‘Baench House’ Hans Scharoun

People don’t need to break their lives into little boxes—either in their day-to-day lives, or in their homes.

Hans Scharoun thought it wrong that people should be squeezed into boxes—that the outside shape should dictate the life inside.  He thought that the inner life of the house should generate the form in its entirety—or as much as possible, in the case of the 1935 Baensch House, since the rules about street-frontages in this case dictated a ‘box-form’ to the street (left). [More about this kind of ‘Mullet Architecture’ here.]

Nonetheless, within the constraints upon him, Scharoun (the designer of the justly-famous Berlin Philharmonic Hall) crafted a remarkably open feeling of spatial flow encompassing half-a dozen changes of level, producing a remarkably relaxed place in which to live.

See if you can work out where on the plan each of these pictures was taken.