Dogma

Faux Corbu

Faux Corbu is a reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s project for Villa Baizeau in Carthage (1928–30). Faux Corbu is intended as a prototype for communal living. It is also a reinterpretation of both Le Corbusier’s five points – free plan, free façade, pilotis, ribbon window and rooftop garden – and the ‘third composition’, presented in his famous plate Les 4 compositions, published in the first volume of his Œuvre complète. The plate summarizes the compositional strategies at work in Le Corbusier’s 1920s villas: linear sequence of volumes (Villa La Roche, 1923), closed volume (Villa Stein, 1927), open volume (Villa in Stuttgart, 1927) and excavated volume (Villa Savoye, 1929). Although Villa Baizeau is not mentioned in this plate, the solution that was finally built after a lengthy and frustrating confrontation with the client (who rejected Le Corbusier’s first two proposals) seems the most accurate embodiment of the open volume strategy. Interestingly, Le Corbusier stigmatized this strategy as the easiest one (‘très facile’).

While the rejected version of Villa Baizeau with its boxy form is an offspring of Villa Stein at Garches, the built version recuperates the openness of the Dom-Ino structure (1914) as the latter was presented in the iconic perspective published in the Œuvre complète. The main datum of the third of the four compositional strategies is the vertical sequence of horizontal slabs which act as ‘trails’ that support any architectural configuration. As result, the façade is made of balconies-verandas that envelop the house on all four sides. Unlike traditional balconies (which usually cantilever from the main volume of the building), in Le Corbusier’s villas they are excavated from the volume itself, thus blurring the line between interior and exterior. This is exactly what happens in the built version of Villa Baizeau which, despite being ‘downgraded’ by Le Corbusier as less interesting than the first version rejected by the client, shows the potential of having all the indoor spaces open towards the enveloping veranda. Owing to its different depths, the veranda gives form to different spaces – loggias, patios – whose spatial character is ambiguously suspended between indoors and outdoors. Another innovative solution is the covered rooftop in which the roof of the building becomes a canopy, the ‘umbrella’ that protects the house from the sun. This solution was more radical in the rejected version in which the ‘umbrella’ appears as a mirrored version of the horizontal slab that acts as ground floor. In this version, the complex section of the villa, with its dramatic interlocking of double-height spaces, is sandwiched by the relentless horizontality of both ground and roof. The umbrella roof makes visible what lies beyond the abstraction of the free façade: the Dom-Ino skeleton as the essential architecture of the machine à habiter. Faux Corbu reappropriates both the continuous veranda of the built villa and the ‘umbrella’ roof of the rejected proposal.

Faux Corbu is six floors high: the ground floor and rooftop are communal while the other four floors contain eight independent apartments that share balconies and two large kitchens and their respective pantries. The verandas run along the four sides of the villa and, like in the built version of Villa Baizeau, give form to a variety of spaces such as loggias, patios, and balconies. Because the villa was imagined to be built in a hot climate and free from mechanical ventilation (as in Le Corbusier’s villa), the veranda acts as a brise soleil. The external façade is made of vertical concrete slabs perforated by a grid of square-shaped holes, a sort of simplified version of the typical Arab window-grille known as mashrabiyya. The width of the holes changes according to the exposure to the sun.

Besides being a reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s Villa Baizeau, our project is an attempt to revisit the urban villa as the most appropriate type for communal living. While Le Corbusier’s Villa Baizeau was, like all his villas, for one family and their servants, Faux Corbu is designed for a number of householders that includes both families and non-family arrangements. The urban villa offers an intermediate scale for a house which is between an apartment block and a single-family house. The urban villa type exists in many varieties and can accommodate between twenty to fifty inhabitants, the ideal size for communal housing in which most domestic spaces are shared. This arrangement challenges Le Corbusier’s idea of home, which despite its radical innovations in terms of architecture, remained traditional in terms of household composition. In Faux Corbu, the eight units are a shorter version of Maison Citrohan (1927), with a double-height living room facing the large veranda and three bedrooms facing the balcony. In this way, all the indoor spaces can, potentially, extend towards the shared veranda, making the latter the very core of the house.

Le Corbusier intended his single-family houses to be miniature models for his ideas about large-scale housing schemes. Faux Corbu is not a miniature of something larger, but the prototype of a new form of communal living. As such, it recuperates the exemplarity of Le Corbusier’s houses, i.e. their being not just beautiful one-off villas, but a ‘case study’ towards a more general idea of housing.