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White Box | House

research

White Box was first identified as an interior archetype in museums and retail environments by Joori Suh and Leah Scolere respectively, and this study proves its existence also in houses. As a dominant spatial component of houses, White Box affects the way residents understand the space they inhabit. The lack of decoration found in White Box is perceived as an ordered space, as well as its whiteness as a luminous enlarged space, and its sameness as a homogenous space or a “one-whole” instead of a composition of floor, ceiling, and walls. As seen, White Box makes the habitant perceive the space differently from reality. According to Jolande Jacobi the archetype is “a profound riddle surpassing our rational comprehension” and according to Ralph Lauren “white in design owns its own world”.1 Moreover, as White Box is experienced, it begins loosing its geometric characteristics until converting itself into a non-ultra space. Clare Cooper reflects, “As space becomes known and experienced, it becomes part of” the person’s “world . . . It is no longer an inert box; it has . . . become a symbol of the self . . . As Bachelor has written, ‘geometry is transcended.’”2 There has been a self-negation of the room to highlight the qualities of the human-self. In White By Design, Bo Niles explains that when he talked with people who inhabited white rooms, “they spoke first and most intensely of trying to achieve individuality . . . They found they could best effect this by dissolving a room of color . . . But the end result was always a white room, expressive of its owner’s unique personality and evocative of mood or attitude rather than of a decorating style.”3 Besides Niles’ observations, entirely white spaces are not always understood as human friendly as they do not allow for personalization. When referring to gallery spaces, Leah Scolere described White Box as “‘conceived solely for the undisturbed presentation of art,’ and untainted by the intrusion of human beings.”4 Historically, white spaces have received different interpretations according to setting and time. Some of these variants are depicted through out the history of residential White Boxes. As a precedent of White Box, white spaces in traditional architecture exist. The whiteness of Mediterranean architecture is due to the availability of lime to produce stucco; material that covers entire houses in the Greek Islands, in Sidibou-Zid in Tunisia, and in Andalucía in Spain.5 Similarly occurs in America with wooden architecture, where colonial homes, Cape Cods, and farm houses are painted entirely in white.6 In 1927 with Weissenhofsiedlung, a housing exhibition of Deutsche Werkbund, white was removed from the pitch roof and identified only with the flat roof; an imposed restriction for all exhibited houses that led to the origin of White Box. According to Mark Wigley in White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, white was not about cleaning architecture but returning to the existing architecture previous to the elaborate ornamentation of the 19th century.7 Thereby White Box was a nude spatial composition that undressed from all applied surfaces spoke about the bareness that was left, that is volume and form. In spite of its success to denote volume in early modernism, in mid 20th century the apprehension towards White Box began as people found it difficult to inhabit. Referring to this, Wigley adds “[the white wall] produces a kind of claustrophobic space because the inhabitant is disoriented within it. Not knowing where you are, and therefore how to get out, becomes the most secure closure of all. The white wall prevents a stable sense of location, a sense of space. It dissolves the forms it is meant to present . . . While everything is visible in the modern building, vision itself is no longer able to operate.”8 What first was seen as a benefit, the sincere expression of volume, then is seen as harm, the inability to distinguish it. As a criticism, in 1946 Fernand Léger refers to white walls as a “dead-end”, in 1950 as a “waiting room”, and in 1952 as being “perfect for a painter”.9 Most certainly, as a painter, Le Corbusier –one of the biggest promoters of white architecture- inserts color accents into his all white architecture, as well as Richard Meier –follower of Le Corbusier- did in the 1970s. Besides according to Meier, white instead of an effacement of color, includes “every color of the rainbow . . . [and] is in fact the color which intensifies the perception of all of the other hues that exist in natural light and in nature.”10 Differently in the 1960s, minimalism –within the International Style- saw white as a medium to evoke simplicity through the elimination of ornamentation “-joints, mechanical and electrical elements, reveals, moldings-” that allowed the production of “plaster boxes” as “’clean’ envelopes”.11 “The avowed aim was to focus on what is most variable in our environments: that is, on portable changeable objects, such as painting, artworks, plants (often reduced to a single plant), and (ostensibly) people.”12 The idea of introducing variation into the starkness of the white environment was further intensified in the 1980s by bringing the natural environment into the house interior. Pompous plants, glass and glass brick walls created a cozier environment within White Box. Contemporary White Boxes challenge perceptions forcing humans to cautiously respond to their surroundings; the sameness of materiality of floor, walls, and ceiling camouflage spatial divisions blurring and softening edges. Furthermore, blob forms dominate the space creating spatial dynamism. This complex shapes are possible through new advances in computer design software as used in the 2001 Torus House designed by Preston Scott Cohen. In it a “toroidal” form twists and extends through out the ceiling and floor and into the walls.13 According to Courtney Smith and Annette Ferrara in Xtreme Interiors, “the walls, floors, and ceilings no longer meet in tidy ninety-degree angles but fuse together in fluid and ambiguous ways . . . confusing our expectations of up and down, interior and exterior, inside and outside.”14

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end notes

  1. 1) Clare Cooper, “The House as Symbol of the Self,” in Design for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences, ed. Jon Lang, ed. Charles Burnette, ed. Walter Moleski, ed. David Vachon (Pennsylvania: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, Inc., 1974), 131; Ralph Lauren, foreword; or, White by Design, by Bo Niles (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1984), 7.
  2. 2) Clare Cooper, “The House as Symbol of the Self,” 138.
  3. 3) Bo Niles, White by Design, 9.
  4. 4) L. Scolere, “Theory Studies: Contemporary Retail Design” (MA Thesis, Cornell University, 2004), 28-9.
  5. 5) Bo Niles, White by Design, 47.
  6. 6) Ibid.
  7. 7) Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 7.
  8. 8) Ibid., 231.
  9. 9) Ibid., 7.
  10. 10) Richard Meier, Richard Meier Architect (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 8.
  11. 11) C. Ray Smith, Interior Design in 20th-Century America: A History (New York: Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1987), 265.
  12. 12) Ibid.
  13. 13) Courtenay Smith and Annette Ferrara, Xtreme Interiors (New York: Prestel Verlag, 2003), 80.
  14. 14) Ibid.