Circulation in the Villa Bordeaux

Designing a house with one floor would have been a natural architectural response to the client’s disability. It would have created more ease for the wheelchair and unified the circulation of those on foot and on wheels.

Rather, Koolhaas devised a house - or three houses -  connected by three different vertical circulations. These circulations are also distinct to the users and their difference is accentuated by their position and structural relationship to the house.

The disabled clients moves through the three levels of the house via a large, open platform. The platform rises and falls to provide the client with access to each level of the house. The platform merges to the floor at each level of the house and allows the house, essentially, to come to the client. An almost continuous set of bookshelves, also rise through the three levels and form a wall along the platform's vertical path, thus responding to the moment of the platform. 

Reaching each floor, the platform completes the floor and becomes integrated into the wheelchair's horizontal circulation of the floor. The platform becomes part of the kitchen on the ground floor, links to the aluminum floor on the middle level, and forms a working space on the top floor. With the integration of the vertical and horizontal circulation, the mobility of the disabled client within the house is actually freer than that of the pedestrian members of the family.

The path of the platform through the three levels of the house creates a vertical, rectangular void at one end of the building. At the other end of the house, the three levels are pierced by a large, seemingly solid metal column. The  column conceals a spiral staircase, which extends from the ground floor to the bedroom level, with pedestrian access on each floor. In contrast to the platform, the spiral staircase provides a restricted, covert pathway to each level. 

The contrast between these major vertical paths (the platform and the spiral staircase) both in structure and spatial configuration, provide an accentuation of the different modes of transport their support, and reverse the traditional mobility experience of the users.

Pedestrians have a second vertical circulation path, via a suspended staircase found behind the platform's bookshelf. This staircase