[ARCH1201]Villa Mairea_Project2_Space&Material

Villa Mairea is one the modern house that is richly decorated and constructed in terms of its materials. Aalto at the time, was very much influence by the Japanese styled architecture, namely, the Sukiya style, which emphasizes on the proportions, and rustic harmony of spaces. Aalto then, paid a great deal of attention to the materiality, he does not allow completely unprocessed material in his design, instead, he used materials derived from nature to produce their natural feelings. The analyses above abstractly shows the material distribution of the ground floor and the first floor.  The colour gradient reflects the hardness of the material, the darker the colour the harder the material. So in this case, the materials are: (from masonry to wooden) masonry, slate, teak, white beech, turf and tile. The gradually dispersal pattern of these materials also, produced a protective feeling from outside to inside as the picture showed, the arrow pointing towards the very 'soft' core of the building. With the study of the materiality,  it turns out that the pattern somehow echos the spaces of the house, as the exterior, interior and in-between spaces. This blurring space approach is also an important concern of Sukiya style.

In this caption, the model shows the different spaces of the house Villa Mairea. The exterior as the perspex whereas the interior modeled with colour paper covered white card. The dinning room as one of the hot zone of the house, is half internal and half external, the external half is covered with the turf cantilever spread to the sauna room, therefore, it is an typical in-between area that is none exterior nor interior. I used this sliding idea as the dinning room represented with one face transparent and the other three opaque indicates the space is an in-between, the reason for the upper face transparent is because i wanted to create this model viewed both 3D and 2D, in this fashion, look from the above, one could see the difference of spaces, and it makes the 2D drawing easier to understand as well. These overlapping layers of both material and space creates an uncertainty that breaks the boundary, Aalto showed this modern approach in every possible pieces of this house,  windows in this project is not perfectly squared, columns are sitting on the grid lines, and even the grid lines aren't perfect squares. The flexibility and unpredictability is the beauty of the house.