Maisons Lipchitz-Miestchaninoff 1924

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Maisons Lipchitz-Miestchaninoff, situated in Boulogne. Le Corbusier and his sculptor clients envisaged a small artisan colony of three connected dwellings around a communal garden, with M. Lipchitz's house at the center, M. Miestchaninoff's at the corner, and a third undetermined resident's toward rue des Arts. Eventually, M. Canale obtained the third site and engaged Le Corbusier as architect; however, he never had the project built. As combination studio-residences, the completed buildings were variations on the house type that Le Corbusier had first developed for Ozenfant, based on the nineteenth-century Parisian studio-workshop, industrial architecture, and his own Maison Citrohan. As in his other early studio designs, Le Corbusier focused on the interrelation of prismatic volumes rather than on the issues of column and grid set forth in the Maison Domino. The larger context of the colony of studios provided for an increased play among sculptural forms appropriate to the clients. The cubes of the two houses are modulated in reference to each other. The cornice and fenestration of the smaller cube imply the missing third story of the larger one. The corner stair tower of the larger reappears as a suspended spiral on the garden facade of the smaller.