La Maison de Verre: The Best House In Paris
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La Maison de Verre: The Best House In Paris www.iht.com By Nicolai Ouroussoff No house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20th-century architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.Its status as a cult object was enhanced by the house's relative inaccessibility. For decades it was seen only by a handful of scholars and by patients of a gynecologist whose offices took up the first floor. Later it was mostly used as occasional guest quarters for friends of the doctor's family, who had long since settled into a traditional 18th-century apartment across the courtyard.So when I heard over dinner here with some friends a year or so ago that the family had sold the house to an American entrepreneur, I was astonished. My dinner companion, an architect who had never met the new owner, lamented the sale as evidence of France's cultural decline, akin to the construction of Euro Disney. Waving a dismissive hand, she invoked the cliché of the ugly American, pockets stuffed with dollars.As it turns out, although the buyer, Robert Rubin, made his money on Wall Street, he is far from a crass trophy hunter. After buying the house, he embarked on a painstaking renovation of its intricate — and for its time, ingenious — mechanical systems. He enlisted a corps of architectural historians and graduate students to decipher its secrets. With the first phase of the renovation completed, he plans to open it up eventually for limited tours. In his loving devotion to the house and its historical particulars, he has emerged as a role model for those who seek to preserve an architectural relic without turning it into a mausoleum.Rubin, 54, is a born collector. He restored his first car, a Jensen Healy, when he moved to New York City in his early 20s. After racking up money as a commodities trader in the mid-1970s, he turned his eye to bigger prizes, like a 1960s Ferrari 275 GTB and later a rare 1933 Bugatti that had once belonged to King Leopold of Belgium. His fascination with industrial objects eventually led him to the works of Modernist architects like Jean Prouvé and Chareau, whose creations were elaborate Machine Age fantasies.Approaching his new subject with the zeal of a scholar, Rubin went back to school in 2001, enrolling at Columbia University's graduate school of architecture at the age of 48. He worked as a teaching assistant for Kenneth Frampton, the architectural historian who wrote a celebrated textbook on 20th-century Modernism.Around the same time Rubin bought Prouvé's Maison Tropicale, a prefabricated metal shelter conceived in the late 1940s as a prototype for affordable housing in colonial Africa and later erected in the Congo. After a methodical restoration, he organized a series of exhibitions on the Prouvé house, shipping it to Yale and to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Last year he donated it to the Pompidou Center. (By contrast the hotelier André Balazs recently bought a version of the Maison Tropicale at Christie's, for $5 million and plans to make it the centerpiece of a Caribbean resort.)Yet nothing Rubin had collected up to this point could compare — in scale or in the weight of responsibility — to the Maison de Verre. The house is often compared to another early-20th-century masterpiece, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. Both houses were built in the brief period between the two world wars, the high point of classical Modernism. Both embody that movement's obsession with hygiene, and the fiercely held notion that a house could function as a tool for physical and psychic healing. But while Le Corbusier's masterpiece was intended as the expression of a broad vision — a philosophical rejoinder to the squalid disorder of the medieval city — Chareau's ambitions were more humble.Born in 1883, he began his career as a draftsman for a traditional English furniture maker in Paris. By the early 1920s he had designed the interiors of some elegantly appointed apartments for wealthy clients and was mostly admired for his furniture designs, elaborate wood and metal pieces with movable parts that reflect a taste for refined machinery.The Maison de Verre itself has been described as an elaborate piece of furniture. It was commissioned in the late 1920s by Dr. Jean Dalsace and his wife, Annie, who had bought the site, an existing 18th-century hôtel particulier, but were unable to evict the woman who lived on the top floor. As a result Chareau was obliged to carve out his creation underneath her apartment. Viewed from just inside the courtyard the house looks like a glowing translucent box, its great glass-block facade embedded in the 18th-century fabric and capped by the old one-story apartment level above.The house's poetic force has resonated through decades. Chareau conceived its interior as a delicate composition of interlocking forms, with the two-story private quarters seeming to float atop the doctor's office on the first floor. Upon entering, you can either descend a few steps into the doctor's waiting room or turn back and climb a broad staircase. From there you turn again before stepping up into the double-height grand salon of the private quarters, which is illuminated through the towering glass block wall.The series of turns is a shrewd strategy. With each step the old Paris — the world of medieval squares and 19th-century boulevards — grows more distant, allowing you to become enveloped in Chareau's fantasy. A towering metal bookcase of small richly bound volumes stands along the salon's back wall. Stairs lead to a narrow balcony that frames two sides of the salon and continues on to the bedrooms. The only views of the outside world are at the back of the house, which overlooks a small private garden.The house has been compared to a Surrealist artwork, a theater stage and an operating room. That effect is animated by the play of light. During the day the facade has a strange milky glow; at night floodlights illuminate the wall from the outdoors, so that it glows like a lantern, bathing the salon in amber light. A single-story dining room and a smaller salon are set just off this central space, so that you are always conscious of its dramatic scale.But the house is above all an exquisite machine. Chareau worked closely with Louis Dalbet, a talented ironworker, and the house's detailing has as much in common with centuries-old craft traditions as with the efficiency of the 20th-century assembly line. Big curved perforated metal screens at the bottom of the entry stair rotate to shut the apartment off from the office below. A rolling ladder set along the salon bookcase is fabricated from a single piece of steel pipe and inlayed with wood. The glistening brass window casements at the back of the house are assembled from the window panels of a passenger train.The Maison de Verre had a profound impact on generations of architects who were seeking to free themselves from the rigid orthodoxies of mainstream Modernism. Richard Rogers, a designer with Renzo Piano of the 1976 Pompidou Center, with its exposed tubes and bright colors, was captivated by the house when he first saw it in the early 1960s. A quarter-century later architects like Ben van Berkel would visit to try to decipher the uncannily fluid relationship between the house's spaces for work and play, for public and private life.
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Casablanca Office / Agents
Mr. Nour-eddine Saoudi
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163 زنقة طه حسين
الدار البيضاء-المملكة المغربية
لتغطية الدول التالية: المغرب، الجزائر، تونس، موريتانيا |
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