Werkbund Estate House

Adolf Loos – Werkbundsiedlung House, Vienna, Austria, 1932

The semi-detached houses of the Werkbund are an example of how, on a limited surface and with modest means, Loos's ability is revealed. In the small house of the Siedlung, in fact, he tries to give an effective structure to "space as raw material". 

As in the upper-middle-class Moller houses in Vienna and Muller in Prague, the central atrium is extended by a gallery and adjoining rooms, developing the concept of movement in space.
The house, with its modest dimensions, surprises the visitor with a large living room 4 meters high and complete with a gallery, which however, with a limited height, appears rather small in size; the real novelty is the gallery, the only example of Raumplan in an affordable house.
The Raumplan is considered by Loos as a tool for economizing: to economize space, therefore consistent with that tendency towards essentiality that guides all his research on social housing. 
The functional organization of the Werkbund houses represents in a limited and experimental form a prototype that can have architectural validity even for small buildings.