Hans Scharoun, Moll House, Berlin-Grunewald, 1937

About the Architect :

Bernhard Hans Henry Scharoun (20 September 1893 – 25 November 1972) was a German architect best known for designing the Berlin Philharmonic concert hall and the Schminke House in Löbau, Saxony. He was an important exponent of organic and expressionist architecture.

About the House :

This Moll house was created for a married couple, one of which was a painter and the other a sculptor, for each of whom Scharoun created a studio—setting up a relationship with the music room that formed a “spatial triangle” across different levels.

This House, as most of Scharoun houses, is irregularly ordered open-planned concoctions centred around a “middle space” that organised the whole, around which the satellite spaces overlapped according to function and topography—each of which was given its own definition within the larger whole.

Rather than a standardised “system of band boxes,” as he called the “handed down” principle on which so many standardised boxes have been produced, this house is individualised for the client, and the context.

The context of this house, the Moll House, required a traditional face be represented to the street, beyond which the house gradually opened to the gardens and landscape beyond, which for Scharoun were an integral part of the house itself.

references

• Bürkle, J. Christoph: „Hans Scharoun”, Studio Paperback, Birkhäuser, Basel 1993

http://pc.blogspot.it/2010/05/moll-house-hans-scharoun.html

images

Reviewed by Esteve P.