Maison a Bordeaux

Rem Koolhaas, Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

Exterior Vs Interior
Nathan Rawlings
Architecture, Year 1
UCA Canterbury
nrawlings@ucrative.co.uk
Word Count: 1667
This essay will briefly explore the career of Rem Koolhaas, taking an in
depth investigation of the genre of his works, focusing particularly on
the key features and elements of the Maison De Bordeaux. Including the
failures of design within the interior spaces and how they contrast with
the successful exterior facades shown in the BekaFilms producation of
‘Koolhaas Houselife’. The house was designed for a gentleman with a
disability, who was sadly paralysed and left to live the rest of his life in a
wheel chair. This essay will look at in detail how Koolhaas took this into
consideration when producing a design, what barriers he had to
overcome and how he designed functional elements and kept them
aesthetically pleasing for the inhabitants. Paying particular attention to
access between spaces and levels.

Rem Koolhaas born in 1944 is an award winning Dutch architect, architectural

theorist, urbanist and Professor in practice of “Architecture and Urban Design”
at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, USA. Koolhaas
studied at the Netherlands Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam, at the
Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. Koolhaas is the co-founder and principal of the
Office for Metropolitan Architecture, also known as the OMA, and of its
research-oriented counterpart AMO (Architectuur Metropolitaanse Officie),
currently based his hometown of Rotterdam, Netherlands. Other building that
Koolhaas has designed and been involved in are the Casa da Música in Porto,
Seattle Central Library, Washington and the Netherlands Embassy, Berlin.

The Masion a Bordeaux, completed in 1998 is a private 500m 2 home built into
the hill with panoramic views over the French city of Bordeaux and Garonne
river with no nearby neighbours. The two-time award winner building,
including the ‘1998 TIME Magazine Best Design of the year’, was ‘designed
for the intimate life of a family’ after the client was involved in a car accident
and now depends on a wheel chair to live and move. ‘The husband told the
architect “I do not want a simple house. I want a complex house to define my
world…” (OMA, 2010)

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The architect proposed a house of three levels. The ground floor, half-carved
into the hill, accommodates the kitchen and television room, and leads to the
garden. The bedrooms of the family are on the top floor, built as a dark
concrete box. In the middle of these two levels is the living room made of
glass where one contemplates the valley of the river Garonne and Bordeaux's
clear outline.

L'ascenseur
This key feature is the heart of the house and the most important feature to
improving the lifestyle of the husband, for whom this house was designed. It is
a three by three and a half meter elevating platform located in the middle of
the house which allows the husband to move freely between the three floors,
creating extra living and kitchen space depending on which floor it is stopped
on. It also creates its own space as a personal office and grants the husband
access to the two-storey bookshelf (Figure 1) and wine cellar in the basement.
None of the floors are complete without having the platform stop on that floor
which creates a sense of dead space and incompleteness to the building as a
whole.

Figure 1: Elevating platform.

Les Escaliers
There are 3 sets of stairs in total including a spiral staircase. The spiral
staircase in particular is very striking. It is made of triangles emerging from the

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wall to make a very steep and tight stairwell that connects the top and middle
floors. “It’s narrow, but it’s enough for the hoover and for me” (Koolhaas,
2008). It is also quite a dangerous feature to use as you could easily slip and
injure yourself on its shiny metal finish and it is such a tight stairwell with no
hand bar to hold yourself on to with if you were to fall.

The other stairs are simple staircase made from concrete. Connecting from
the lower level to the first level, another from the bottom to the top of the
house.

Le Joystick
There is no key to the house. The ‘joystick’ is a multifunctional device that
allows the owners to open the front door from the outside by simply pushing
or pulling the joystick it is also a light bollard that brightens the entrance
during the night. The only way to open and close the door from the outside is
by simply pushing or pulling on the ‘joystick’ that will automatically open the
door sliding it into the wall. There is a button on the inside to shut it behind
you. The ‘joystick’ is disabled when the alarm to the house is switched on with
a remote device.

Les Vitres
There is a lot of glass on site all
different shapes and sizes from
dynamic holes on the top floor to long
and tall glass panels on the second
floor to make the whole wall. (Figure 2)
Figure 3: A view of the house at night.

Some windows have been cleverly designed and

disguised so that they blend in with rest of the fabric
and let in maximum amounts of light. The frames of
these windows are made out of the same material
as the whole house, concrete. This makes them far
to heavy to operate by hand so the residents must
depend on the operating system in which, when you

4 Figure 2: Indoor circular window

turn the handle on the circular window the whole circle spins on a vertical axis
allowing the operator to open it easily and stay in control. (Figure 3)

The smaller dynamic holes that frame different parts of the view across the
Bordeaux countryside (Figure
4) have three different
theories to the windows have
been arranged. The first,
positioned at the eye level of a
standing child and adult and
also of a wheelchair user so
that when they walk across
Figure 4: Dynamic Windows
the house they see different
part of the view. The second
theory is that the dynamic holes connect to different stationary points in the
house for example bed, desk and sink, to the closest outside point. The third
theory is that from the same stationary points it frames the view over
Bordeaux.

Hublot
The theme of the circle follows into the outside space where it does a similar
task of allowing access from the
garden into the woods that
surround the house though a
circular concrete door that spins
on its vertical axis. This portal
has a different pattern on each
side to match the pattern on
either side of the outside wall.
This portal is different though as
it can spin freely and with much

Figure 5: The 2 circular portals

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more ease than the one on the inside, with a simple bolt on the inside to stop
it spinning.

L'emplacement
From the details giving to use the picture painted in our minds say that the
house tucked away in the middle of acres of beautiful French fields, far way in
the piece and quite. On the other hand from these picture I found on ‘Google
Earth’ can imagine a very different picture. You can see from the ‘Google
Maps’ snap shot (Figure 6), the long road up to the house (marked within the
red circle) which feels you are far away but it is actually very close to a airport
and major motorway which must be quite noisy at different times at the day.
The positive aspect is that from this Google Earth image (Figure 7), you can
see that from the top of the hill the house is situated on, you can’t even see
the huge car park but indeed look across over the Garonne River.

Figure 6: Google Map image showing birds eye view Figure 7: Google Earth image showing the house
of house in red square and local environment. and view across the river.

Fin
In conclusion, after reading many articles and watching ‘Koolhass Houselife’
by Ila Beka & Louise Lemoine, I feel that this house has not lived up to the
expectation gained from our initial view of the building. I was bitterly
disappointed with the interior architecture, design and furnishing with the
exception of the elevating platform. I would have hoped that the interior
designer or residence, took as much time as Koolhass did to design this
striking building. But it seems that it was rushed and is still unfinished with

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many of the rooms a still portraying their original boring, dull concrete colour.
From the film camera moving around the interior of the building I got the
feeling that this building is has some of the same aspects as an enclosure.
This feeling was created by the thick, dull, grey walls, though-out the building,
giving the building the status of a structure, more than a ‘home’ to a family. On
the other hand Koolhass had created pieces of architectural genius which
save the building’s reputation I think, for example the elevating platform, portal
windows and general layout of the building in particular how it is set back
within the hillside creating different ground levels form different views of the
house.

Combined with the section of the brief I have read that was giving to Rem
Koolhass and what I have seen from the film. I think it is safe to say that the
more complex a house is the more things there are that can go wrong.
Structurally and electrically. For example in this house the husband wanted
the house to be complex. So after designing has finished it is easy to see the
flaws in it. For example the elevating platform. If every book is not on the
bookshelf right the platform will get caught and therefore stuck, leaving the
person operating it stranded waiting for assistance. And across the footbridge
that connects the two sides of the second level it is impossible to open both
doors at the same time. Also from the film we were unable to see how the
house could cope with one of the main priorities, keeping water from entering
the house though gaps in the window fittings and damp in the floors. It is
apparent that a house of this status is not looked after in the right way.

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Bibliography.

Films:
Koolhaas Houselife (2008). Directed by: Ila Beka & Louise Lemoine [DVD] Beka
Films.

Journals:
Filler, Martin (2010) House Life in a Koolhaas. In: The New York Review of Books

Websites:
OMA, (2010) Maison a Bordeaux, France, Bordeaux, 1998.
http://www.oma.eu/index.php?
option=com_projects&view=portal&id=19&Itemid=10 (Accessed on: 3.12.10)

Images:
Figure 1: Werlemann, Hans. Elevating Platform. At:
http://www.oma.eu//images/photocache/stories/Bordeaux/bxdiapo6x6-
085_1000x35x90.jpg (Accessed on 3.12.10)
Figure 2:Werlemann, Hans. At:
http://www.oma.eu//images/photocache/stories/Bordeaux/bxdiapo6x6-
082_560x374x90.jpg (Accessed on 3.12.10)
Figure 3: Ila Beka & Louise Lemoine. At: http://www.we-make-money-not-
art.com/wow/0aakoolniiisisi.jpg (Accessed on 16.12.10)
Figure 4: Ila Beka & Louise Lemoine. At: http://www.we-make-money-not-
art.com/wow/0aakooolkoool.jpg (Accessed on 16.12.10)
Figure 5: Werlemann, Hans. At:
http://www.oma.eu//images/photocache/stories/Bordeaux/0275_008_560x37
4x90.jpg (Accessed on: 3.12.10)
Figure 6: Google Maps. At: http://maps.google.com/ (Accessed on 28.12.10)
Figure 7: Google Earth. At: http://www.google.com/earth/index.html (Accessed
on 28.12.10)