Villa Noailles

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South side with entrance
Villa Noailles (2016)
Pink Salon glass ceiling

The Villa Noailles in Hyères is a monument historique . It is also called "Château Saint-Bernard".

Construction task and planning

Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles , wealthy and influential members of the Parisian intellectual scene, after they had previously had contact with Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, commissioned the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886–1945) to plan theirs in 1923 Villa on an inherited property in Hyères. From 1924 to 1929, the construction site became an experimental field for the architect whose model was the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann , the studies of the Dutch artist group De Stijl and the theories of the Bauhaus . Initially, a winter residence was planned as “ a small house designed so that the sun shines in the bedrooms in the morning and in the salon in the afternoon ”. The couple expanded the space program during the construction period and gradually the swimming pool, the gym, the squash room and other extensions were built.

South side with a view of Hyères
Garden of Villa Noailles

distribution

The cubist garden

In contrast to the contemporary buildings by Le Corbusier , who placed his villas on pillars or columns and detached them from the site, Mallet-Stevens' new building consists of a series of rooms with floors of different heights following the topography of the slope. The villa itself, a labyrinthine, nested, stage-like building complex whose function was less for living than for representation. The building is determined by the “poetry of the right angle”. The complex, made up of cubic structures, resembles the aesthetics of the De Stijl Group. The resolution of the room does not correspond to the classical tradition, but follows the room concept of Frank Lloyd Wright . The ceiling of the Rosa Salon is formed by an irregular, load-bearing concrete structure on which a single-colored glass ceiling by Louis Barillet, consisting of different rectangular formats, rests. The south facade opens with numerous windows and terraces in front of the bedrooms to the south with a view of the Bay of Hyères. On the first floor there is a largely glazed open-air room. The client demanded “... not to sacrifice one inch of windows in order to get an interesting modern facade.” The homogeneous facade surfaces without protrusions and cornices are plastered in light gray and extend to the attic of the flat roofs. In the east, Gabriel Guévrékian laid out a strictly architecturally structured cubist garden in the shape of a triangle for the botanically interested owner, the end of which was originally a bronze statue of Jacques Lipchitz on a pedestal.

The house as a monument

The villa in Hyères, whose owners abandoned the architecture of the elite Belle Époque and followed the rationalist ideas of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus , i.e. wanted to implement the ideals of the modern with the new building, is no longer a residential building and has been in the possession of the city of Hyères since 1973 . Today the object is a cultural monument, in which the young artists are encouraged and in which exhibitions on fashion and design take place regularly.

Trivia

A large part of the film "Les Mystères du Château de Dé" was shot in 1929 in the Villa Noailles. At 27 minutes it was Man Ray 's longest film .

literature

  • Alfred Werner Maurer : Villa Noailles. In: Architectural icons Provence, Côte d'Azur + Riviera. Philologus Verlag, Basel 2008.

Web links

Commons : Villa Noailles  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ in Hyères. Monuments historiques; Label XXe
  2. ↑ Quote from Gérard Monnier, La Côte d'azur et la Modernité 1914–1918, réunion des musées nationaux, Paris 1997.
  3. ↑ Fashion and photo festival in the Villa Noailles  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Arte , April 25, 2009, accessed August 3, 2012@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arte.tv  

Coordinates: 43 ° 7 '28.7 "  N , 6 ° 7' 40.8"  E