- One of the very few books devoted to the discussion of these two spatial ideas that developed by Loos and Le Corbusier around the similar historical period. Loos’s Raumplan obviously received much more attention. Speaking of the commonalities or differences between these two ideas, Loos’s treatment to the openings, which was perceptively observed by Colomina, was not much different from that of Le Corbusier (See Joedicke’s essay: Le Corbusier’s own reflection on his visit to the Carthusian monastery of Ema, located in the Florence suburb of Galluzzo – Joedicke discovered that, in addition to this underlying analogy between architecture and the city, is that the fact that the ramp connecting the main entrance of the monetary and the personal cells deliberately leads people to not only the upper level but also the opposite direction of which they came from. In other words, after ascending the ramp, one was expected to look at the place from where they started to proceed). As in Loos’s houses, Colomina detected a sense of theatrical play for both intimacy and control: “not only the windows either opaque or covered with curtains, but the organization of the spaces and the disposition of the built-in furniture seems to hinder access to them… moreover, upon enter a Loos interior one’s body is continually turned around to face the space one just moved through, rather than the oncoming space or the space outside.” (32)
- One thing I agree with the editor of this book is that the static form accommodated the dynamic disposition of the Raumplan with its displaced symmetries and changes of level, “placing maximum emphasis on the difference between the interior (private) and the exterior (public).
LIYANG DING 