Corbusier's Little Buildings
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Transcript of Corbusier's Little Buildings
Le Corbusier’s Mini Buildings
By Daniel Chen
January 10, 2008
Andre Wogenscky, a close associate of Le Corbusier for more than thirty years
reminisced on his friend and employer a decade after his death, “Many think that Le
Corbusier developed furniture to go with his architecture. I prefer to take the view that he
designed architecture to go with his furniture. Thinking on the scale of the furniture means
thinking about the body, about hands and eyes – this is the origin of Le Corbusier’s
architecture.”1 When one first thinks of Le Corbusier, what comes to mind are often his
iconic building designs such as the ones for Villa Savoye or Unite d’Habitation. What
come next are his architectural theories and ideologies espoused in his publication L’Esprit
Nouveau. His furniture and interior designs however, usually come towards the end when
listing Le Corbusier’s influential achievements.
Nevertheless, Wogenscky’s quote provides insight into how Le Corbusier’s
furniture can serve as a lens to analyze the designer’s life. In fact, we should view each
furniture piece as a carefully distilled piece of mini-architecture. His shift from using
commercially produced pieces to designing and producing his own furniture demonstrated
a progression towards a unified aesthetic in which he imbued virtually every component of
his buildings with his own ideas and theories. The chairs, tables, kitchens, and storage units
serve as both analogs and counterpoints to the spaces that contain them. They exhibit many
of the same features such as efficiency, standardization, and the machine aesthetic. His
furniture and building designs were in constant dialectic conversation, each playing off one
another. The designs also demonstrate Le Corbusier’s fundamental appreciation and
understanding of the human body. Wogenscky later writes, “He loved the body of things
and the life of the bodies he perceived...All thinking is tied to the body, to its volumes and
1 Andre Wogenscky, “Movement, Furniture, and Le Corbusier,” 1978 (Typed Manuscript) as cited and translated in Volker Fischer, The LC4 Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand (Frankfurt: Verlag Form, 1999), 13.
shapes.”2 To Le Corbusier, furniture represented the opportunity of first contact with the
individual. Hence, although he might claim that his furniture pieces were designed to be
nothing more than purely functional, they also served as spatial mediators, distillations of
the very same ideas that inspired his architectural designs.
While his most famous furniture designs do not appear until the late 1920s, it is
important to understand Le Corbusier’s conceptions of the interior earlier in his career. In
his independent practice at Le Cheau-de-Fonds, it is clear that architecture for Le Corbusier
represented more than just the exterior structure. On his studio letterhead, he referred to
himself as “Architect-consultant for all matters concerning interior decoration conversions,
furnishings and garden designs.”3 His design for Villa Schwob which he began work on at
the end of 1913 is a good example from which to start. With its flat roof, double height
living room, and ocean liner like oval windows, it represented the beginnings of Le
Corbusier’s maturing aesthetic present in his work during the 1920s and 1930s. As for the
interior, he was involved in every aspect from choosing colors and fabrics to furniture and
lighting fixtures. Sketches and photographs of his interiors from this period also indicate
that his ideas were most inspired by the forms of the French Directoire, Empire and
Restoration styles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.4 With heavy curtains
and ornate chairs, the interior seems to be the antithesis of Le Corbusier. One wonders how
did his conception of the interior transform so drastically within the next decade. Two years
after the completion of Villa Schwob in 1919, he revisited the building only to write a letter
to Mme Schwob complaining of the backward taste of the interior: “The living room is…
not yet right. The chief reason is the awful and enormous carpet which takes away all the
2 Andre Wogenscky, Le Corbusier’s Hands (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 9. 3 Cited in J. Petit, Le Corbusier lui-meme, Rousseau, Geneva, 1970, 45.4 Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the decorative arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1991), 114
tranquility and grandeur and destroys the spirit of the architecture. The clutter caused by
furniture of doubtful quality is responsible as well. It is essential to purify…In architecture
as demanding as this, all efforts must be concentrated on purifying, on eliminating the
superfluous, on serving only the useful…”5 What were the origins of this rhetoric when
only a couple years before Le Corbusier was helping clients choose wallpapers, fabrics, and
furniture pieces inspired by 18th and 19th century French restoration styles?
A significant explanation for this shift was Le Corbusier’s growing relationship
with artist, friend, and publisher Amedee Ozenfant whom he first met through an
introduction by his mentor August Perret between 1916 and 1917. For the next decade,
Ozenfant would heavily influence Le Corbusier’s thinking. Encouraging him to draw and
paint, he indoctrinated Le Corbusier with Purism, the cultural aesthetic movement which
sought visual and physical purification, a “Period of Vacuum-cleaning” as Ozenfant would
later write in his memoirs.6 During these years, Le Corbusier focused on forming the
polemic ideas that he would later published in his magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. He
experimented with painting and drawing to explore the forms that he would later use as
inspirations for his interior and furniture designs. With his newly found Purist ideals, he
began to regard the client as a vandal who contaminated his carefully designed spaces. He
viewed the purification of historical styles as necessary for modern living. Along with a
more streamlined conception of space, he also demonstrated his interest in the machine age
by replacing the term furniture with equipment: “A new term has replaced the word
furniture…the new word is the equipment of the house. To equip is through the analysis of
5 Letter of 8 September 1919, cdf LC ms. 112., as translated and cited in Charlotte Benton, “Le Corbusier: Furniture and the Interior,” Journal of Design History 3.2 (1990): 109.6 Ozenfant, Memoires, 103 as translated and cited in Carol S. Eliel, L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 22.
the problem, to classify the various elements necessary to domestic functioning…”7 By
1925, the partnership culminated in the Pavilon de L’Esprit Nouveau at the International
Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. Here, the two demonstrated their
beliefs in physical form. Architectural historian and critic Renato De Fusco condenses Le
Corbusier’s theories on furniture into three principles: standardization, furniture as tools
and extensions of the body, and technology.8 We can look for examples of each of these
three tenets in Le Corbusier’s writings and the interior of the pavilion.
In Towards a New Architecture, he writes, “It is necessary to press on towards the
establishment of standards in order to face the problem of perfection.”9 Le Corbusier
believed that society should concentrate on a few prototypes to be perfected and mass-
produced for everyone. Perhaps the best example of a prototype for future standardization
found in the pavilion is Le Corbusier’s storage system or “casier standards.” These units
served as a structural base for the modern interior. Inspired by office furniture and the fitted
wardrobes of the American manufacturer Innovation, these flexible storage components
freed up space, frequently acting as flexible walls.10 They enabled homeowners to store,
organize, and hide away their personal objects, allowing the individual to experience the
architecture in a sparser environment. Corbusier hoped that these designs would become
the standard mode of storage for society.
Second on De Fusco’s list was Le Corbusier’s belief that furniture should be
considered tools to fulfill a universal set of needs. In The Decorative Art of Today, Le
Corbusier writes a chapter called “Type-Needs, Type-Furniture” in which he claims that all
7 Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete Vol.1 (1910-1929), 100.8 Renato De Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer, Furniture, 1919 (New York: Barrons, 1977), 17-28.9 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 153.10 Le Corbusier, Almanach d’architecture moderne, 113 as cited and translated in George H. Marcus, Le Corbusier: Inside the Machine for Living (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003), 35.
objects can be categorized into certain types: “the human limb objects are type-objects,
responding to type-needs: chairs to sit on, tables to work at, devices to give light, machines
to write with (yes indeed!), racks to file things in…”11 For the interior of his pavilion, he
defines seating into two chair types: the Thonet bentwood chair and the Maple club chair.
Its organically inspired form fit the body well. Furthermore, made from only six pieces of
wood, the Thonet chair exhibited the material and financial economy Le Corbusier
promoted. The Thonet chair had been successfully mass-produced for more than two
decades. Its long production life had enabled its manufacturer to refine and distill its design
to its most basic purposes: the roles of the working and dining. He writes, “During the long
and scrupulous process of development in the factory, the Thonet chair gradually takes on
its final weight and thickness…this process of perfecting by almost imperceptible steps is
the same as that to which an engine is subjected, whose poetry is run well—and cheaply.”12
Next to the Thonet chair, Le Corbusier placed club chairs manufactured by the Maple
Company in England. He writes, “The Maple armchair, which is attuned to our movements
and quick to respond to them, assumes an ever more distinctive profile.”13 The generously
upholstered chair exuded comfort and fulfilled the role of a relaxation and conversation
chair. Le Corbusier believed that these two chairs were the best commercially produced
designs to fulfill the seating needs for the typical individual.
Lastly, De Fusco states that technology was the third inspiration for Le Corbusier’s
selection of furniture. In his writings, he constantly refers to applying the engineer’s
mindset to architecture and design: “Every modern man has the mechanical sense. The
feeling for mechanics exists and is justified by our daily activities. This feeling in regard to
11 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, 75.12 Ibid., 76.13 Ibid., 76.
machinery is one of respect, gratitude and esteem.”14 At this point in his career however,
Le Corbusier’s writings on technology are inconsistent with his interior designs. Granted,
the Thonet bentwood chairs benefited from a unique technological manufacturing process
that used steam to efficiently bend wood. It is also true that the artwork and the mass-
produced glassware seem to evoke associations of technology. However, he continues to
use traditional materials like wood in his furniture. Moreover, his choice of a handmade
berber rug underneath the Thonet chairs seems to undercut the goal of the exhibition.
Hence, his furniture does not yet overtly display the technological machine-like quality we
see later in his work.
The pavilion of 1925 represented a sharp contrast from the interiors that Le
Corbusier had designed in the past. The interior demonstrated Ozenfant’s influence on him
with its sparse and spacious layout. His furniture selection was a commercial “survival of
the fittest” one in which he chose pieces that industry and society had gradually refined
over decades. Le Corbusier’s trend towards restricting clients to certain pieces of furniture
also illustrated his belief that the interior and the exterior were inextricably linked. For his
architecture to be fully appreciated, it had to be experienced in the right environment. The
curving Thonet chair acted as a counterpoint to the rectilinear walls and windows. The
colorful purist paintings of bottles and other ordinary objects were not only images for
individuals to meditate on, they also echoed or contrasted against other forms in the
pavilion. Furthermore, it must be remembered that Le Corbusier envisioned the pavilion as
a model for the basic unit of the immeubles villa, a collective building made from these
modular cells.15 Although De Fusco’s attributes were originally in reference to Le
Corbusier’s furniture, these same ideas informed his architecture. In other words, his
14 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 123.15 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, 231.
architecture extended his ideas on a larger scale and vice versa. The glassware, the chairs,
the casiers, the modular cells all were designed and selected to fit within the conceptual
framework Le Corbusier had laid out in his theoretical writings. Thus, we see the
beginnings of an aesthetic and ideological continuity that Le Corbusier will later attempt to
instill in all of his designs, immersing the viewer.
Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s partnership ironically ends only two weeks after the
exhibition. Despite the end of this relationship, Le Corbusier continues to show interest in
furniture and the interior. He now began designing more of his own prototypes similar to
his work with casiers. In the fall of 1927, Le Corbusier hired the furniture and interior
expert, Charlotte Perriand.16 Her entrance marks another significant watershed for Le
Corbusier’s practice. Although he already had defined conceptions of what his own
furniture would look like, Perriand’s expertise and leadership enabled him to transform his
furniture sketches into physical realities. The move towards creating his own prototypes for
modern furniture also indicated that Le Corbusier was frustrated with the furniture
industry’s inability and unwillingness to bring machine inspired furniture to market.
Perriand was an unlikely candidate for Le Corbusier’s office. Graduating from the
Union Centrale des Arts Decoratifs, a traditional French academic design school, she was
only twenty-four years old and already established as one of France’s up and coming
interior designers.17 After reading Towards a New Architecture and the Decorative Art of
Today, however, she became inspired by Le Corbusier, quickly absorbing his rhetoric and
demanded a meeting with him. Their first encounter seemed rather unpromising. In her
autobiography, Perriand writes:
The austere office was somewhat intimidating and his greeting rather frosty.
16 George H. Marcus, Le Corbusier: Inside the Machine for Living (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000), 98.17 Mary McLeod, Charlotte Perriand: an art of living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 11.
“What do you want?” he asked, his eyes hooded by his glasses.“To work with you.”He glanced quickly through my drawings. “We don’t embroider cushions here,” he replied, and showed me the door.18
Nevertheless, after Le Corbusier visited her exhibition “Bar in the Attic” at the 1927 Salon
d’Automne, he hired her on the spot. He was impressed by her streamlined machine
inspired interior and choices of economical, mass-manufactured furniture.19
While working for Le Corbusier, Perriand also kept an independent interior design
practice on the side. Her dining room exhibition for the Salon des Artistes Decorateurs in
1928 illustrates Perriand’s conception of the modern interior. A black hard-surfaced
extendable table supported by metal tubes is surrounded by swivel dining chairs. With easy
cleaning surfaces and floors, she demonstrated she cared about practicality and efficiency.
The long buffet with plate warmers reminds us of a more refined version of Le Corbusier’s
earlier casiers. Unlike the 1925 pavilion, we see a much more extensive use of metal and
glass. However, despite its machine and technological associations, the dining room had a
human quality. Dimensions were carefully measured to ensure that everything was within
arm’s reach. The swiveling dining chairs were carefully designed so that the human body
never touched the cold hard-machined tubular steel. All that touched the body were plump
soft cushions upholstered in rich leather.20
Her conception of the modern interior had a profound effect on Le Corbusier and
we see the outcome of their partnership in 1929 with their exhibition “Equipment for a
dwelling” at the Salon d’Automne. This model interior must be seen in reference to the
1925 pavilion only four years earlier. With floors covered in glass tiles, the double height
18 Charlotte Perriand, Life of Creation: an autobiography (New York: Monacelli Press, 2003), 23.19 Mary McLeod, Charlotte Perriand: an art of living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 11.20 Mary McLeod, Charlotte Perriand: an art of living (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), 40.
living room was furnished in a unified machine aesthetic. Le Corbusier formally displayed
all his new prototypes of furniture in this exhibition. Refined versions of the casiers with
mirrored glass and sliding metal doors act as room dividers.21 Whereas before in the
L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion, De Fusco would be hard pressed to find instances of extruded
and machined metal, he would find them in every corner of this apartment. With the
entrance of his own line of furniture, it was also clear that Le Corbusier had relinquished
his former strategy of commercial furniture selection. The new apartment was different; it
was cohesive and the theme was metal. Fittingly in an article Perriand writes, “if we use
metal in conjunction with leather for chairs, with marble slabs, glass and India-rubber for
tables…we get a range of wonderful combinations and new aesthetic effects. UNITY IN
ARCHITECTURE and yet again POETRY. A new lyric beauty, regenerated by
mathematical science.”22 Le Corbusier’s scientifically planned interior brought aesthetic
unity to a new level.
In the same article Perriand also writes, “Metal plays the same part in furniture as
cement has done in architecture. It is a revolution.”23 The exhibition made extensive use of
metal especially in the new prototypes of furniture they had developed together. In this new
scheme, Le Corbusier designed a separate chair for working, dining, relaxation, and
reclining. Inspired by the “safari” chair originally from East Africa, the siege a dossier
basculant represented Le Corbusier’s conception of the ideal machine for working.24 The
pivoting back conveyed a sense of mechanization and machinery. Tubular steel and tautly
stretched calfskin or leather provided a rigid support system. For dining, Le Corbusier
designed a chair inspired by its counterpart from the earlier pavilion in 1925. Named the
21 Ibid., 51.22 Charlotte Perriand, “Wood or Metal?” The Studio 97.433 (April 1929): 278-279.23 Charlotte Perriand, “Wood or Metal?” The Studio 97.433 (April 1929): 278-279.24 Renato De Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer, Furniture 1929 (New York: Barrons, 1977), 58.
siege tournant, it was the modern interpretation of the Thonet bentwood chair with similar
organic enveloping curves except manufactured out of tubular steel. By adding the
swiveling component, Le Corbusier borrowed functional ideas from industrial office desk
chairs.
The chair that garnered the most attention was the iconic chaise longue, the
machine for reclining. A low sweeping recliner made from bicycle metal tubing and
stretched leather or calfskin, the chair followed the shape of the body and literally
demonstrated Le Corbusier’s love of the human form. De Fusco remarked, “this beautiful
resting machine, resembling a perfect Freudian analyst’s couch, is almost unrecognizable
as an article for use in the home, when seen without the presence of a person occupying
it…there is a quality of mimicry in it when seen perfectly in profile, copying the shape of
the human body: it resembles a flaccid puppet with a round cushion in the place of a
head.”25 Le Corbusier and Perriand had conscientiously studied the body to best position it
for total relaxation. We can look to previous forms that may have influenced Le
Corbusier’s thinking, the most significant inspiration being the “Surrepos, Super Relaxing,”
a chair designed by a Parisian physician named Dr. Pascaud. It was an anatomically correct
chair, thickly upholstered with flexible armrests and an adjustable tray that could serve as a
drink holder. Originally designed for invalids, the Surrepos was designed for supreme
comfort.26 Perriand however, hints that the overall system was more simple, inspired by the
”basic idea of the simple soldier who when he is tired lies down on his back, puts his feet
up against a tree, with his knapsack under his head.”27 Whether the chair was based on
25 Renato De Fusco, Le Corbusier, Designer, Furniture 1929 (New York: Barrons, 1977), 36.26 George H. Marcus, Le Corbusier: Inside the Machine for Living (New York: Monacelli Press, 2000), 102.27 Charlotte Perriand, in: Cassina 1987, Meda/Milan 1987, 51 as cited in Volker Fischer, The LC4 Chaise Longue by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand (Frankfurt: Verlag Form, 1999), 13.
Perriand’s description or influenced by Dr. Pascaud’s design, it is clear that Le Corbusier
had carefully studied the body to design a recliner for total relaxation. Hence, Le Corbusier
might argue that the alluring chaise longue was purely a machine for relaxing. Indeed he
writes, “I thought of the western cowboy smoking his pipe, his feet up above his head,
leaning against a fireplace: complete restfulness...It is the true machine for resting.”28 As
such, this longue chair was a way for Le Corbusier to frame the person in a certain mindset
and landscape. By relaxing the body and mind, the chair altered the person’s experience of
the surrounding architecture.
However, the very form of the lounge also played a significant role for Le
Corbusier. Functionality aside, the curving shape similar to the way the Thonet chair acted
as a counterpoint in the 1925 pavilion, plays a similar part in many of Le Corbusier’s
buildings. In Villa Savoye, the zigzag recliner form is echoed in a blue mosaic tiled built-in
recliner in the shower. It nearly replicates the same body positioning as the chaise longue.
On a larger scale, the rooftop of Villa Savoye includes a sweeping curvilinear wall
contrasted against the orthogonal façade. Likewise, with its sweeping and inviting curves,
the chaise longue plays against the straight lines of the surrounding interior space. In this
way, furniture acted as sculpture, a method for Le Corbusier to mediate the spatial
experience from the smallest to the largest scale.
This spatial dialogue becomes even more apparent when looking at the “fauteil
grand confort” chair, the furniture piece that most physically reflected Le Corbusier’s
architecture. At first glance, the general form might connote images of the Maple club chair
from the L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion in 1925. It seems as if Le Corbusier inverts the
traditional chair’s structure to show the metal skeleton containing five leather cushions on
28 Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 118.
the outside creating a machine-age modern translation. However upon closer examination,
the chair also brings to mind Le Corbusier’s design for the exterior façade of the iconic
Villa Savoye. The chair with its solid bulky leather cushions wrapped around by steel tubes
and supported by thin tubular legs seems to float above the ground. The Villa Savoye
exudes a similar aesthetic; the main body of the house ethereally hovers in the tree-lined
landscape supported by thin pilotis. The narrow band of ribbon windows surrounding the
exterior mirrors the slick chrome tubing that wraps around the bulky cushions. By
furnishing the homes he designed with his own pieces, Corbusier conveyed a formal
likeness between object and building. This relationship correspondingly helped him
mediate the viewer’s transition from object to building. Individuals visiting Villa Savoye
would then constantly be reminded of Le Corbusier’s designs and influences on all levels.
In his essay “Furniture Design and the Common Object,” architectural critic
Sigfried Gideon thus proclaims, “it was not only that the bentwood chair entered into a new
type—but a new vision.”29 By using the term “vision,” Gideon aptly touches on the breadth
of Le Corbusier’s intentions. After examining his progression from his early interiors at
Villa Schwob to the 1925 L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion to finally the 1929 Equipment for a
Dwelling exhibition, we now better understand his development and search for visual and
theoretical continuity. For Le Corbusier, object and building were intimately related; the
Thonet chair and every other component that Le Corbusier selects or later personally
designs was part of a larger agenda. Object and building were in constant dialogue.
Moreover, as both an architectural practitioner and a theorist, Le Corbusier was always
looking for ways to convey his ideas visually, literally, and tactically. He was constantly
seeking methods to channel his theories on modern life to the public. Hence, furniture
29 Sigfried Gideon, “Furniture Design and the Common Object,” Le Corbusier, architect, painter, writer ed. Stamo Papadaki (New York: Macmillon Company, 1948), 40.
because it was so related to our daily living activities, was the perfect outlet for further
expression. Furniture was just another part of this scheme. Wogenscky writes:
“When he thought of a house, he first thought of a man, woman, a child, their movements, and their behavior…So that’s why he first put someone in an armchair or chair, and then positioned him in a landscape. Then he thought about the architecture surrounding this person, like a sensitive passé-partout defining the space around this person and his furnishings. First the person, in other words, then his table, his chair, his bed…”30
In this quote Wogenscky refers specifically to how Le Corbusier’s architecture was
fundamentally influenced by an intense study of the body. Nevertheless, his statement goes
beyond this aspect of Le Corbusier. It points to the multiple layers upon which he designed.
Le Corbusier’s brand of architecture was more than just shelter from the natural
environment. He strived for an aesthetic and more broadly a foundation for modern living
in which his theories and principles hoped to permeate every level of existence.
30 Andre Wogenscky, “Movement, Furniture, and Le Corbusier,” 1978 (Typed Manuscript).