Description
The Planeix house, built by Le Corbusier for Antonin Planeix, is one of the legendary studio residences designed by the architect in the 1920s.
Boasting a 92 m² garden with terraces and walkways, this house spans 273 m² over five levels. Combining living and working spaces, it has a flat and three artists’ studios, giving it four independent units.
The ground floor comprises two independent 50 m² double-height studio flats with mezzanine floors, separated by a 36 m² garage. The first floor comprises a 92 m² flat with a fully glazed living room opening onto the garden, a kitchen, a master bedroom, a small bedroom, a bathroom and a study. Access is via an outside staircase on the garden side.
Like the flat, the large workshop on the top floor is accessed via the outside staircase. This 48 m² workshop is double-height. Two sheds (zenithal sawtooth windows used in factories) and two entablature windows overlooking the garden illuminate this magnificent space, which also has a 24 m² terrace and a balcony.
The house is crowned by a 40 m² roof terrace with views over the city.
It is located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, between the Olympiades and Porte d’Ivry districts.
Slight modifications that respect the building
With the exception of a few alterations necessary for the evolution of the living environment – carried out with respect for the original architecture – such as closing the terrace shelter to install a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and double-glazing the window frames to match the original – the Planeix house has kept its beautiful volumes, its original colours and its furniture intact, such as the storage units built into the partitions, the sideboard in the living room and the cloakroom in the entrance hall. It has been listed on the Supplementary Inventory of Historic Monuments since 1976.
Le Corbusier
Born in Switzerland in 1887 and died in 1965, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was an architect and town planner renowned for his ability to turn architecture into a total art. He thought about buildings and interior design in terms of both furnishings and comfort, and took the urban planning dimension into account in all his creations. He remains undeniably one of the most emblematic figures of the Modern Movement.
Throughout his career, Le Corbusier shared his visions and theories through his participation in international exhibitions such as that of 1925, where he presented the Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, and that of 1937, with his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux.
A defender of modernism and rejecting the decorative arts, Le Corbusier inscribed his architectural thinking in his villas, most notably in the villa Savoye in 1928, where he theorised the “five points of modern architecture” (pilotis, the flat roof, banded windows, the free facade and the free plan).
Although he was one of the most prolific architects of his time, many of his projects never saw the light of day, such as the Neighbour Plan or the Contemporary city of three million inhabitants. Although sometimes too polemical or radical in the eyes of the general public, Le Corbusier’s work nevertheless had international resonance. His last major project was offered to him by the city of Chandigarh, India. He was commissioned to direct all the urban planning work for the creation of the new capital of Punjab, where he blended raw concrete with lush vegetation.
The history of Maison Planeix
Le Corbusier designed this house from 1924 to 1928 on behalf of Antonin Planeix (1895-1949), a man with a passion for modernity, a painter, a self-taught craftsman and an entrepreneur with a passion for photography who produced transfers on enamel. His small enamelled photographic portraits were widely used on tombstones.
The Planeix house is one of a series of studio residences built by Le Corbusier in the 1920s: the Ozenfant studio in Paris 14e (1923-1924), the Lipchitz studio (1923-1925), the Miestchaninoff studio (1923-1926) and the Ternisien house (1923-1927) in Boulogne… The refined architecture of these houses transcribes the pictorial theories of Purism and borrows elements from purely functional industrial architecture.
These workshop-houses combine living and working spaces, and are characterised on the inside by large, well-lit volumes, made possible by the application of the “Five Points of a New Architecture” that Le Corbusier formulated in 1927: the pilotis, the free plan, the free facade, the long window and the garden roof. In order to pay for the house, the total cost of which was almost double the initial budget, Antonin Planeix asked Le Corbusier to add two workshops on the ground floor in place of the stilts.
