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House for Karl Friedrich Schinkel - Japan Architect Competition
Johannesburg, Gauteng
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| A competition entry submitted by Pancho Guedes to Japan Architect in 1979. The competition brief was prepared, and the entries adjudicated, by the architect James Stirling. The competition brief - published in Japan Architect - read as follows: Advice from the Judge It is normal for a "one off" house to be designed for a particular somebody. The problem is to find a somebody familiar to all architects and students. Who better than a well-known, famous architect like Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier? though both designed their own houses. Mies van der Rohe might be a good subject because he seems to have spent much of his life living out of suitcases or in anonymous apartments. But his work (which would be an influence) is for many of us too mono-stylistic. John Soane, with his catholicity of taste, would be an excellent subject, though he also built his own house (The Soane Museum). But I have chosen as the person for whom contestants must design a house, Soane's contemporary Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781 to 1841). Though usually regarded as a neoclassicist, Schinkel was a Gothicist. He has been referred to as the first modern architect and as the first eclectic architect. He was active at the time in history when austere neoclassicism (Biedermeier) could easily have developed into modern architecture and design without a break in continuity or the intervention of the Beaux Art and Victorian styles. Today, as the sustaining force of the so-called abstract, modern style in art, architecture and, furniture runs out of steam, we look further back than the immediate past to an architecture richer in memory and association and related to a thicker layer of history (perhaps to something similar to Soane's and Schinkel's view of Greek and Roman architecture but to Egyptian and Gothic architecture as well). In the hypothetical situation posited for this competition, after achieving success, Schinkel asks his very brilliant pupil (you, the contestant), to design a family house for him. This pupil is indeed gifted, because he has foreseen in his daydreams the entire development of the modern movement up to 1980. Therefore he (you) can assume that the competition requires a modern or neoclassical house, or a modern neoclassical, or classic neomodern, or any mixture he likes (you like; the terms modern and neoclassical are here used in their widest sense and are applicable to either the period of today or the period of Schinkel, or to both). It is arguable that little has changed in the program for a house since Pompeii - except the inclusion of electric wiring and plumbing. As architects, we probably all have ideas about our own Ideal Villa; and Schinkel, with his wide cultural interests, would (then, as now) require, in addition to several bedrooms (approximately six), a library, a gallery, a conservatory (winter garden), a dining room, and other living spaces. Accommodation is required for a small staff of servants (living room, kitchen, two bedrooms) and stables or garages (three cars), garden outbuildings, and a small swimming pool (inside or outside?). The site [100 m x 100 m, one hectare in extent] is on unbuilt land near a large city (in Europe, the United States, Japan, or other region) in an area of transition between town and country. The land is flat; and within its boundaries there are a stream; an area of woodland; and a small, steep hill rising seven meters. These are to be included in the design along with an orchard and a walled garden. There should be a wall along the boundary of the site as other houses are likely to be built adjacent. The choice of orientation (north-south) is a design element. The climate is approximately similar to those of Berlin. Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, and so on. required drawings paper drawing materials identification deadlines announcement of winners prizes notes Shinkenchiku-sha regrets to be unable to answer requests for information on this competition other than the instructions given above. ______________________________ Pancho made a submission of a competition entry to Japan Architect but was ultimately not placed. His design was based on a square house plan set with the diagonal on a vertical north-south axis. A substantial tapered flight of stairs gave access into a circular double volume entrance stairwell. under a conical roof. The square plan was punctuated by another three circular turrets - also with conical roofs - at each of the other three corners. A square internal courtyard was in turn inscribed with a circular colonnade at ground floor and a circular collonaded gallery at first floor level. ______________________________ Pancho Guedes constructed an elaborate story to define the context and detail design of his competition entry for the House for Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1979. His story is prefaced with references to two actual items, but the rest of the text is clearly the product of Pancho's fertile imagination. Pancho repeated the story in a talk delivered to the AA in London shortly after the competition entry had been submitted. A crisis An interlude about an architectural crisis. Like most such crises, it turns out to be a crisis of a formal nature. The architectural crisis is a crisis of a formal nature which happened during the fifteenth century. The crisis in those days was that the tents wanted to become bastions and the bastions wanted to be tents. In the beautiful painting of "The Field of the Cloth of Gold", where Francis I is meeting Henry VIII (1520), many of the tents have cloth battlements and look like stuffed castles. There are many other such examples in pictures of sieges and encampments. Chambord was the resolution of the crisis. The bastions won. There is a little known symbolic fountain (Ill. 11) that I love very much at the Contento da Manga in Coimbra, Portugal, which is a late-ish reworking of the style. The date is about 1533 and the work therefore is quite reactionary. The fountain consists of a central circular dome resting on a colonnade and four little bastion chapels with tent-like roofs. Each circular sentry box chapel is accessible through the door which doubles up as a draw-bridge. Once a monk got in to pray he raised the door and shut himself off from the world. The fountain is attributed to Joao de Ruao, a French sculptor and architect who came to Portugal to work for King D Joao II, but there is a legend that the king himself designed it and drew it on his sleeve and that when the workmen needed to consult the plans they would ask the king to show them the drawing on his sleeve. It is hard to believe that the king did not ever change his shirt. These meanderings have been a pretext, a manner of introducing another entry for a Japanese competition – the house for Schinkel which you all entered for as well. I want to read to you the story which accompanied the drawings, as I show them to you. From the diaries of Thiago Grosso, Schinkel's favourite pupil (recently sold at Sotheby's), one is able to understand the nature of the relationship between Schinkel and Grosso. These diaries cast a new and entirely different light upon their friendship – showing Thiago's gigantic creativity influencing and disturbing Schinkel and finally causing him to stop designing himself. It is Thiago who convinces and accompanies Schinkel on that well-documented tour through France, Spain and Italy, and it is Thiago who insists that Schinkel visit the Loire Valley with whose architectural fantasies Thiago is familiar, having been born and brought up at Chambord and Blois, the only son of the papal representative. The chateaux, with their strange mixture of gothic and renaissance architecture, have an extraordinary effect on both men, and it is the impact of this visit that changes the course of their careers. Upon their return to Berlin, Schinkel buys a plot on the recently demarcated suburbs west of Berlin on the edge of the Grunewald district. The plot has a view to the south onto the river Havel. Schinkel asks Thiago to design his house. This Thiago does in a matter of days, and Schinkel is so enthusiastic about the design that he immediately begins the construction. Because of the may political convulsions of the epoch the house takes seven years to complete. This permits the development and refinement of many ideas and the incorporation into the design of the many wonderful scientific discoveries of those times. Schinkel often sends Thiago on buying expeditions to Italy, to recently liberated Greece, to the Middle East and to Egypt. The spoils of these artistic raids result in the famous and unique collection of sculpture, painting, artefacts and furniture today in the Schinkel museum, having been lovingly and painstakingly reassembled after the last war by Mathilda Ungers. Thiago's idea for the house is an inversion of the Villa Rotunda plan set at 45º and curiously bastioned at each extremity into a memory of Chambord. The house itself is rigorously related to the diagonals of the square site. To the west of the house and transfixed by the cross axis is the walled garden. It is a folly, and its plan is a reduction of that of the house. It is a ruined fortification with the remains of a circular temple in the centre. The outer walls are in stone from an old Bavarian building bought and demolished for this purpose. The ruins of the circular temple are the central core of the Temple of Venus at Pratolota in Corsica, which was brought to Berlin by Thiago. This architectural ancestor of the house is entered from the south through a ramped terrace which is split on its west side by the stream which meanders through the site. The steep hill, rising seven metres, is to the east of the house and sufficiently south to catch the later afternoon sun. The orchard is split into two and laid out formally in two sweeping curves bordering the drives. The swimming bath (just a small plunge pool) is both inside and outside. It can be enclosed at will by the motorised glasshouse which Schinkel designed in his old age. The water is heated during the winter. On the opposite side of the swimming pool, and complementing the symmetry there, is a hothouse for the strange collection of exotic plants that Mrs Schinkel so loved and displayed so brilliantly in the central winter garden. The diaries describe the changing of the course of the existing stream to run through the three pools adjoining the house and the folly (Ill. 12) to cast reflections and display the swans of Schinkel's youngest daughter, the well-known soprano Karin Gregotti. The existing area of woodland on the three inner boundaries is carefully maintained, with the exception of some of the trees in front of the lounge which impeded the view to the Havel and the distant Hundekehlesse and are replaced by smaller trees. One enters the house through the very broad flight of steps guarded by the pair of superb Egyptian Middle Kingdom lions for which Thiago designs the bases. The entrance portico, with the fantastic cast bronze doors, leads into the hall with the concealed curved stairs and the very tall central conical shaft, which Schinkel gilds to give the most exquisite blond light. From the entrance hall one passes into the "Galleria" with the central ionic and circular conservatory. It is on the two levels of the "Galleria" that Schinkel's collection of antique and contemporary sculpture and his own stage sets are displayed. On the left of the entrance are the kitchen and other service rooms. On the right are the cloakrooms and Schinkel's very private study. The library, which has a delightful double volume with a metal gallery and a huge round table, occupies the right-hand bastion. The dining room is in the east bastion. It houses the exquisite expandable table that Thiago designed and which Albert Speer bought at the 1937 Schinkel sale. It is the same table that Herman Göring persuaded Speer to give him and which Speer managed to buy again after his release from Spandau, and which he has bequeathed to the Schinkel museum in his will. The other two side wings open onto raised terraces. On the right is the gallery which once again houses the somewhat disconcerting collection of paintings of Schinkel's which consist of both magnificent trecento and quattrocento masterpieces as well as a number of romantic paintings and many peasant and naïve ex-votos. On the left is the central glazed porch, Barbara Schinkel's own sewing room, the beautiful "round room", and the delightful polygonal breakfast room with the Chinese furniture. The round lounge directly opposite the entrance is a belvedere, and in good weather its large windows slide upwards and transform it into a sunny and breezy place with a wonderful view of the Havel and the distant Hundekehlesse. From either raised terrace one descends onto the south lawn through Bramantesque stairs. The bedroom floor consists of six bedroom suites of various sizes, all accessible from the upper galleria. The main suite, which has its bedroom over the lounge, contains a replica of the central bedhouse which was used for firewood when the house was occupied by Russian troops at the end of the last war. Each of the three bastion bedrooms has a circular balcony with plant boxes. The ground floor houses the servants' apartments, service rooms, change rooms and garages for four carriages. The house is centrally heated but some rooms have fireplaces. The house, which now belongs to the Berlin Municipality, was recently restored and houses the Schinkel collection, and is the headquarters of the Schinkel society. The restoration is the work of those distinguished British architects and Berlinophiles, Alison and Peter Smithson. ______________________________ Extract from a talk delivered to the Architectural Association at the time of the exhibition of his work arranged by his son Pedro Guedes. Reference: Pancho prepared the following caption for his competition drawings when they were displayed at an exhibition of his work in South Africa in 2008: When Japan Architect asks Jimmy to do a competition for them, Jimmy is intoxicated by the vapours of neoclassicism and Schinkelitis. He proposes we impersonate a disciple of Schinkel to design the house. I write a story about the building of the house, which just seems to come out. It was out of a dream, where I invent a disciple of Schinkel called Tiago Grosso, which is Italian for 'Fat James'. This was at the time of the great controversy about whether Jimmy had been influenced by a certain Luxembourgian amateur architect, aka LK. And then the story involves the Schinkel family, the opera singer's daughter who is called Karen Gregotti; everybody comes into the story, even the Smithsons end up in it by doing the restoring of the house. Japan Architect sees the story published in San Francisco, and ask to publish the story of the restoration of an upcoming edition of the magazine. Submitted by Pedro Guedes via William Martinson from the Pancho Guedes archive. |
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