Abstract
Façade-poché designates the surfaces and inhabitable depths enclosed within ‘thickened’ window-walls in late modern buildings. It is configured by platforms, window-walls, and overhangs, all of which create well-shaded, inhabitable, and external depths. Unlike a façade that behaves as a visual object, like a picture plane in the street, the inhabitable depth of the façade-poché makes the building and the site operative for use. Particularly found in late modern architecture, the thin window-wall configurations began to be applied in sections, thickening elements in order to improve its function of sunshading and to lessen the risk of glare.
The façade-poché sustains the renewal of use and in doing so, represent the traces and possibilities of inhabitation from the scale of intimate to urban experiences. This argument suggests a new concept in the physiognomy of architecture in the perception, construction, and interpretation of the surface in architecture. While the philosophical tradition of physiognomy, i.e. correlation between body and soul, gave rise to an expressive, but merely sur-facial façade. In another tradition–the anonymous but shared tradition of cultural praxis–has given rise to another façade, one that is thicker,
inhabitable, and expressive of life. Selected examples of the façade-poché from postwar America–the works of Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra, and Jose Luis Sert, representatively–will support this proposal and provide a diversity of use around the façade-poché.
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