the story of the villa müller

(Image: The marble hall of the Villa Müller in 1987. Taken from Villa Müller A Work of Adolf Loos)

"Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art". Adolf Loos.

This is a post about architecture and change and about how antithetical they are to each other. While artworks are protected from change, preserved in a state of constant newness and displayed as their author intended, architecture is usually offered no such protection. Its fate lies in the hands of those who own and use it who are generally under no particular obligation to preserve buildings in aspic. You might say that this is the key difference between art and architecture and that architects should therefore stop considering their designs as art. Perhaps they should, in fact, follow Adolf Loos' dictum that architecture is rarely an art and when it is, it is usually because it is uninhabited. But, inevitably, things are more complicated than that, even for Adolf Loos.

Consider the story of the Villa Müller. Designed by Loos in 1930 for a wealthy industrialist and his family the villa has been used at various times as a family home, a repository of the Applied Arts Museum of Prague, the office of a state publishing company and the headquarters of the Marxist Leninist Institute of Czechoslovakia before its current incarnation as a museum. If you read the architectural history of the Villa, the narrative suggests strongly that after being neglected and mistreated for many decades, the building has been now been 'saved' and will be preserved for posterity. Saved from what though? Saved from being the headquarters of the Marxist Leninist Institute or from being  a family house? Either way, the suggestion is that these various forms of occupation were somehow a threat to the building.

On the face of it this seems reasonable. Historic photographs (see the image at the top of this post) reveal that the Marxist Leninist Institute didn't care too much for the artistic credentials of the building and were happy to place a fridge in front of one of the most famous walls in architectural history. Buildings can be badly or carefully maintained, although in the Villa's case it seems to have been pretty well preserved. But there is a deeper assumption here which is that buildings need to be emptied of inhabitants in order to survive the 'problem' of occupation. In the Villa Muller's case it has been turned into a museum with the result that it now forms both the vitrine and the exhibit. Roped off from sticky fingered children and faithfully restored to its original condition, the house is finally free from danger.

Many of the iconic buildings of the early twentieth century have gone this way. Originally designed as family houses, their importance as Architecture has now exceeded their use as Buildings. They have in effect been requisitioned, withdrawn from the everyday world of messy occupation and preserved exactly in the manner of artworks. I've visited many of them and I'm grateful that they're there and open to members of the public in a way that they wouldn't be of course if they were still lived in, but it still strikes me as strange.

A few months ago I wrote about Konstantin Melnikov's own house in Moscow, a building currently occupied by his grandaughter. The house isn't in great condition but it still serves as a family house.  There are, inevitably, plans to 'rescue' it though and to turn it into a Melnikov Museum. The house, we are told, is in danger, and must be rescued from occupation. Implicit in the proposal is an assumption that the present occupier, despite being directly related to the architect and having therefore a fairly decent claim to ownership, is not looking after the house sufficiently well.

Architecture attempts to resist change at every level. You could even say that buildings only really become architecture when they perform a function that removes them from everyday life. They are usually photographed when newly completed, before people arrive and begin irrevocably to change the building and its spaces. They are rarely photographed again, at least not by architects who are happy to use the same set of photographs of their projects decades after the project has been completed. To be considered successful architecture must somehow remain faithful to its moment of completion.

Sometimes if it is deemed sufficiently important it might be saved from occupation and preserved forever in this original state. The ultimate dream of architecture is to be left free of the burdens of use and occupation, and to become a kind of tomb, or a monument to itself.