La Maison de Verre: Negotiating a Modern Domesticity

Abstract

The Maison de Verre (1928–1932), built in Paris and designed by Pierre Chareau in collaboration with Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoët, metalworker Louis Dalbet, and the clients, Dr. and Mme Dalsace, does not fit easily within the canon of modern architecture and interior design. Though acknowledged at the time of its construction for the groundbreaking use of modern building materials and technological innovations, it went unacknowledged throughout much of the twentieth century as a defining modernist building until a 1969 essay by Kenneth Frampton rescued the house from critical obscurity. In his essay, Frampton asks whether the house is to be understood as a conventional building or as a piece of furniture. The possibility that the house might be better understood as a “piece of furniture” suggests two questions: (1) Is the Maison de Verre more significant for its interior design than for its architecture and (2) can its significance be located in the quality of livability that resulted from the negotiation between the ideals of early modernism and the demands of habitation? Our purpose is to propose answers to these questions by analyzing the complexities of Chareau's design in relation to the rhetoric of early modern architectural theory and its challenge to the nineteenth–century concept of domesticity. We assert that Chareau's design resolution as expressed in the interior of the Maison de Verre represents a case study in livability that warrants greater attention in the context of the history and theory of interior design distinct from architectural history and theory.