Looking forward/looking back

Maison La Roche is a house that is easy to see in. By seeing I mean, that it is a house whose interior comes together into almost effortless composition that give due credit to Le Corbusier’s masterful skill with a clean line. Though when we were given the assignment to take photos in the house that represented Le Corbusier’s sensibilities as a painter (pictures previously posted), I like everyone else had a hard time pulling my eye away from his clean lines in order to find the painter/sculptor’s eye amongst them. The flow of inspiration between Le Corbu’s architecture and his artwork is fascinating, and when you’ve had an opportunity to spend time in house like we were able to, you begin to see how those sensibilities match up and overlap. 

There was a similar occurrence at the Maison de Verre—it was pointed out that Pierre Chareau, a man with a discipline in interior architecture design, approached the design of the house of Madame Dalsace more like an interior or a piece of furniture than necessarily an exterior building. Whether that is the case or not, whatever drove him to push the possibilities of the façade and the interior of the house, it is quite the marvel. Once again, it was a distinct pleasure to see inside this house; though the residence wasn’t quite so spare (since it still is a private home) and it wasn’t a house of clean white lines, there were still elements of the house that were charming and had a strong compositional flow. 

The things that struck me about both places were these attempts to imbue social ideology into the design of the house. For Chareau, starting with something as simple as having everyone, visitor-patient-service, use the same entrance; for Le Corbusier, envisioning a whole new approach to architecture so that the world might have a renewed outlook after the devastation of World War I. Learning about the concepts behind their design decisions helped ground my appreciation for what I was seeing; it was no longer just an aesthetic quality I was responding to but the quality of the design’s transformative potential.