House in Mellieha

Frank Lloyd Wright, known as the architect of space, never explicitly mentioned space in his numerous writings. It was historians and critics after him, such as Bruno Zevi and Sigfried Giedion, who crowned him the king of space. Wright, on the other hand, often spoke specifically about elements projecting from the core of a building, a feature he called “getting away”. Especially in the 1930s, during the period of his “Usonian” villas, Wright began to see architecture as a structure that starts from a strong central core, often in stone or clad concrete, from which other nuclei branch off, more or less freely, often rooms that seem to radiate outwards, almost as if to escape the grasp of the central force.

One of Wright’s students, the Viennese Richard Neutra, a very successful architect in post-war United States, gave a completely modernist interpretation of the master’s getting away, almost as if seeking to find a possible meeting point between Wright and Mies van der Rohe. On the other hand, Alvar Aalto’s getting aways are delicate. Combined with the landscaping of the adjacent terrain, he (successfully) attempted to integrate his villas with their natural surroundings. These designers were followed in much more recent years – around the early 2000s – by Steven Holl, one of whose most convincing buildings, Y House, is conceived as a fragment of a getting away: a series of overlapping wings seemingly freely arranged in space and devoid of the core from which they appear to have fled.

The House in Mellieha, Malta, presents a special interpretation of the getting away poetic. A full understanding of the project, designed by MYGG, requires focus on its strongest feature: the various plans. It reveals a rigid rectangular perimeter decisively marking out the plot, and a plot that in turn encloses – again decisively – a series of stepped components on land treated as a system of...

Proceed with your preferred purchase option to continue reading

Digital

5.49 €

Add to cart

Printed

15.00 €

Add to cart

Subscription

From 42.00 €

Choose subscription