An apartment in the house where Le Corbusier lived, in Paris

The building that has stood since 1934 on the line where Paris merges into the Bois de Boulogne – Porte Molitor, XVIème arrondissement ­­– is anything but a generic, unknown building: its façade features in almost all architecture history textbooks, and through its door have passed many names that are also part of these books. This is the building where Le Corbusier owned his home and studio until his death.

Despite its rather conventional location and typology – it is a block of flats that fills a gap in a nineteenth-century urban curtain – this building embodies many of the principles with which Le Corbusier thought about innovating houses and cities: It faces a park – the Bois – and sports facilities – the Parc des Princes, the Molitor swimming pool – fulfilling two of the constituent points of his vision, the Ville Radieuse; it overturns the schemes of the classic Parisian Haussmannian building by placing the entrance to the garages and the service rooms on the façade; the top floor, usually reserved for servants’ rooms, becomes the main floor. And then, the plan libre.

The building has undergone many updates, works and transformations, some of them still under the supervision of Le Corbusier himself, who designed it with Pierre Jeanneret. Then come the apartment interiors, which, in application of the plan libre, were almost fully editable, and were never listed, unlike the rest of the building.
One of them, heavily modified in the 1970s, was bought in 2024 by clients who wanted to return to the original spirit and enter into a dialogue with it.

The designers at Parisian studio RREEL have worked exactly in this direction, through a process of historical research, “archaeological” as it has been described, carried out with the support of Fondation Le Corbusier, to rediscover traces of the original 1930s layout – living room and bedroom on the street, bathroom, kitchen and studio on the courtyard – without literally replicating it in this new phase.

The plan libre is emphasized, defined by simple elements, the interaction between surfaces and objects placed in the space, turns marked by sculptures: a single curved wall, an embrace starting from the entrance, separates a living room revolving around a kitchen-sculpture from an articulated bedroom hosting a bathroom and a second sculpture (in this case the shower); in the same way, a free pillar in the void has since the beginning marked the transition from the vestibule to the living room: and we find it again in the new layout.

The dialogue with Le Corbusier’s poetics also runs through the materials and colour palette: we find in the radiators and exposed pipes, in the tiles of the new kitchen-object, on the walls, the blues and reds, the whites and the warm-toned wood that we can also find a short distance away in the Maison La Roche, but not necessarily placed where one would expect them. This composition of lines, pure forms, sequences and grids is visually linked to the perimeter walls, with their Nevada glass bricks and surfaces originally developed by Saint Gobain, and reopens a discourse that seems never to end, from Modern to our times.