While Corbusier’s apartment has been
materially preserved, it currently lacks
the joyous mess of objects that made it
unique amongst his oeuvre.apartment diverged from his 1920s aesthetic
- most conspicuously in the retention of
the rough rubble of a party wall and the high
reinforced-concrete barrel vaults – many of
his contemporary residential projects were
far more radical in material and form.
The penthouse offered a familiar
play of perspective, proportion and slabs
of purist colour. The top floor was devoted
to a streamlined guest suite and roof ter-
race, reached by a muscular open-spiral
staircase. The largely open-plan apartment
below housed a substantial painting studio
to the east, with its striking combination
of industrial components and the rustic-
ity of the rubble wall. To the west was the
rather narrower living room, with kitchen
and bedroom on either side, all sharing a
balcony and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Archi-
tecture had decried ‘houses and moth-eaten
boudoirs’ as feminine spaces, leaving their
types’ – botijos, shells, sculptural frag-
ments, candelabra, figurines – along with
his own sculptures and paintings. The mar-
ble dining table, inspired by a morgue slab,
attests to a vigorous social life; the bed is
raised over a metre on ungainly legs to give
views towards Mont Valentin. Longtime
collaborator Charlotte Perriand provided a
compact kitchen and built-in storage, some
precariously integrated into the bedroom
door. On moving in, Le Corbusier recorded
that ‘a great event occurred this morning:
we carried up the large fireside sofa... sud-
denly the whole place looked snug, just like
a real home’ – hardly the words of a zealot
for minimal, standardized living. Privacy,
freedom, comfort and happiness – he called
it ‘la coquille de l’escargot’ – took priority.
The much-needed restoration project
has returned the penthouse to its mid-1960s
condition. The fabric is stable, and a sense of
architectural promenade has been recov-
ered. But the studio stands almost empty, its
built-in shelves bowed under the weight of
absent books. A few bits of furniture, a few
knick-knacks, are scattered elsewhere, with
an emphasis on the 1920s chrome furniture
he designed with Perriand. What has yet to
be restored is a sense of a life, of a home –
something one hopes will form the basis for
a second stage of renovation. – JJ
fondationlecorbusier.frPrivacy, freedom, comfort
and happiness – Le Corbusier
called it ‘la coquille de
l’escargot’ – took priority
virile male inhabitants ‘shrivelled like tigers
in a cage’, and the penthouse was undeni-
ably a macho space. His wife, Yvonne Gallis,
rarely entered the studio, where he painted
most mornings to take advantage of the light.
It could be shut off with a massive pivoting
door, ‘permitting meditation in solitude’, as he
put it. Gallis found the apartment’s isolation
oppressive, spending much of the day out
and about and even concealing her home’s
all-too-prominent bidet under a tea cosy.
The photographs that do exist
reveal a more sympathetic take on modern
living than the aforementioned descrip-
tions might suggest. The studio is a mess of
wicker chairs, papers, plan chests, painting
paraphernalia and benches. Canvases lean
haphazardly against the rubble wall, trans-
forming it from an aesthetic gesture to a
scene of labour. The living quarters are less
cluttered, but Le Corbusier pursued a ‘femi-
nine touch’, created by clusters of his ‘objectAnto
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