Four names first, then the families they sit among. The four are the ancestry; the families are the record.
The direct ancestry
Each of the four answers a different question, and together they are the whole method in outline: what the medium is, why the body measures it, how form is found, and that it can be built at a price a family can pay.
Adolf Loos — the medium
(1870–1933.) I do not design plans, façades, sections. I design space — the sentence this document opens with, and the one everything in it elaborates. The Raumplan: rooms made by height and level rather than by partition, interlocking so you see between and across them, held inside an exterior that stays a quiet box. Müller House, Prague; Moller House, Vienna. The closest built precedent for principles 1 and 3, and the reason the section decides over the plan.
August Schmarsow — the measure
(1853–1936.) The theoretical origin, 1893: architecture as the creatress of space, with space derived from the axes of the upright human body — front and back, left and right, up and down. Loos says design space; Schmarsow says space is what a body makes. Your space-first commitment and your body metaphor meet in his one lecture more exactly than anywhere else in the record.
Hugo Häring & Hans Scharoun — the method
(1882–1958; 1893–1972.) Häring named it — organhaft building: form discovered by working outward from what the thing must do, organ by organ, never imposed from a geometric idea. Gut Garkau, where the cowshed plan is shaped by the animals and the feeding route. Scharoun is the same conviction built at scale: designed from the inside out, plans that cannot be composed in elevation, exteriors that are frankly the residue of the interior — Schminke House, Berlin Philharmonie. Principle 2 is theirs, a century before this document; of the four, Scharoun's houses are the ones to read closely.
Laurie Baker — the proof
(1917–2007.) Forty years in Kerala: curved brick walls, jaali screens and rat-trap bond, built with local masons at a fraction of conventional cost. The demonstration that the curve is affordable exactly where your site is — that this language survives contact with a real budget and real hands. He is the practical conscience of the whole list: a detail a local mason cannot lay is not a detail yet.
The seven families
The wider record, grouped by what each contributes. The four names above sit inside the first, second and fifth of these, which is where their company is.
1Space as the medium
Adolf Loos (1870–1933) — Raumplan. Rooms made by height and level, interlocking so you see between and across them; the exterior a quiet box holding a complex interior. Müller House (Prague), Moller House (Vienna). The single closest precedent for principles 1 and 3.
August Schmarsow (1853–1936) — the theoretical origin, 1893. Argued architecture is the creatress of space, and derived space from the axes of the upright human body: front and back, left and right, up and down. Your body metaphor and your space-first commitment meet in his work more exactly than anywhere else.
Bruno Zevi (1918–2000), Architecture as Space — the argument that space is the protagonist of architecture and that all other categories are secondary. The book to read if you want the position defended at length.
Frank Lloyd Wright — took from the Tao Te Ching the idea that the useful part of a vessel is the emptiness inside it, and made "destroying the box" a lifelong project. Also the origin of compression-and-release as a deliberate device.
2Form from function, organ by organ
This is the group that will most surprise you, because they arrived at your thesis a century ago and gave it a name.
Hugo Häring (1882–1958) — organhaft building: form should be discovered by working outward from what the thing must do, organ by organ, rather than imposed from a geometric idea. Gut Garkau farm, where the cowshed plan is shaped by the animals and the feeding route. He is the theoretical grandfather of what you are doing.
Hans Scharoun (1893–1972) — Häring's ideas built at scale. Designed from the inside out; irregular, un-drawable-in-elevation plans; exteriors that are frankly the residue of the interior. Berlin Philharmonie, Schminke House. If you read one architect's houses closely, make it these.
Alvar Aalto — the humane version: curved, warm, body-scaled interiors in a cold climate, with light handled as a material. Villa Mairea, Säynätsalo.
3Carving, mass and atmosphere
Peter Zumthor — Therme Vals is literally an excavation: space subtracted from stone. His Atmospheres is the best short account of designing for what a space feels like rather than what it looks like.
Luis Barragán — colour, light and water used to make emotion the deliverable. Proof that "beautiful" can be an engineering target rather than a decorative one.
Tadao Ando — compression and release, and the discipline of a very small material palette.
Sigurd Lewerentz — thresholds, and the refusal to make a detail that does not mean something. St Peter's, Klippan.
4Curves, cells and no corners
Closest to your instincts and the most dangerous. Read them for form and for warning.
Antoni Gaudí — structure and ornament as one thing; curvature derived from how loads actually fall.
Frederick Kiesler — the Endless House: continuous curved space with no beginning or end, conceived as a body rather than a container. Mostly unbuilt, and worth knowing why.
Antti Lovag — argued straight lines are foreign to the body and built bubble houses on that premise. Palais Bulles.
Javier Senosiain — bio-architecture; the Organic House in Mexico City is womb-like and half-buried.
Balkrishna Doshi — Amdavad ni Gufa: a cave-like, hand-built, continuously curved gallery, made with unskilled labour and ferrocement. The most instructive of this group because it was cheap.
The warning shared by most of this group: the shell becomes sculpture, and ordinary life — wardrobes, beds, bookshelves, flat glass — has nowhere to go. Doshi and Gaudí escape it; several of the others do not.
5Hand labour, earth, and warm climates
The practical lineage for Nepal.
Laurie Baker — forty years in Kerala building curved brick walls, jaali screens and rat-trap bond with local masons at a fraction of conventional cost. The most directly useful precedent you have: he proves the curve is affordable exactly where your site is.
Hassan Fathy — Architecture for the Poor; mud brick, vaults and domes built by the people who would live in them, with climate handled by form rather than machinery.
Charles Correa — "open-to-sky space" and the section as a climate device in a warm country.
Geoffrey Bawa — the house dissolving into its ground; sequence, courtyard, threshold. The strongest precedent for principle 4.
6Threshold, in-between, and the senses
Aldo van Eyck — the in-between as a real place rather than a leftover; the doorstep as architecture.
Herman Hertzberger — spaces that invite appropriation and are completed by their users. Directly serves your governing test.
Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language — 179 Alcoves, 129 Common Areas at the Heart, 159 Light on Two Sides, 190 Ceiling Height Variety, 112 Entrance Transition.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin — architecture addressed to the whole body rather than to the eye. The short book most aligned with your premise.
Gerrit Rietveld — the Schröder House upper floor: one space, sliding panels, reconfigured through the day. Principle 3 built in 1924, and it is in Utrecht, an hour from you. Go.
7Your own vernacular
The chautari. The plinth you sit on. The roof you dry grain on. Ranked here deliberately: it is the only tradition on this list that has already passed the governing test, for centuries, without an architect.
Back to the design language, or on to the house it produced.