Excerpts from Hannes Meyer's "Building" (1928)

Hannes Meyer's essay Building published in 1928 represents an undercurrent of the radical architecture that developed in the early 20th century. In it Meyer focuses on "life," processes and relationships, as an augmentation of the era's more prominent themes of plasticity, materials, and construction. However mechanic or discontinuous the work of the modern architects' may have been, or been branded, the aspiration to understand and orchestrate life bestowed a certain humanism to architecture, which in the past decades has regrettably been superseded by other interests. Mies expressed a similar position a year earlier: "Life is for us the decisive factor. In all its fullness, in its spiritual and real commitments."

building is a biological process. building is not an aesthetic process.

these are the only motives when building a house: sex life, sleeping habits, pets, gardening, personal hygiene, weather protection, hygiene in the home, car maintenance, cooking, heating, exposure to the sun, service.

we explore the relationships of the house and its occupants to the world outside.

we explore the relationships of human beings and animals to the garden, and the interrelationships between human beings, pets, and domestic insects. we determine the annual fluctuations in the temperature of the ground and from that calculate the heat loss of the floor and the resulting depth required for the foundation blocks. the geological nature of the soil informs us about its capillary capability and determines whether water will naturally drain away or whether drains are required. we calculate the angle of the sun's incidence during the course of the year according to the latitude of the site. with that information we determine the size of the shadow cast by the house on the garden and the amount of sun admitted by the window into the bedroom. we estimate the amount of daylight available for interior working areas. we compare the heat conductivity of the outside walls with the humidity of the air outside the house. we already know about the circulation of air in a heated room. the visual and acoustical relationships to neighboring dwellings are most carefully considered. we include in our calculation the amount of light reflection [paint] offers. we avoid using purely white finish on the house. we consider the body of the house to be an accumulator of the sun's warmth…

the modernness of such an estate does not consist of a flat roof and horizontal-vertical arrangement of the façade, but rather in its direct relationship to human existence. in it we have given thoughtful consideration to the tensions of the individual, the sexes, the neighborhood and the community, as well as to geophysical relationships. building is the deliberate organization of the processes of life.