A film about this famous house is quite ironic because Rem Koolhaas began his own career as a filmmaker.On a daring late-’80s experiment in form by Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture Perhaps her most well-known film, Koolhaas Houselife, is about the challenges faced by the occupants left behind. Louise Lemoine, who grew up in the house, turned to independent filmmaking.Since then, Gang opened her own Chicago firm and received accolades for her design of Aqua Tower in 2010. Architect Jeanne Gang was part of Koolhaas' OMA team for the 1994-1998 project in Bordeaux."The platform is now about chaos and noise rather than order,” commented Koolhaas in 2005. The architect suggested redecorating, changing the desk and bookcase office-like moving platform into an informal TV room. “The elevator had become a monument to his absence,” Koolhaas told writer Zalewski.So what happens to the architecture designed for specific people? What happened to the people involved with a building that some have called a masterpiece? The platform was no longer needed by the family-one of the complications of "client-centered design." The Koolhaas design was appropriate in 1998, but Jean-François Lemoine died only three years later, in 2001. "-an architectural metaphor for flight which offered an immobilized man unobstructed views of the countryside."īut the elevator, along with the large, round windows designed to be opened by a man bound to a wheelchair, become oddities after the man no longer lives in the house. "The platform could be flush with the floor or it could float above it," wrote Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker. The center of Koolhaas' design for the Lemoine home may have been the client's elevator platform room. The Housekeeper in the film "Koolhaas Houselife" opens a Rem Koolhaas window. Sources: "The Architecture of Rem Koolhaas" by Paul Goldberger, Prizker Prize Essay (PDF) Interview, The Critical Landscape by Arie Graafland and Jasper de Haan, 1996 The starting point is rather a denial of invalidity" "It was not a case of 'now we're going to do our best for an invalid'. "That movement alters the architecture of the house," Koolhaas said. Koolhaas has said that the elevator has the "potential to establish mechanical rather than architectural connections." Bookshelves line one wall of the elevator shaft room where the homeowner has his private living area, accessible to all levels of the house. The floor rises and lowers to other levels of the house via a hydraulic lift similar to ones seen in an automobile garage ( see an image of elevator platform). The wheelchair-enabled owner has his own movable level, a room-sized elevator platform, 3 meters by 3.5 meters (10 x 10.75 feet). This modern villa has another "floating" level that transects all three stories. Instead of dwelling on the width of entry doors, Koolhaas designed this house in Bordeaux around the presence of the wheelchair. Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine / Film Koolhaas Houselife (cropped)Īrchitect Rem Koolhaas thinks outside the accessible design box of guidelines. Interior Lift at Maison à Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas, 1998. Sources: Maison à Bordeaux, Projects, OMA "The Architecture of Rem Koolhaas" by Paul Goldberger, 2000 Pritzker Laureate Essay (PDF) It is dotted with window-holes (see image), many of which twist open. The upper level, which Koolhaas has called the "top house," has bedroom areas for the husband and wife and for their children. The imposing ceiling and floor defy the lightness and openness of this central living area, like living in the open space of a workshop vice. Motorized curtain walls, similar to Shigeru Ban's Curtain Wall House, ensure privacy from the outside world. The middle section, partially at ground level, is open to the outside and enclosed with glass, all at the same time. The lowest part, Koolhaas says, is "a series of caverns carved out from the hill for the most intimate life of the family." The kitchen and wine cellar are presumably a good part of this level. Koolhaas describes the building as three houses because it has three separate sections layered on top of one another. "Koolhaas started with this," wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger, "-the client’s needs- not with the form." Rem Koolhaas designed a house to accommodate an active family man confined to a wheelchair. Middle level interior of Maison à Bordeaux by Rem Koolhaas, 1998.Īnn Chou/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
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