Carved from the Inside

I do not design plans, façades, sections. I design space.

Adolf Loos

Everything below is an elaboration of that sentence. Plans, sections and elevations are instruments for describing space, and they are all partial. The drawing is not the object. The object is the volume of air a body moves through, and every convention of representation flattens it in some way — which is why a design that looks good in plan and good in silhouette can still be a bad space, and usually is.

Two practical consequences, stated up front because they govern the method:

• The exterior is a result. It is the residue of the space, not a composition to be arranged. If the outside is being designed directly, the method has been abandoned.
• The section is the primary drawing, because it is the only one that shows height, and height is what makes a room. Where plan and section conflict, the section decides.

I. The definition

A house is carved out of solid material from the inside; it is organised the way a body is organised; the whole of it is present at once; and it does not end at its walls.

II. The governing test

Does a person use it without deciding to?

You have arrived at this twice from different directions. A chautari is "the only public building in a Nepali village that nobody had to be persuaded to use." A 520 mm plinth is "the height at which a person sits down on it without deciding to."

Both describe design met by the body before it is considered by the mind. An element that has to be explained, signposted or argued for has failed, however elegant its reasoning.

III. The eight principles

1. The interior is carved, not assembled

Begin with a solid mass and remove material to make rooms. The exterior form is the residue of that operation.

Consequence: draw plans and sections before massing. A turntable view rewards silhouette, and silhouette should be arriving last.

2. The body is organisation, not shape

The metaphor governs how parts relate, not what the building looks like. Rooms placed by function and adjacency the way organs are. A spine that carries load and services. The metabolic centre — the stove — at the core, not on an outside wall. Extremities allowed to be cool, thin-skinned, unheated.

Failure mode: literalism. If a visitor can name the body part by looking at the building, the metaphor has escaped into form and must be pulled back into plan.

3. The whole house is present at once

Every part of the house is available to whatever is being done. No single-purpose space, and no space ever out of play. A small house feels large not because of its floor area but because of the length of its longest sightline and the number of places visible from where you stand.

Places are made without walls, by four devices:

• Ceiling height — low over the alcove, high over the shaft, medium between. Height makes a room more decisively than a partition and blocks nothing.
• Floor level — two or three risers define a place more strongly than a wall.
• Light — each part gets its own quality: side light, top light, reflected light.
• Surface underfoot — stone, timber, matting. The foot reads the change before the eye does.

The resolving device is the alcove: a place with its own back, its own ceiling and its own light, occupied without leaving the whole. Total openness is not restful — people want prospect and refuge. Every place must have a back.

Two disciplines make this survivable:

• Visual connection is not acoustic connection. Design them separately. Openness of sight is free; openness of sound is what kills open plans.
• Openness is default but revocable. A closure that is open ninety per cent of the time and shut when a room is needed.

This principle depends on principle 5. A multipurpose space without deep storage in the walls becomes a permanently cluttered one. The tatami room works because the futon goes into the cupboard.

4. Radius is a function of touch

Curvature is differentiated, never uniform. A uniform radius produces a lozenge — a rectangle with a haircut.

The curve is not a luxury. At equal floor area a compact curved plan has roughly 10% less perimeter than the rectangle — less wall, less heat loss, less material — and it removes the masonry corner junctions that fail first in earthquakes. A curved wall also never dead-ends the eye, which serves principle 3.

5. Leftover thickness is inhabited

The technique is poché — the solid between rooms, drawn black in plan. Thick and irregular walls are not a cost of curving; they are where the niches, seats, stores, stair, flue and light shafts live.

Every residual space receives a named function or is filled as solid. A leftover you have decided to fill is a detail; a leftover you have not is a defect.

The insulation line is never cut. Pockets shallower than about half the wall come out of the inner leaf; anything deeper is a local swelling of the inner leaf into the room, not a hole toward the weather.

6. Everything derives from one body dimension

One modulus per project; every dimension descends from it. On the Nepal house, M = 520 mm — sitting height. Plinth 1M, sill and seat and hearth on one line at 2M, floor 7M, terrace 12M, parapet 14M, risers M/3 on M/2 treads, noses M/8, drip throats M/16.

Proportion is legible only against a recurring unit. A body reads as proportionate because it is measured in heads and hands, and the unit should be one the body already knows.

7. Ornament is protection

A body's external features are almost all protective devices at thresholds — eyebrows divert sweat, eyelashes catch dust, nails armour the fingertip. They read as beautiful because they are doing something.

If a feature cannot name its job, it is applied decoration and does not belong. The strongest version: the shading device is the floor slab; the seat is the sill. Nothing to bolt on because nothing is separate.

Shading geometry carries its latitude. Brow projection = drop from soffit to head ÷ tan(90° − latitude). At 27.7° N the coefficient is 0.525; at 52° N it is 1.28. A shading number without its latitude is meaningless. Test at equinox, not only at the solstices.

8. Arrival is a sequence, and the roof is inhabited

A house should not disclose itself all at once. The form unfolds as you walk, the door stays hidden, the path narrows, the threshold is low and dim and takes a moment to cross, and then the space opens. Compression and release, in section as well as plan — a narrow path with an ordinary ceiling is only half the move.

Crossing the threshold changes five things at once: light, sound, view, surface underfoot, temperature.

And the roof is not a lid. It is occupied, and it brings light down into the plan.

IV. The method

1. Site, climate, occupants, sun angles. Fix orientation first.
2. Choose the modulus.
3. Carve the interior: sections first, then plans. Spaces named by organ and function.
4. Establish the longest sightline and the vertical shaft. Everything else hangs off them.
5. Make places by ceiling, level, light and surface. Give each one a back.
6. Decide separately where sound must stop, and how.
7. Let the envelope emerge from the carving. Check that the section changes with height — the outline at 1.5 m should differ measurably from the outline at 4.5 m.
8. Assign every residual space a function, or fill it.
9. Design the perimeter and the approach as a sequence with dimensions.
10. Add protective features, each with its job stated.
11. Model last, and view it at eye level from the path — 1.6 m, where a person will stand.

V. What to police

Literalism. The body should be felt in how the house works, not seen in how it looks.

Residual space as an excuse. Subtractive design generates offcuts. Without principle 5 they migrate to whatever room was drawn last — and in a body the innermost organs are the well-formed ones.

The extruded plan. The most persistent failure. All the body-thinking goes into the plan and the section stays a straight extrusion. A curved plan pushed vertically is a drum, and horizontal bands on a drum read as 1930s seaside Moderne.

Sculpture that cannot be lived in. The organic-curved lineage (§VI.4) is the closest to this language and the most seductive, and its characteristic failure is a beautiful shell that cannot take a wardrobe, a bed, a bookshelf or a straight pane of glass. The discipline against it is principle 5: if the curve does not generate usable poché, it is sculpture.

Sound, smell, adolescence, mess. The four things that break a co-present house. Each needs an answer before the openness is committed to.

Solstice-only testing. Shading that works at both solstices can still fail through the shoulder seasons, which is when heat is still wanted.

Climate-dependent economics. Curvature is cheap where hand labour is skilled and cheap — stone and earth in the Nepali hills. In the Netherlands the same curve is paid for in labour at ten times the rate, and the language survives translation by moving the curves to where hands touch and letting the bulk go straighter.

Area. This language costs floor area against a rectangle. Quantify the loss each time, so it is a decision rather than a discovery.

VII. Questions to ask of any design in this language

1. Would someone use this without deciding to?
2. Am I designing the space, or arranging the outside?
3. What is this element protecting, shedding, or armouring?
4. What is the longest sightline, and how many places are visible from where I am standing?
5. Does every place have a back?
6. Where does sound stop, and what stops it?
7. What does the outline do at 1.5 m that it does not do at 4.5 m?
8. Which body dimension is this derived from?
9. Is the leftover named, or is it an excuse?
10. What does a person see, hear and feel underfoot at each stage of arriving?

The four names this language descends from — Loos, Schmarsow, Häring & Scharoun, Baker — are on their own page, with the seven families of the wider record folded beneath them: the lineage. The whole of the above is content/design-language.md, rendered rather than retold.