The First House as a Spatial Manifesto
_Characteristics of the Architectural Space of Early Family Houses by Influential Architects
The First House as a Spatial Manifesto
The first family houses of influential architects are viewed through Kahn's thought on the beginning of things. It is precisely these early realizations that show that the fundamental logic of an architectural oeuvre can often be recognized at its very beginning, because they clearly shape the author's basic preoccupations for the first time — the relationship to context, space, boundary, light, construction, emptiness, order, etc. That is why each of these houses can be read as a concise manifesto of later work: not as its completed realization, but as its first, condensed and still open form. They confirm that the germ of every important architectural idea appears already in the initial intention, at the moment of forming its own language, when that language is still in the making, but already clearly intuited. The first house is therefore not the beginning of someone's oeuvre, but also the place of their earliest, but surprisingly clear self-understanding.
The first house is a spatial manifesto. Three thematic prisms — boundary, atrium, and field — illuminate the different ways in which a house establishes space and takes on a relationship with the concept, context, and discipline of architecture itself. The boundary examines the edge, or membrane, of the house, as a place that simultaneously separates and connects space. The atrium shapes the central zone of the interior, creating an intimate microcosm, almost its inner core. The field, finally, questions the neutral character of space: it enables the establishment of organizational order, flexibility, openness of use, and plurality of meanings, while partially suspending the hierarchy of space.
Boundary, atrium, field
The boundary examines the edge, the membrane of the house, that divides and connects, as in Flammer’s single-space ground floor plan of “The House in Balsthal.” In Shinohara’s “Unfinished House,” he suggests the unmarked space of “Ma,” and in Hejduk’s “Wall House 1,” the wall is a spatiotemporal boundary, a surface that is an element of transition and abandonment from one reality to a new one. The wall, at Hejduk, thus becomes an event - a point of transition and change.
The atrium dissolves the core of the house: Ando and Ito's concrete artifact is hollowed out with a negative impression creating an ascetic courtyard, the Japanese Lao-Tse's idea of this void and imbued with nature, while Nishizawa in "Weekend house" transforms the interior into a fluid landscape with a regular grid of columns and light sources - an intuitively reinterpreted idea of the continuous interior of the Katsura Imperial Palace.
The field abolishes the center and establishes a non-hierarchical network of relationships: For Peter Eisenman, the field is an intellectual construct. "House II" functions as an anti-composition;There is no hierarchy. No focus. There is no primary space. The field is an organizational tool in which the elements of architecture - column, beam, wall and mass - are given abstract concepts - point, line, surface and volume. Eisenman advocates the autonomy and reading of architecture. For Sou Fujimoto, the spatial shells of "House N" become diffuse and unclear boundaries of public and private, Fujimoto explores the indeterminacy, ambiguity of space and continuity between nature and architecture. Movement is free, intuitive, non-linear. Associative. Movement becomes a journey through degrees of privacy. In "House N" there is no clear "inside" and "outside". For KGDVS, the neutral field of Ville Buggenhout reinterprets Palladio's early Renaissance idea of the centrality of space into Belgian neutral ordinariness and suggests the house as a labyrinth of possibilities. Opposites are present - open/closed - (ground floor)/(upper floor); tectonic/ stereotomic - (ground floor walls, sun protection, plot coverage/ (volumen kata)
Three motifs — border, atrium and field — are linked to two fundamental ways of building, as defined by Andrea Deplazes; stereotomy starts from a full, continuous mass and shapes space by hollowing it out, as a negative within matter, forming an enigmatic appearance of solid masses, while tectonics produces space by arranging planar elements, as a result of their mutual relations. One operates by subtraction, the other by addition — and it is between these two principles that the basic logic of architectural space is established.
The introduction of context opens a comparative overview between European, Japanese and American early houses. The European house emphasizes heritage, measure and typological continuity; the Japanese emptiness, edge and sensitivity of transition; the American diagram, concept and autonomy of formal operation. A comparison of these three traditions shows that the same three concepts — border, atrium and field — do not produce the same spatial effects, but manifest themselves differently in each cultural framework. The border in the European context often appears as an articulated edge between the inherited type and the genius loci, in the Japanese as a porous membrane between inside and outside, and in the American as an abstract motif that organizes the conceptual relationship of elements. The atrium can be a stereotomically hollowed-out core, a space of collected intimacy, or simply a temporary center within a more open system. The field, ultimately, appears as a neutral network, but and this neutrality is never the same: it is inherited from the line, from the void, and from the diagram.
Genealogy of origin
Genealogies reveal rhizomatic connections: Kazuo Shinohara's Tanikawa house echoes Pascal Flammer's house in Balsthal; Le Corbusier's plasticity and color become the language of John Hejduk's iterative first houses, while the asceticism of Kiyonori Kikutake's Sky House anticipates the nomadism of Toyo Ito's White U. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's collages are indirectly inscribed in the way of framing and presenting volumes by Kersten Geers and David Van Severen (KGDVS), where the Palladian figure is reduced to a pure, almost abstract expression.
This series is joined by deeper, almost archetypal lines of influence: in Tadao Anda, verticality and strict symmetry evoke the discipline of the Japanese temple, where space is constructed through axis and light; the house becomes a sequence of introverted, almost ritualistic transitions. In Ryue Nishizawa's Weekend House, the genealogy leads to the Katsura Imperial Villa — not through form, but through the ambience of spatial relationships and fluid movement as the primary principle of organization. At Sou Fujimoto, the multiplication of the same elements (shells, openings) evokes the legacy of Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower, but freed from its infrastructural rigidity — as a dispersed system between nature and architecture.
Peter Eisenman also appears in that network, where genealogy is no longer only formal but also linguistic. His early houses introduce a post-structuralist reading of architecture as language, in which relationships between elements behave like grammatical rules—evoking Noam Chomsky's theories of deep structures. Form is no longer derived from function, but from transformations of an abstract system; the house becomes a series of operations — displacements, rotations, cuts — that produce meaning without relying on representation. In this destabilization of language, a hint of deconstruction can already be seen: architecture no longer affirms the whole, but exposes its own internal contradiction, its own impossibility of stable meaning.
Conclusion
These spatial manifestos are at once an archive of the past and a project of the future – heterotopias in Foucault’s sense, “other” places where layers of time interpenetrate each other. Like Nolan’s fragmented narrative in Memento, the house can be understood as a device of memory: a space in which layers of experience, idea, and time are constantly reactivated with each new architectural project. What, then, does a look at the first nine houses reveal? That the initial gesture of a smaller scale is in fact the beginning of all later architecture; that the boundary, the atrium, and the field are not just analytical categories but living evidence of the dialogue between place, construction, and architecture; and, finally, that in, as L. Kahn suggests, the “beginning of things” permanently hides the germ and genealogy of a future architectural idea.
Krešimir Damjanović, April, 2026