of architecture - Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole

After the death of Badovici, the property of the house passed to his sister, an elderly nun living in
Bucarest who had given powers to the American Adventists taking care of her. Le Corbusier started
an extraordinary campaign to control the destiny of the house. He wrote over a hundred elaborate
letters and notes to the pastor in charge of selling the house, to friends in Switzerland trying to
arrange for a suitable buyer (most notably his publisher Boesiger and gallerist Heidi Weber), to a
notary of the Cap Martin area trying to establish the value of the house against the pastor’s request
for 30 million, to the director of SPADEM requesting that he writes a threatening letter to the
pastor advising him of Le Corbusier’s intentions to make the preservation of the murals a condition,
to the eventual buyer of the house, the Swiss architect Marie Louise Schelbert, advising her
on what to do and what not to do, including precise instructions on wearing a hat (presumably to
make bids at the auction, and so on and on. The letters, sometimes three and more pages long and
including drawings, sketches and photographs explain in excruciating detail how extraordinary the
house and its location is, the neighboring houses, the beach, the other beach, the station connecting
it to Bourdeaux, Paris, Frankfurt, Geneva, Genes, Rome, …, every detail of everyday life down to the
perfect cuisine of the Etoile de mer, the restaurant immediately above E.1027, eating in the sun on
the terrace of Roberto (the owner of L’Etoile de mer)... The tone in crescendo, he starts sounding as
a tourist brochure:
In a letter to his publisher, Boesiger, written from Cap Martin he writes:
Voila la question, Boesiger, Cap Martin Roquebrune for Xmas, New Years, Easter, winter and
summer. It is this part of the coast called Mediterranean climate….
Accesible by wagons lits, by the big international roads, by aeroplane.
In direct contact by 3 routes (but here the tranquility of the isolation) with Nice, Antibes, Cannes,
Menton, Genes (Turin St Bernard o Milan). Here I put an slip and nothing else for weeks.
Boesiger make Photostat of this letter. Show it to your friends. Do it quickly….
I am going to jump into the water.
He tries to convince Boesiger to form a group of 3 or 4 people from Zurich who could buy the house.
Ostensibly, he is trying to save the murals at every cost, but on the way, he expresses once and
again his great love for the place and for the house. Most remarkably, a recurring theme appears in
all these letters: the fear that the house could be turned into a house of ill repute, a bordello. It is
hard to imagine the idea that a modest modern house by the sea in a very expensive piece of property
surrounded by luxurious villas could be turned into a brothel, but Le Corbusier keeps repeating
the idea obsessively in numerous letters to all kinds of people:
“If the filthy beasts installed a bordello in this house, they will destroy the 8 mural paintings. If
your group buys it, they will be saved,” he says to Boesiger
I am going to jump into the water.
To the pastor and the notary, he claims in different letters to be trying to preserve the house and
the garden and avoid that it falls in the hands of “gens equivoques” insisting that, by contrast, the
people he is trying to organize to buy the house represent “the most impeccable quality, honesty,
understanding of the problem, desire to preserve this pied-de-terre modest but coquet, for spending
the weekend or holidays of every kind”.
To Mr. Duchemin, Secretary General of SPADEM he writes:
What is the double threat? The brothel, precisely, the very scene of sexuality and femininity that
he had tried to conquer through endless drawing. His fear is that the brothel will come to life as if
projected back out from the images on the wall. The murals have to be protected both from destruc-
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Fig. 14
“The threat is double: On the one hand, the house could be bought by people who could make
it a place of “rendez-vous,” perhaps picturesque! (the situation of the property and the house
itself lend themselves to it), or it could be bought by people of taste – that we don’t know –
and that will perhaps have as first attitude to cover the mural paintings in the walls”.