, the patio, in terms which reject or intensify the quotations in favour of a much more profound phenomenon. What is missing is the extensiveness of their relation, the floor or visual plane on which or in which the elements stand in front of or beside each other, as if they have something to do with each other, as if the marble wall forms the ideal background for the glass wall of the patio. They are both walls and are related if only by that alone. You could say that with Mies the extension of the floor plane as an architectural feature is brought about by the equal identity of the elements that rise from it. Although they look different, they could have developed from each other, as successive stages of the same thing. In this sense the floor plane is a parallel reading direction. But the patio in the Rotterdam house, however different its facades may be, is a three-dimensional form which as a body is modelled on the other elements.

As a glass case filled with air and light, as a smaller version of the house stripped of all inside and outside, of all superfluity and all attribution of meaning, as an ideal aedicule, the patio bears a resemblance to Jeff Koons' glass cases containing vacuum cleaners, but then without the vacuum cleaners because it is already clean, like an image of infinite yearning washed round by the process of dwelling. The patio has no ground and is timeless. There is no changing of the seasons or of day and night. Snow lies there summer and winter. In the evening it is lit from below through the milk­ white glass floor, from the level beneath. Then it resembles an open refrigerator[xviii], an image of unrestrained mental and physical consumption, as if the occupants were meat on display. The patio lies above the gym to form its ceiling, as the crowning of a bodily change which can assume all shapes,

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regardless of whatever the original bodily form was. Is body building anything other than having long taken leave of an original figure? The uncovered quality of the bodies below, open to every possible perception in the privacy of a hygienic space, is continued above in an aesthetic and ideal nakedness of sunbath or moonbath, unroofed but in vitro, between glass, outdoors but artificial, not in a natural space but in a space which within the dwelling is most isolated from that dwelling. Above, people bathe in the motto which modern architecture cherished as its dream but which, as a result of supposed puritanism, under the pressure of that same motto, it had never imagined it could realize except in a spatial (I would almost say naturalistic, non corporeal) fashion: light, air and space, which do not come from outside but which nonetheless fill the patio equally and completely. Modernism as a collecting basin. As ideal transformation of the house, as house in the house, as mental house – a theme whose formula could have been derived from Oswald Mathias Ungers[xix] – the patio shows the modern to be an aesthetic of motionless fluidity, of formless fullness and all-round completeness, of hedonistic potential, of a certain oppressiveness of light, air and space and not of their translation into motion, space or void. The only void in the house is at the stair, the principal element of movement through the house though without becoming a promenade. The stair appears simply as the most mobile element with its length corresponding to the dimensions of the patio, just as on the other side the length and height of the kitchen unit form an interface with the patio.

Apart from being adjacent, structurally the stairs and patio share the same hole in the floor plane; they lie cold and unbuffered against each other on each side of the house's axis of symmetry, or rather of the centre line which is nowhere given shape, not in the serial quality of the facade, not in the layout of the things inside. The symmetry is virtual and underdetermined and can have any effect when determining the relation between the various elements, from joining to separating, from reflecting, doubling, adding and reversing to distinguishing, from complex repetition to unrelated difference. The centre line, or rather the centre plane of the house, its axis of symmetry, does not manifest itself, not even virtually, not even as an idea, but remains invisible in the adjacency of two elements, better concealed than the dividing line between properties in the city. For this very reason it acts as a two-sided base, a background in two directions, a mirror which not only reflects but then reflects the mirror image back again from the other side, and then reflects it again and so on to infinity. Thus a figure always standing on only one side of the mirror achieves autonomy from the backgrounds on both sides. In this way the relation between the formed bodies below and the formless corporality in the patio above can be conceived via the stair, via their physical connection.

As motion, as an element joining not only the floors but also the gym and patio in their floorless and roofless denial of the notion of floor as a natural space, the stair simply lies on the other side of the mirror, on the other side of the axis of symmetry, as if vertical linking only takes place in mirrorland. The elements of the house do not reflect. The elevated rooflessness of the patio is not reflected in the normal floorlessness of the stairwell. Their relation is one of denial and endlessness. Just as the patio is a slice out of the volume of the storey from whose extensiveness it frees

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itself, so the stairwell is a slice out of the extended floor plane of the same storey, so that it is filled not with bodies or corporality but with forms, with figures, with the artificially formed human shapes that rise and descend along a voluptuous, almost trapeze-like balustrade. There is formless similarity of patio and stair in their adjacency, but their similarity is expressed in such a hidden form in the layout of the house that a comparison, to use Frege's terms, can only be one of names, not of things, not of spatiality, not of appearance, not based on identity. A synthesis of body and corporality is not brought about by figure, form or shape but only insofar as the virtual space occupied by that form or shape frees itself from the extensiveness of both body and corporality and abandons the extendability of every horizontal plane, including that of storeys in architecture.

Reduction of floors, of the extensiveness of storeys, leads to vertical planes that are anthropomorphic, manifestations of a body in terms of form, of figure. But to make such bodies actually appear in building materials, as shaped form and not just reference or imagined form, is probably one of the most difficult issues in architecture today. One might assume that this is why Rene van Zuuk, in his house 'Psyche', restricts himself to avoiding the smallest possible upper floor area, that of the top of a capital.

Rene van Zuuk: Psyche

It may be the utterly unarcadian surroundings, but on entering this house one is reminded of Michelangelo and not only of the Biblioteca Laurenziana; not because the stair fills the space by swelling so that the vestibule, marked 'hall' in the plan, becomes a cramped antechamber for something higher, the long, narrow and equally cramped library whose engulfing depth beckons from the top of the stair. Everything is directed towards movement upwards, to higher wisdom stacked in books. It is a neoplatonic entrance where you are never where you are, because by indicating movement everything becomes tangled up in indicating and not in movement, as if an architect's hand had five index fingers and no others. Rene van Zuuk's aim was to “achieve a combination of materials so that the material would radiate an exclusiveness and transcend itself”[xx]. An autonomy of material through intensity, like an Adolf-Loos-style cladding, not through form. And conversely, the more formed the elements, like the four body-building frames supporting the roof like Atlantes, the more inconspicuous and neutral the material. It even seems as if the material hardly matters. Clearly conceived as wooden forms, they are made of steel. Material and form become autonomous solely to be able to step up to something higher, the non-material and informal, as if they themselves were the content of books or, as the architect puts it, 'identity'.

Perhaps because the stair has already transcended its nature as a stair, it does not invite us to ascend. It itself climbs but in frozen movement, in the bulging curve that it forms to the right but not to the left. The stair is asymmetrical, a half, with no hospitable middle, so as to be included in a larger symmetry whose centre line is not intended for people. In the plan the curve of the staircase is reflected in that of the kitchen worktop. The stair, in the space it occupies, is reflected in the space it does not occupy, which is an intelligent definition not only of symmetry but of what a mirror is. In this latter space, with no stair, the space in front of the kitchen worktop, a second stair stands like a

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distorting mirror, a shadow or phantom staircase, a shaky ladder whose movement is not frozen and which is not shown in the plan. Leaning against the wall it underlines the vanity of all architecture – a memento that makes the stair's desire for bookbound knowledge a perilous affair, as if cherishing the desire were itself so intense and dangerous that the books were never reached. The mirror symmetry turns the hall into an art-historical diptych, with on the right the perspective view of the ascending, masculine, Florentine, easy-clean flight of stairs from 1526 where little happens that is not already known; and on the left the neatness of a Dutch genre piece from 1650, the flat cartography of the kitchen worktop, the letter-reading, pearl-weighing woman, the broom, the money bag and the ladder, which tell an as yet unknown story. The house is for a married couple. While the man builds it almost single-handed. the woman earns them a living.

While the stair may resemble in its dream of uninhibited consumption, the full-wax world of Jeff Koons's towers of spotless glass cases full of gleaming vacuum cleaners, the proud owners have to make do with dustpan and brush. It may be because of this confusing allegory, but later, after having visited the house, I read in the De Volkskrant newspaper that the columns do not stand in a straight line but follow the curve of the stair[xxi]. While in general, a straight line appears to the eye to continue after it has in fact stopped, a curve described by a few points has the disadvantage of not becoming manifest. Moreover, the frames remain parallel down to the bottom. They do not bend with the curve but merely shift, as if one after another each would like to establish some measure of individuality. They peer out from their row, or at least their feet do or their legs. Above, all in line at the level of their heads, they carry the same straight gutter, or rather bear up the spine of the huge open book which forms the roof and which is read only from the heavens, not from the house, not in the library. But when the body-building frames already have the book of books in their head, or at any rate collect the tears which fall on it when read by the heavens; as they bear the great book-body, as if their heads were one big tear duct, there is little need for other reading matter.

The latent curve of columns is accurately recorded in a frosted glass screen which divides the 'hall' as an architectural subject from the poky box of bedrooms which tucks into the house from outside like a Corbusian ready-made and in and on which the business of dwelling, whatever that may be, unfolds without much architecture. Like an arch opposing the intrusiveness of the sleeping compartment in order to hide it from view, so as not to disturb the tense quiet of the library vestibule, the screen marks out in plan the choreography of the feet of the columns as a segment from a perfect, centreless Bramante circle. Because it cuts through the house in the way that the frame and stair following the same curve cut through the upper floor, it belongs not to the house itself but to something else. Yet the radius is so large and the bend so slight that this line too is acknowledged as nothing other than an unspecific curve. In order to continue nonetheless as a virtual, ideal line it is not only transparent but reaches out into the surroundings, outside, well past the front door, where the screen makes room for an equally transparent list of forty companies which sponsored the construction. The design won first prize in the 1989 'Ongewoon Wonen II' competition for unusual dwelling forms and was the first house in De Fantasie, an area

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in Almere for dream houses where the normal rules were relaxed, earmarked for permanence from the outset.

The design was born not on paper but from dozens of models. “It's a question of slowly polishing and perfecting until everything is right”[xxii]. The model shows more clearly than the house that the logic of the big curve of the screen concerns not the position of the columns but their form, the attitude they assume. In the model only the upper line of the screen plays a role. Only later does the line bulge out to become the screen. As a construction line the top of the screen indicates the height at which the columns effectively cease and the corbelling of the arches could begin to develop. In the case of an arcade it would be the tie rod but with the anthropomorphic frames it is the waist, navel, belt or rail. As a virtual point it divides the frames into two heights, those of the upper floors of the house. The comparison with trees which the architect himself makes[xxiii] is valid only for the proportion, the dimensions within the frames as autonomous sculpture, as a body without organs, whereby in the overall picture of trunk and top no specific space is allowed for the transition from column to arch. The comparison between column and human body, however, one not drawn by the architect but with a long history in architecture, makes it clear that between the leg and the arm of the frames there is an entire torso, an organic and sensual intervening area, a chest and stomach section whose waist links the dimensions of the frames to the other dimensional systems of the house. As a transcendental line rising above the image of trees or even avenue of trees – and therefore not drawn on the ground but in the air – the curve makes it clear that the frames were conceived from the beginning as part of a house, not as part of a wood. Proportioning on the basis of the clear image of trees, without taking into account the shadow they cast, the image­less scale of the house, would have left the form undetermined. It would have made the frames an object of design, stylized objects in the house, and not an object of architecture or at least of architectural thinking[xxiv]. Moreover, what concerns Rene van Zuuk is not the proportioning of frames but “a construction that is part of the design of the space”[xxv]. That the frames do not bend with the curve of the screen but only move parallel to one another has to do with the frame as concept being all-round, in the analogy with trees, so that as an image it can easily be flat; or rather, in a sense, the straight spine of the roof lying open seeks to rest on all-round capitals, on broadly oriented heads, which in turn can rest on bodies standing in line, so that all-round or diagonal vaults could extend from the capitals. Yet the only vault here is that of the heavens, which is represented by the curve of the Bramante circle but is itself borne by the chapter at which the book is blown open by the wind on the roof.

The difficulty is that as soon as the analogy with trees is no longer an object of design but of content, their individuality plays a role. Since a three-dimensional form would make the frames comparable or even identical things, their potential for individualization lies in the unequivocality of their image, in a flatness of their image as visual plane, so that in turn individualization can be brought about by shifts within this plane. This shifting is integrated into a curve. While vertically the curve describes the scale of the house, in plan it is in turn a segment of a much larger, indeterminate circle, that of the surroundings, the orbit of sun and moon. As a fixed curve,

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the circle is the differential of the columns, but as an unfixed curve it is the differential of what they support, the straight spine of the dead book of the roof. In addition to its bulging into a screen, there are two points when this differential, the diagram of the house as a formula, itself becomes an autonomous form: in the curve of the staircase which follows the same bend but in the third dimension and which to the eye is indeterminate and hence appears as a swollen, Michelangelesque shape; and in the bending torsos of the frames where in a sense it is what determines the virtual shadow the arches might cast in the shifting light of sun and moon in their paths across the sky. It follows that the frames have no mutual articulation in their series. They are merely different manifestations within a series. The all-roundedness of the tree is resolved into flat image. But this contributes to the hieratic quality of the vestibule as a space with a flat, frontal and tectonic succession, in much the same way that in a Gothic cathedral it is precisely the three-dimensionality of the rib vaults which allows the depth of the bays, in the direction of the procession, to be shortened to produce a sequence of much flatter screens. In fact in Almere the frames form an arcade whose arches are broken at the position of their keystone to rise at right angles as a plane. Tectonically, the frames are a column with two half, bulging arches.

We know that frames support; that does not need to be expressed. What matters for their design is not that they support but what they support, the sad book of the “tropical roof”[xxvi] and the desire for deepening, for an upper storey, a library, for the elation of many books. Unlike in an architecture of load and support, here the load is already expressed in the support and no longer needs to appear as load, which is a great relief so that in the second place, the frames express the resulting lightness of the load they bear. Thus they convey downward not only the forces but the meanings, finally, like a Gothic wishing machine, expressing nothing but desire. According to Rene, Gothic is “the technique of stacking up stone blocks to form an arch”[xxvii], leading not to anything other than stacking, but to an oblique, flat cancelling-out of its forces. Remarkably enough, the question of where stacking stops and pressure begins is not mentioned by this technically oriented architect. The distinction between column and pointed arch plays no role. The form is not the starting point. Form is secondary. In the Gothic style voluminous stacking leads up to the empty, flat form of the arch, which as a shallow shape can in turn be applied in all directions at once and so is indeed just 'part of the design of the space' in the canopy system where the corner loads free themselves all round or at least diagonally from the walls, reducing them to background screens[xxviii]. In this sense the curve marked off by the frames is freer and more a subject of desire than that of the screen behind that follows it. From the stylistic point of view, by stacking, the Gothic master builders were on their way full of desire towards something different, towards a different form, a pointed arch. However, the distinction between desiring and the thing desired, between 'what we have' and what we don't have, between column and arch, plays no role in expressing this desire. In a somewhat similar way Raoul Bunschotens's basic metaphors not only evoke but also express feelings, and the elements which enable movement are always mobile themselves. You could say that Rene's frames are also on

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their way towards an arch, except that it follows in the opposite direction, that of their succession. From the start the frames stand in the form of an arch, which is already present in the first stacking. For this reason no capital, no mini-storey, is needed to give shape to the transition from column to arch. While the arched screen as a secondary plane, a plane of adjacency, forms a mirror for the curve of the columns, the invisible plane of the capital, as the resting point from which the arches above should spring[xxix], can be included in the stacking but now as a vertical plane, a torso that is not only a reference but is actually there. A remarkable achievement!