The Paris apartment-atelier within the Immeuble Molitor, where Le Corbusier lived for over three decades, has reopened its doors to the public again, following two years of restoration works led by the Fondation Le Corbusier.

Back in 2016 Fondation Le Corbusier began the restoration of the apartment, which was designed by the French-Swiss architect and his long-term collaborator Pierre Jeanneret.

The apartment is located along rue Nungesser-et-Coli in Paris' 16th arrondissement, and was home to Le Corbusier, along with his wife Yvonne, housekeeper and pet dog Pinceau, between 1934 and 1965.

The Fondation has renovated the apartment on the seventh and eighth floors of Immeuble Molitor, which includes an art studio, kitchen with sweeping views of nearby Bois de Boulogne and the bedroom inspired by the transatlantic staterooms.

Place of experimentation and novelties where theory and more intimate sources of inspiration intertwine, the apartment-studio is a penthouse from Le Corbusier's research on villas with roof garden buildings. His free plan, his garden roof, his vaulted roofs, his polychromy, his large sliding glass panes and the size of his pivoting doors make it a major element of his architectural work. With an area of ​​240 m², the apartment has four parts, served by the same entrance: the 7th floor, the workshop with outbuildings; apartment composed of a living room, a dining room, a bedroom-bathroom and a kitchen. On the upper level, a guest room and a roof garden designed as a separate room.

The apartment is both characterized by its brightness and the fluidity of space. This exceptional luminosity is due to the glazed walls on the two facades, with various openings taking daylight on the courettes as well as several skylights. The flexibility of the space is due to the pivoting walls allowing to have a continuous space between the facades or on the contrary to close workshop or stay. Same principle between the dining room and the bedroom, separated by a wide closet door. The continuity of the space is emphasized by the uniform layout of the tiles that cover the floor.

A WORK TO RESTORE - Although having regularly been the subject of repair and maintenance work, a faulty waterproofness from the beginning, the fact of not being inhabited and therefore insufficiently ventilated have caused disorders to the apartment. The lack of protection causes infiltration: the resulting humidity has degraded the coatings and caused paint to peel off. Cracks also affect glass brick panels. As for the outdoor locksmiths, very exposed to rainwater, they are partially corroded, whether metal joinery or bodyguards. The large exposure linked to the large windows has created a summer overheating effect: an extreme thermal amplitude makes the materials play. An ambitious program of restoration of this place was needed, which allowed:

    To deepen the knowledge of the place
    To find the last state of the studio apartment
    Restore the Polychromy
    Restore wooden elements, floors and furniture

One of 17 buildings that became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016, the project is regarded as a prelude to Le Corbusier's Radiant City project, which sought to create airy and light-filled living spaces for people in dense urban environments.

Artist Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen also sunk a 1:1 scale model of Corbusier's iconic Villa Savoye in a fjord as part of Denmark's Floating Art Festival.
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Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland on October 6th, 1887. He is best known as Le Corbusier, one of the most important architects of the XX Century that together with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright rise up as the fathers of Modern Architecture. In his long career, he worked in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Argentina, India and Japan.

Jeanneret was admitted to the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1902. He knew Charles l’Éplattenier, his first teacher, and he became interested in architecture. He built his first house, Villa Fallet, in 1906, and one year later he set out on his first great journey to Italy. From 1908-1909 he worked in Perret Bother’s Studio, where he focussed on the employment of the concrete, and from 1910-1911 he coincided with Mies van der Rohe in this studio in Berlin.

In 1917, Charles Édouard Jeanneret set up finally in Paris. The next year he met the painter Amedée Ozenfant and he displayed his first paintings and wrote his first book, Après le Cubismo. In 1919 he founded the magazine l´Esprit nouveau, where he published unnumbered articles, signing with the pseudonym Le Corbusier for the first time.

He opened his own Studio in 1922, in the number 35 of the rue de Sèvres. In this decade when his laboratory epoch started he carried out a great number of activities as a painter, essayist, and writer. But also as an architect, he planned some of the most recognizable icons of modern architecture and developed the principles of the free plan. Some of these works are the Villa Roche-Jeanneret, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, and the Siedlungweissenhof’s houses built in Stuttgart in 1927. It should be pointed out that at the same time; he set out the “five points” of the architecture.

Le Corbusier projected “The contemporary three million population city” in 1922 and in 1925 put forward the Voisin plan of Paris, which is one of his most important urban proposals. Three years later, in 1928, through his initiative, the CIAM was created and in 1929 he published his first edition of the Oeuvre Complète.

In the 30s, he collaborated with the magazine Plans and Prélude, where he became enthusiastic about urbanism and he started, in 1930, to elaborate the drawings of the “Radiant City” as a result of the “Green City” planned for Moscu, his project would be summarized in the “Radiant Villa”, which was enclosed with the projects for Amberes, Stockholm, and Paris. By 1931 he presented Argel, a proposal that composed the Obus Plan. And in 1933 the 4th CIAM passed and there he edited the Athens Document.

Le Corbusier, in 1943, developed the “Three Human Establishments Doctrine” and founded the Constructors Assembly for Architectural Renovation (ASCORAL). He made the project the Unite d´habitation of Marsella in 1952, which was the first one of a series of similar buildings. At the same time, the works of Chandigarh in India began, where he planned the main governmental buildings. Nevertheless, in the same decade, he worked in France too, in the Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp, in the convent of La Tourette in Éveux, Jaoul’s houses in Neuilly and the Unites d´habitation of Rézé-lès-Nantes, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy.

He wrote and published his worldwide known study of the Modulor in 1948 followed by a second part in 1953. Meanwhile the next Le Corbusier’s books had a more autobiographic nature, among them the Le poème de l'angle droit (1955), l'Atelier de la recherche patiente (1960) and Mise aupoint (1966) stand out.

Le Corbusier, at the end of his life, created many projects that would not be built, for example, a calculus center for Olivetti in Rho, Milan; a congress in Strasbourg, the France embassy in Brasilia and a new hospital in Venice.

He died drowned on the 27th of August of 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

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Published on: November 8, 2018
Cite: "Le Corbusier's Paris Apartment-Studio reopens its doors to the public" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/le-corbusiers-paris-apartment-studio-reopens-its-doors-public> ISSN 1139-6415
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