Vessels and landscapes: a special reciprocity

Extract

Here was the house, its heavy walls built of the stone of the mountain, plastered over by groping hands – in feeling and material nothing but an artificial reproduction of one of the many caverns in the mountain-side. I saw that essentially all architecture of the past, whether Egyptian or Roman, was nothing but the work of a sculptor dealing with abstract forms. The architect’s attempt really was to gather and pile up masses of building material, leaving empty hollows for human use […]. The room itself was a by-product.

(R. M. Schindler)

By 1911, Rudolph Schindler had concluded that all architecture in the West leading up to the early twentieth century had been fixated on structure and mass, in stark contrast to the new ‘space architecture’ he championed. His dismissive categorisation of the traditional room as some kind of evolutionary relative of the cave is a reminder of the moment when a strand of Western architecture blossomed from containment into openness; from a predictable past to an exciting and uncertain future – the gift of modern architecture.