Elevation of the Willow Road House. Ernö Goldfinger

Resumen

Abstract

The article proposes the approach to the house that the Hungarian architect Ernö Goldfinger built for himselfin the Hampstead neighborhood, London in 1939. The complex and unique exercise, in which Goldfinger
bases the greatest part of his principles, is visible in this House at Willow Road and particularly evident in its façade. The study of the human experience in the architectonic space, in relationship with the building's
envelope, is fundamental for the architect. In this sense, its theoretical legacy is expressed in his writings for the Architectural Review magazine between 1941 and 1942: "The Sensation of Space", "Urbanism and
Spatial Order" and "Elements of Enclosed Space".
The analysis of this enigmatic elevation brings up a number of questions that are, in themselves, a true manifest in favor of an architecture free of any stylistic affi liation. Here, Goldfinger questions his own reflections about the spatial order, composition, scale, character and construction.
This way, the proposal for Willow Road cannot be explained in functional or mechanistic terms. It needs a phenomenological vision and a precise approach to start to unveil its keys. This home can be understood as a bourgeois residence but also stands out a Modern exercise. It offers the opportunity to unveil a very particular way-of-doing, in which some rootless architects, free of the ruling English traditionalism and any dogmatism, step off the predictable path in that moment. Instead, they contaminate the English Modern architecture and originate a scene of different influences difficult to recognize in any other location. The footprint of this revised modernity of unmistakable Modern spirit, fi ltered from a Classical attitude, influenced the following generation of English architects, exemplary in many of the works of Denys Lasdun.