A Little House by Birkhäuser

LE CORBUSIER

L I T T L E

H O U S E

BIRKHÄUSER

A L IT T L E H O U SE

The region

site...

The region – is the Lake of Geneva where the terraced vines rise one above the other. If you were to place the Une Petite Maison.indd 4

01.04.2008 12:27:09 Uhr

walls that support them end on end, they would total 30,000 kilometres (three quarters of a trip round the world!). The vine growers certainly know their job! Their work is meant to last for centuries, perhaps for a thousand years. This little house will shelter my father and mother in their old age, after a life of hard work. My mother is musician, my father a nature-lover. 1922, 1923 I boarded the Paris–Milan express several times, or the Orient Express (Paris–Ankara). In my pocket was the plan of a house. A plan without a site? The plan of a house in search of a plot of ground? Yes! The main points of the plan. First: the sun is to the south (that’s something!). The Lake spreads out to the south, backed by the hills. The Lake and the Alps mirrored in it are in front, lording it from east to west. That is some sort of setting for my plan: facing south, its length is a living-room four metres in depth, but sixteen metres long. The window, by the way, is eleven metres long (one window, mind you!). Point number two: “the machine for living”. Dimensions precisely adapted to individual functions permit maximum exploitation of space. The arrangement is practical and spatially economical. Through a minimum use of space for each function the total surface area was fixed at 50 square metres. The finished plan of the single-storeyed house, including all approaches, covers a surface of sixty square metres.

A circuit

onsequence: a circuit. 1. the road; 2. the garden gate; 3. the front door; 4. the cloakroom (with the oil-heating apparatus); 5. the kitchen; 6. The wash-house (with cellar stairs); 7. the exit to the courtyard; 8. the living-room; 9. the bedroom; 10. bath; 11. drying- and linen-room; 12. small bed-sitting room for guest; 13. roofed loggia looking out on to the garden; 14. the front of the house and the window of eleven metres; 15. the staircase to the roof. 6

ith the plan in our pockets we spent a long time looking for a site. After considering several, one day we discovered the right one from the top of a hill (1923). It was on the lakeside and might be said to have been waiting specially for the little house. The vine-grower and his family who sold it were very obliging and agreeable. The sale was toasted.

We discovered the site

Geography

he geographical situation confirmed our choice, for at the railway station twenty minutes away trains stop which link up Milan, Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris, London, Geneva and Marseille... 8

he plan is tried out on the site and fits it like a glove. Four metres from the window is the lake and four metres behind the front door the road. The area to be kept up measures three hundred square metres and offers an unparalleled view, which cannot be spoilt by building, of one of the finest horizons in the world.

The plan is tried out ... 9

The landscape (drawing by L-C, 1921)

1414

y father lived one year in this house. The scenery fascinated him. During his hard-working life high up in the mountains of Neuchatel at an altitude of a thousand metres he had opened our eyes to the wonders of nature. The countryside there was barren and rough. On one side, blocking the horizon, was the last range of mountains, the last step of the staircase which climbs the Jura from the French Rhone, on the other side the deep defile formed by the Doubs. This valley was secluded and formerly quite uninhabited; for seven centuries it has been a place of refuge. But the inclemency of the climate induces those who feel inclined and have the possibility of doing so, to descend one day to the Lake of Geneva where the vine grows. 15

n 1923 our “Chemin Bergère” here was an almost deserted track, an old Roman road which linked the diocese of Sion with those of Lausanne and Geneva. In 1930 there came a change, for the road authorities chose

The road

The entrance

this old track for the straightening of the international Simplon road. Since then the din of traffic has banished what was once an Arcadian silence. By chance, the little house faced in the other direction and was protected. 17

uilding costs were extremely low. The contractor did not take architecture of this kind any too seriously. I was in Paris and had to rely on him! The walls were

The garden gate

The door is behind the hydrangea

built of hollow blocks of cement concrete and sand (good conductors of heat and cold, and hence poor material). 19

or this reason the northern side had one day to be revetted with shingles of galvanized iron plate, as are often used on farm-houses in the Jura to protect them against the weather. This useful armour looks very attractive.

The northern side revetted with shingles of galvanized iron plate

Just at that time commercial aviation was developing, with its cockpits of corrugated aluminium (Breguet). Without meaning to be so, the little house was right up to date.

70 70

71 71

72 72

73 73

74 74

75 75

76 76

77 77

CONTENT A LITTLE HOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 THE LITTLE HOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 HOUSES TOO CATCH THE WHOOPING-COUGH . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 DRAWINGS FROM THE YEAR 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 THE CRIME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Afterword

LIVES OF AN ILLUSTRIOUS LITTLE HOUSE Guillemette Morel Journel Three quarters of a century have passed since the first publication of the text reprinted here in facsimile. In 1954, Le Corbusier dedicated one of his smallest books, Une petite maison, to one of his smallest works. His decision to come back to this modest construction of just sixty square metres more than thirty years after its construction in 1924, in Vevey on the shores of Lake Geneva, clearly demonstrates how important this “little house”, also known as the “Villa Le Lac”, was to him: he had in fact designed it for his beloved parents, and envisioned it “as an ancient temple at the water’s edge” (letter to his wife Yvonne, 11 September 1924). Beyond its sentimental value, a further specificity of the “little house” is that it inspired many descriptions by Le Corbusier. Thus, the way the house was designed, the construction process, its functional logic, the spatial devices it implemented and even its “life” over the years were examined in detail by its own designer. Le Corbusier came to adopt a dual, interchangeable posture of both author (of a text) and creator (of a piece of architecture), the former being the official interpreter of the latter. An interpreter, but also a theoretician: presenting his own buildings also afforded Le Corbusier opportunities to formulate or illustrate elements of doctrine. The successive volumes of his Œuvre complète issued since 1930 by the Zurich-based publisher Hans Girsberger, who also published the original edition of Une petite maison, attest to this principle: “It remains a useful exercise, I repeat, to constantly study one’s own work. An awareness of the path travelled is the springboard of progress”, exclaimed Le 86

Corbusier in a 1929 conference. To properly understand the 1954 book one must therefore situate it in the long time frame in which Le Corbusier spoke of the “little house”.

Forty years of descriptions The first public description of Villa Le Lac appeared even before its construction began on 28 December 1923 in Paris-Journal, a daily newspaper. Le Corbusier was quoted extensively in the piece and availed of the opportunity to respond to the criticisms expressed by his former master Auguste Perret regarding the long window. The article is illustrated with a plan and a perspective of the rear of the house, with the outline of the Alps visible in the distance; the architect states: “Only one side of the house has a real window, but it runs along the whole width of the façade and suffices amply to illuminate the whole house; for, not only do its dimensions admit enough light, but at both ends it meets the adjoining side walls at a right angle. These white walls direct the view straight out into the landscape, unobstructed by any reveal. [ …] To the sentimental eye, this house lacks in elegance. But we will not have it accused of being uncomfortable.” What Le Corbusier is proposing therefore goes beyond the technical aspect of lighting to focus on more ambitious goals relating to strictly architectural concerns: the relationship between inside and outside (a fundamental point of so-called modern architecture) and the staging of views over the wider landscape. Three years later, in 1926, the house was given its first “official” presentation, by Le Corbusier himself, in his book Almanach d’architecture moderne: three pages of photographs, featuring 87

BOOK DESIGN AND LAYOUT BY LE CORBUSIER Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931272 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. New edition of the first edition of 1954 This publication is also available as an e-book: ISBN 978-3-0356-2069-6 as well as in a French language edition: print (ISBN 978-3-0356-2065-8), e-book (ISBN 978-3-0356-2070-2); and in a German language edition (ISBN 978-3-0356-2067-2), e-book (ISBN 978-3-0356-2068-9) © 2020 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston © 2020 Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris Printed on acid-free paper produced of chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Germany 987654321 ISBN 978-3-0356-2066-5 www.birkhauser.com