Villa Besnus (Ker-ka-ré) 1922

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Villa Besnus, situated in Vaucresson. Although the clients of the house requested that the house resemble the display model of Maison Citrohan, Le Corbusier did not translate his universal prototype directly into a built work. Instead, he chose to develop the idea of a purist architecture in which cubist design principles were reinterpreted in light of the French neoclassical tradition. The two facades of the house presented the different sides of Le Corbusier's aesthetic argument. The garden side of the house, at the top of the sloped site, was a two-story, symmetrical block with a clearly separate stair tower behind. In its tripartite division, its proportions, and its symmetry, the main block strongly resembled le Petit Trianon, designed by Gabriel for Louis XV at nearby Versailles. It had a cornice and a low ledge, equivalent to the palace's top and bottom balustrades. Le Corbusier ironically relegated the formality of le Petit Trianon to the backyard of Besnus. On the street facade, asymmetry, decentralization, and peripheral incidents held in tense equilibrium replaced a classical sense of balance. Le Corbusier set the stair tower in the same plane as the main body of the house, making the entire composition asymmetrical. Within this perimeter, he then used overlapping sets of symmetries to create competing centers.