Le Corbusier’s Studio-Apartment
After two years of restoration, the studio-apartment where Le Corbusier lived from 1934 to 1965 reopens its doors to the public.
Le Corbusier’s studio-apartment occupies the last two floors of the Molitor apartment block, located at 24, rue Nungesser et Coli. Designed between 1931 and 1934 by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, his cousin and associate, the building called “24 N.C.” is situated in the 16th arrondissement at the border between Paris and Boulogne. Due to its East-west orientation and its exceptional surroundings, it fits what Le Corbusier termed “the conditions of the radiant city”.
As a project for a rental building, it offered the architect the opportunity to test the validity of his urban proposals. Given that no structures were placed opposite, he could raise facades entirely filled with windows, thereby constructing the first residential apartment made of glass in architectural history. Bathed in light, Le Corbusier’s personal apartment spans the length of the last floor and, furthermore, houses his painting studio.
The architect would inhabit this apartment-terrace from 1934 until his death in 1965. The apartment was classified as a Historical Monument in 1972, and the facades facing the streets, the courtyard, the roof, and the entrance hall were also inscribed as such in 1990.
The Société Immobilière de Paris Parc des Princes solicited from Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret a building plan that would house roughly fifteen apartments to be sold or rented. Following this program*, the architects designed a structure comprising two or three apartments per level.
The final plan read as follows: three housing units on each of the first two floors as well as the fourth and fifth, and two on the third and sixth floors. Le Corbusier negotiated with the property developers so as to obtain the last two levels of the building and use them for his own apartment. Having secured the seventh and eighth floors, the architect set himself to the construction, at his own expense, of these two levels and the roof of the building.
[Text from Fondation Le Corbusier]
