Señorita

Essay written by: Alejandra Ferreyro

Rachofsky House
By Architect Richard Meier

 



Introduction


Architecture is a social art. Is the concern about the needs of society, is the art of finding solutions to spatial problems. The architect has the ability to transcend the role and reach unknown places Architecture seeks to be innovative and different. The idea of creating newspaces with meaning for society. But not only that, but also listening to the users, and what they want, need and wish. Is fulfilling the dreams of others and build them. Architecture is the art of creating unusual houses and buildings, is breaking down stereotypes and create what was previously known.

Richard Meier is known to make modern and simple architecture. He is the younest architectto receive the highest accolade, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Meier’s root come from the best, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe. “Architecture is a tradition, a long continuum. Wheter we break with tradition or enhance it, we are still connected to the past”. Richard Meier has become on of the greatest architects from the 21th century.

The RachofskyHouse is not a museum, but it is also not a home. The 11,000 square-foot, three-story building is a one bedroom bachelor pad/art gallery house and it is centrally located on 3.2 acres of land. Its client is Howard Rachofsky, and extravagant stockbroker and artcollector. Rachofsky wanted Richard Meier to desing his home after falling in love with Meier’s High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Mr.Rachofsky lived there a short period of time before getting married.

In this essay it will be learned how Richard Meier accomplished that, by building the Rachofsky House. We will learn on how the Architectural Theory and Design Methodologies applies to this house; using two books and comparing them with knowledge from Meier’s Rachofsky House. First we will see the where of the house, then thehistory and its memory. For who it was build, how it was build. The flexibility of it and its use, and its structure. We will learn the essence of the house.


2
 

¿WHERE?

 
In the words of Richard Meier, the purpose of the Rachofsky House is to provide a place of residence and a feeling of relaxation. Atmospheres are perceived through human emotional sensibility. This form ofperception works incredibly quickly (...) Humans are capable of immediate appreciation of a spontaneous emotional response of accepting or rejecting things in a flash (Zumthor 2006, 13)” (Barragan 89). The house itself feels free, open; but at the same time you feel enclosed. From inside of the Rachofsky house you feel part of the art, but also, you feel part of the nature, of the outsideatmosphere. “All of the spaces of the house, works of contemporary art, and vignettes of the surrounding landscape combine to animate the interiors of the house. Grass, trees, pond and sky are visible from every angle of the house.” (Architects statement online)

“One might accuse of formalism an architect who does not absorb into his work the particular and characteristics contents suggested by theambiente” (1955, 201) (…) Let us resist the affected cosmopolitanism which in the name of a still shallowly felt universal style raises the same architecture; identical architecture in both the country and the town. Let us seek rather to blend our works into the preesistenze ambientali, both the natural surrounding, and those created historically by human genius. (1956, 3) (Forty 133). In Meier’sRachofsky House we can experience that, the house does not blend contextually at first sight, but it in a strange way it does. “Dallas es un lugar extraño. Se diría que quienes viven allí no siempre saben dónde está “allí” y que con frecuencia lo cambian de localización(...) Pues bien, está casa es Texas, vasta, ambiciosa, mayor que la misma vida, pero aún por vacío para asir el instante en que la...