“Experience the Genius of Le Corbusier’s Villa Le Lac: Celebrating 100 Years of Modern Architecture”

2023-05-26 09:41:59

Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since July 2016, Le Corbusier’s villa “Le Lac” in Corseaux (VD) celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2023. Several festivities and activities are planned until October, including an exhibition to discover from of Saturday.

To mark this centenary, conferences, film screenings, concerts and a canine competition, in homage to the fox terrier of the mother of the Franco-Swiss architect and urban planner, will also be on the program, according to the villa’s website, became a museum in 2010.

Built for his parents in 1923, the villa on the shores of Lake Geneva is an architectural manifesto that brings together many of the main ideas developed by Le Corbusier for his famous “white villas” in the 1920s. After restoration work, it was reopened to the public last April.

As much a gem of ingenuity and functionalism as a true laboratory of modern ideas, the house of Corseaux is one of the most personal and inventive achievements of the architect born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds (NE) and died in 1965 in Nice (F).

Villa told by witnesses

The exhibition “Once upon a time the Villa” tells this house by those who lived close to it in the 50s and 60s. Architects, historians and great specialists of Corbusier, as well as neighbors, friends and student musicians take the floor.

These testimonies are accompanied by numerous writings from the 1940s, documents from the 1930s and even a few rare photographs from the 1920s, when the cantonal road did not yet exist. Audio and video content from the RTS archives are presented in the exhibition.

Curator of the premises, Patrick Moser underlined with Keystone-ATS, at the time of the UN registration, “the small cultural shock” that the construction of this modern villa in 1923 had represented. For Corseaux, “it was science fiction”, with its flat roof, its front band windows, with an aluminum sheet on the facade.

Inside, on a modest surface of 64 m2, are organized in a functional and minimal way, hall, living room and work space, bedroom, modular guest room, wardrobe, kitchen, bathroom, toilets and heating. .

Narrow single-span house

The villa “Le Lac” is the result of ergonomic research and a functionalist analysis aimed at achieving a typological standard: the narrow house with a single bay. A standard taken up, since, throughout the world, recalls the website of the museum.

“Prototype of the minimal house offering maximum comfort and space, the house crystallizes ideas which will have a considerable influence in the 20th century around the fundamental questions of minimum habitat and habitat for the greatest number”, is it explained.

It already brings together three of the future “five points of a new architecture”: the free plan, the roof-garden and the long window – one of the first in the history of architecture. True technical experimentation, this window of eleven meters testifies to a new conception of the framing of the landscape and the relationship to the site, it is underlined.

As a reminder, in Switzerland, apart from the “Le Lac” villa, Le Corbusier notably designed the “Maison Blanche” and the “Villa Turque” in La Chaux-de-Fonds, as well as the “Clarté” building in Geneva.

www.villalelac.ch/fr/event

This article has been published automatically. Source: ats

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