Villa Le Lac

The Villa Le Lac on the Route de Lavaux in Corseaux in Switzerland is a house built between 1923–1924 by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret .

“A little house” ( French: Une petite maison ) is what the architect Le Corbusier called the second house he built for his parents in the village of Corseaux on the north shore of Lake Geneva .

history

The small house was built between 1923 and 1924 for Le Corbusier's parents according to plans by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. His father Georges-Édouard Jeanneret (1855–1926) lived in this house for another year. The mother, Marie-Charlotte-Amélie Jeanneret, lived in the house until she was 101 years old. After her death, his brother, the musician Albert Jeanneret , lived in the house from 1960 to 1973. Today the listed building belongs to the Fondation Le Corbusier .

Idea and planning

The widespread idea that Le Corbusier had already drawn the plan of the house before the building site was bought is not substantiated. The distribution stipulated that the single-storey house would face south towards the lake. Due to the economical use of space, Le Corbusier described the sixteen meter long and four meter wide house as a “ living machine ”. Le Corbusier used this term for the new type of residential building he was striving for, a cubic structure whose interiors merge into one another. The arrangement of the rooms follows the sequence of the individual activities, assuming a minimum of floor space for this function. The floor space of the planned house is calculated with all adjoining rooms with 60 square meters. The house is designed with a flat roof as a terrace with a roof garden and is accessible via the outside staircase on the north side. The rising sun is captured in the guest room by an east-facing, sloping skylight. The roof terrace is framed with a railing like the construction of a ship railing and the roof garden is surrounded by a lower concrete wall. The height of the house is 2.50 meters.

Construction site

With this plan, Le Corbusier went in search of a suitable building site. The choice fell on a 300 square meter building site in the village of Corseaux four meters from the north shore of Lake Geneva with an unobstructed view of the lake. When the property was purchased, the north side of the property was accessed via an old Roman street called “Schäferweg”, which was then expanded into the main thoroughfare “Simplonstrasse” in 1930 a few years after the building was built. The trains from u. to Milan, Zurich, Marseille and Paris.

The narrow property with a shallow depth made it possible to dispose of the 16 meter long and 4 meter wide building with its long side facing south. “ The plan fits the site like a glove. "

Distribution of the house and the garden

View from the garden courtyard of the "Petite Maison" ( Le Corbusier ) over Lake Geneva

"Petite Maison" ( Le Corbusier ) east side with terrace of the guest room with a view of Lake Geneva

From the beginning it was planned to surround the property on the border with a two-meter-high wall, which is only lowered to ground level in the area of the south-facing side of the house. "... the east, north and south walls enclose the small garden like a cloister courtyard and design it into a green hall" Le Corbusier justifies this garden enclosure with "The purpose of the wall visible here is the view to the north, east and partly to the south and cordon off the west; the omnipresent and overpowering landscape on all sides is tiring. “ The southern garden wall was given a square section that allows a view of the lake from the garden square. The courtyard on the north-west corner from the garden wall along the street to the single-storey building is covered by a small storage room on the upper floor in which the furniture of the roof terrace is placed .

The previously planned floor plan of the house was also implemented during construction. This provided for a small living room for guests in the east with two beds on top of each other and a terrace covered on the east side with a ceiling on two steel supports, and in the west the house entrance, the cloakroom (with oil boiler) the kitchen, the laundry room (with basement stairs), the exit to the courtyard and a room for drying and storing laundry is available. The part of the house in between, with an 11 meter long ribbon of windows oriented towards the lake, contains the living room, bedroom and bathroom from east to west and a small entrance hallway on the north side.

materials

The buildings and garden walls are made of hollow stones made of cement and sand and plastered white on both sides. The strip u. Individual foundations are made of concrete, the basement walls, the floor slab, the flat ceilings and the sloping skylight are made of reinforced concrete. The supports of the canopies are made of metal tubes 6 centimeters in diameter. For the roof garden, the flat ceiling is filled with twenty to thirty centimeters of earth and planted.

Archimedes taught us

The single-storey house has a basement only in the northern part, which subsequently led to cracks in the outer wall and the concrete slabs of the floor and roof due to the rising and falling water level of the lake. "We are delighted to note that the small cellar at the western end of the house - a watertight cellar - becomes a floating ship when the water is high, so that the" ship's cellar " receives the buoyancy that was so expensive for the blessed Archimedes " Due Due to this planning error and the insufficient joint connection of the hollow stones of the walls, the house was later given a prefabricated outer skin made of galvanized iron sheet. “ This useful tank is also very pretty… .The little house had become (without wanting it) very modern. “The crack in the flat roof was covered with a sliding copper water stop.

Plan bundle "Une petit maison"

For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the house, Le Corbusier added a few drawings he made himself to the drawings for the house from 1945. "... I took a few hours of leisure to make some drawings of it. The last drawing from September 1951 was made for my mother's ninety-first birthday "

Quote LC: On the criticism of his house design

«In 1924, when the little house was finished, the council of a neighboring parish met to determine that such architecture represented a“ disfigurement ”of nature. Fearing that she would still want to go to school (who knows), he forbade any imitation forever »

Inclusion on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites

In December 2004, four located in the area of Switzerland buildings by were Le Corbusier in the Tentative List of UNESCO entered: next to the Villa Le Lac , the Villa Jeanneret-Perret (Maison blanche) and the Villa Schwob (Villa Turque) in La Chaux-de- Fund as well as the Immeuble Clarté in Geneva . This is a general requirement in order to apply for recognition as a World Heritage Site at a later date .

France, together with Germany, Argentina, Belgium, Japan, India and Switzerland, proposed that Le Corbusier's architectural and urban planning work be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2009. The oeuvre originally comprised 23 buildings, including the four named from Switzerland. The candidacy dossier was signed on January 30th, 2008 by the French Minister of Culture Christine Albanel in the presence of UNESCO delegates and representatives of the Fondation Le Corbusier. Despite a later reduction to 19 objects and revision of the application, it was rejected by the World Heritage Committee in June 2011 . A third, again revised design with 17 objects from 7 countries, including the Villa Le Lac, was published in mid-July 2016 under the title “The architectural work of Le Corbusier, an extraordinary contribution to the modern movement” ( French: L'œuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier, une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne ) recognized as World Heritage by UNESCO.

Individual evidence

↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Édition d'architecture, Zurich 1968, p. 9 .
↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architectures, Zurich 1968, p. 13 .
↑ ^a ^b Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architectures, Zurich 1968, p. 26-27 .
↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architecture, Zurich 1968, p. 60-63 .
↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architecture, Zurich 1968, p. 24-25 .
↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architecture, Zurich 1968, p. 67 .
↑ Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architecture, Zurich 1968, p. 84 .
↑ Œuvre urbaine et architecturale de Le Corbusier . Entry in the tentative list of UNESCO on their website, accessed on April 7, 2014 (French)
↑ Nachrichten.ch - Le Corbusier in the UNESCO World Heritage - The news from Switzerland and abroad is constantly updated. Exclusive column with a biting note on the front page. April 2, 2008, accessed July 31, 2018 .
↑ Joseph Hanimann: All or not at all. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. June 29, 2011, accessed April 7, 2014 .
↑ Information on the World Heritage Site on the UNESCO website, accessed on July 18, 2016 (French, English, Spanish)
↑ Le Corbusier's architectural work is world heritage . NZZ, July 17, 2016, accessed on the same day.

literature

Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 1st edition. Verlag Geschwister Ziegler & Co., Winterthour 1954.
Le Corbusier: Une petite maison 1923 . 2nd Edition. Éditions d'architectures, Zurich 1968.
Le Corbusier: My work . Verlag Gerd Hatje, Stuttgart 1960, p. 67 .
Alfred Werner Maurer : Le Corbusier - The idea of the living machine Une petite maison . Philologus Verlag, Basel 2012.