Trifter

“I have a château on the French Riviera that measures 3.66 m x 3.66 m” used to say Le Corbusier. The place has become, with time, a must for students in architecture, and especially the Japanese who perhaps see here the art of living of the Samurai.

In the heavenly site of the Gulf of Roquebrune, on a sloping path reaching the Mediterranean is found Le Corbusier’s Cabanon. His “château” is in fact a seaside wood hut with one door and three windows located on a narrow strip of land. It has only one room divided into 4 spaces: to sleep, wash, work and eat. The furniture is in an helical motion  accentuated by the one foot table placed sideways and that can be tilted. The bed with a wooden pillow offers 3 drawers. Two wood cubes are used as stool, another one bigger is used to put things away. A cabinet has been placed in the ceiling. The tiny washbasin even has a mirror inserted in the window pane. Very personal modern frescoes decorate the walls, one of them represents a phallus. They are signed Le Corbusier. The floor is painted yellow, the ceiling green and light orange. The 3 windows are an interpretation of the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms. A small window at the rear of the hut frames a micro landscape with a mineral character. Another window opens onto the immediate surroundings. And the vista over the Mediterranean and the Principality of Monaco is really something.

    Le Corbusier’s Cabanon in Roquebrune.

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Le Corbusier came here on holidays in August for 18 years. The legend says he would have drawn the plan of the hut in three quarters of an hour. This is a square of 3.66 x 3.66 m and 2.26 m high. Once again, the architect used the Golden Ratio in order to keep human size. This minimalistic house is strictly necessary and sufficient for a man to live in with the essentials. This is a prototype of the “machine for living” according to Le Corbusier’s principle to adapt architecture to industrial civilization and cast a bridge between art and industry. The hut was completed in 1955. The architect who was a self-made man, a freedom lover, was quite ahead of his time. Did he foreshadow a new psychology? Did his urban philosophy for a new life without the superfluous anticipate an ecological way of life? Le Corbusier’s Cabanon on the French Riviera proposes an  ascesis, a paradise regained without harsh consumption in conviviality with the joy only Nature can give.

Check out also my related article: http://quazen.com/arts/architecture/the-secret-of-le-corbusier/

Roquebrune and the Mediterranean.

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Le Corbusier was drowned on August 27, 1965 in front of his Cabanon. He was buried close to his wife Yvonne in the small cemetery of the old picturesque village of Roquebrune. He had left a drawing for his tomb.  

The old village of Roquebrune.

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