Layout LC.indd - Professur Schett

Atelier Ozenfant
Le Corbusier
mit Amédée Ozenfant
1922-1924
53, avenue Reille, 75014 Paris
LC Paris
105
The client for this studio-residence was Amédéé Ozenfant, Le Corbusier‘s
mentor in the development of Purism. Ozenfant was a painter and a critic
who moved easily among arts and industries, designing a streamlined
automobile body called the Hispano-Suiza (1912) and establishing an
aesthetic journal l‘,Elan (1915). He made several ventures into the world of
fashion with the designer Germaine Bongard, the sister of Paul Poiret, and
then with his Russian wife.
In the pages of l‘Esprit Nouveau, and at the Salon d‘Automne (1922), Le
Corbusier proposed several versions of a universal dwelling called the
Maison Citrohan, based on the potentials and demands of the machine
age. Conceived as a standardized object of mass production, it had a
reinforced concrete structure, metal sash windows and prefabricated
details, all designed according to a module. For the organization of
this „architectural mechanism,“ Le Corbusier looked to various sources,
including vernacular Mediterranean types and a small bistro he
frequented in Paris which had a double-height salon and small kitchen
tucked beneath a mezzanine. As Reyner Banham has observed, however,
it was the nineteenth-century Parisian studio-workshop that provided Le
Corbusier with the directness of the vernacular, the spatial formula of the
café, and the forms of industry together in a single entity.
Atelier Ozenfant, as such a Parisian studio-workshop, was a particularly
apt program with which to begin the exploration of yet untested ideas
of dwelling. The house had service quarters and garage on the ground
level; a piano nobile entered directly from the spiral stair with master
apartment in the front and a gallery at the rear; and a top fl oor studio.
The generic aspects of the Citrohan dominate the expression of the
building: concrete fl oor slabs and piers, glass facades with industrial
metal sashes, non-bearing partitions freely disposed, a dominant doubleheight
studio space with mezzanine and circulation along the edge.
Elements particular to the house evoke related industrial sources, such as
the original skylights now gone, or the metal ship‘s ladder leading to the
library „cockpit.“ This vocabulary sets it apart from its neighboring arts
and craft houses, although its relation to the street is similar.