Living in Le Corbusier’s houses: one artist has been doing it for years

Twelve countries, from the best-known architectures in Marseille, Paris, and Berlin to those in Moscow, Baghdad, and Tokyo: Sardinian artist Cristian Chironi in 2015 decided to go and inhabit most of the buildings constructed by Le Corbusier during his career. He does so, he recounts, "not so much out of a veneration for the architect," rather because Le Corbusier, with his focus on the future of living, "is a means of telling the story of how people live in homes today."

The result is a multifaceted work, where living is translated each time into different forms-installations, performances, documentaries, and traveling exhibitions-but above all into "encounters and real life." The latest stage of the My house is a Le Corbusier project took place in Tunis, around Villa Baizeau, one of the master of modernism's most difficult and controversial pieces of architecture: built for a tycoon in French colonial Tunisia and separated for nearly a century from the city around it.

What we know about Villa Baizeau we know from pictures and stories. And so do those who live in Tunis every day. Located on Carthage Hill, it was designed between 1928 and 1930 by Le Corbusier together with Pierre Jeanneret, "from a distance," without the architect ever visiting the site, and soon incorporated into the capital's presidential park. The request of the client, Lucien Baizeau, director of the "Tunisoise Industrielle" and a central figure in the economy of French colonial Tunisia, was to always have a view to the east, over the sea: the result is a multi-level house, where each floor has a terrace and thus a continuous view of the horizon, but also a dwelling capable of defending itself against the climate, working on shade and natural ventilation.

Villa Baizeau, with its modernist setting, is one of the most curious pieces of architecture in the city, but also one of the paradoxically most difficult places to approach: the presidential park in which it is located is in fact militarized, and anyone who tries to approach it is stopped. This is also what happens to Chironi, who while trying to observe it together with director Domenico Palma is blocked and detained for hours: "you see it from a distance, but as soon as you get close they take you away."

In short, Villa Baizeau is not only a villa mostly forgotten by the general public, but also a house that one cannot inhabit or walk through, and where Chironi himself has never been able to enter: "it is the mirror of the city. Like Tunis in the Mediterranean, Villa Baizeau is distant, it is put on the edge."

This stage of My house is a Le Corbusier, therefore, is based on this distance, on the recovery of memories related to the house that do not actually exist, but are mixed with the artist's personal life and the people he met in Tunis. "How to live in a house where you cannot enter to live? Simply by moving from bodily to mental contact," he says, describing a transition that also becomes a working method.

Chironi moves to the Medina, experiences the city, traverses it, and builds another form of living: "I chose to make the house live in the city and the city in the house, to move from an elite high architecture to an architecture made primarily of gestures, encounters, spaces, and community."

It does so with an exhibition, hosted by La Boîte - Centre d'Art & d'Architecture, and with a car, a Fiat 127 from Turin, used as a "thermometer to measure the mood of the city" and as a mobile space for relationships, developing the project together with the Italian Cultural Institute of Tunis.

Here the reference to Le Corbusier is direct, but also reversed: the "living machine" is no longer an abstract model, but something that moves, that traverses the city, that welcomes. The habitation becomes a temporary, open house, traversed by others-artists, architects, musicians-and built through relationship rather than through space. Not coincidentally, at the end of the project, the car enters the collection of MAUTO - Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile, as a concrete trace of a living that no longer coincides with architecture but with what happens around it.

But My house is a Le Corbusier begins much earlier than today, in a small town of two thousand inhabitants in the hinterland of Sardinia, Orani, where Le Corbusier probably has never been, but where-perhaps without knowing it-he designed a house.


The story comes to Chironi in an indirect way, during an afternoon spent at the home of Daniele Nivola, grandson of Costantino Nivola, one of the most important 20th-century Sardinian sculptors and a collaborator of Le Corbusier, as well as his father's godfather: it is there that he hears for the first time the story of this never-realized project, which remained for years in a drawer and then disappeared.

In the 1960s, in fact, Costantino Nivola entrusted his nephew Daniele with the project of a house designed by the very Swiss-French architect, asking him to build it faithfully following the design. That project, however, will never be realized. Not for economic or technical reasons, but for something simpler: it is not understood. "It had no doors or windows ... it looked more like a hovel than a house," Chironi recounts, reporting the words of those who were supposed to live in that house.


It is a minimal but decisive gap: between an architectural design and its interpretation, between the great masters' idea of living and its reception by ordinary people.

Years later, in 2014, that story resurfaced when Chironi came across a call from the Fondation Le Corbusier dedicated to contemporary artists. "That's when I remembered it all, this story that tied my father to Le Corbusier," he says, explaining how the idea of working precisely on that gap arose from there, "reasoning about the disconnect between communication and interpretation, about Le Corbusier's houses as a point of observation on the world."

The project is selected, and from that moment My house is a Le Corbusier takes shape: not so much as a reconstruction of a missed house, but as an attempt to inhabit, finally, that distance. And it is a distance that is not only about this story, but that runs through all of Le Corbusier's work: that between what architecture imagines and what people actually make of the spaces they inhabit.

The first stop is Bologna, in the Esprit Nouveau Pavilion. It is here that the project takes shape for the first time, in 2015, and that what at first might have seemed like an intuition becomes a method: to inhabit a Le Corbusier architecture not as an object to be observed, but as a space to be used, traversed, and tested.


This is a decisive step, because it immediately moves the project out of a theoretical dimension. It is not a matter of studying Le Corbusier, but of entering into it, experiencing it, verifying what happens when those architectures are actually used.

From there on, each stage-from Paris to Marseille, from Berlin to Chandigarh, to Tunis-becomes a variation on the same gesture: inhabiting as a practice, as a device, as a research tool. "Dwelling has become a form of language for me," says Chironi.

At this point the question arises: does one really live well inside Le Corbusier?

It is a question that runs through the architect's entire oeuvre and that, for decades, has fueled a specific critique: that of an architecture that is too abstract, often lowered from above, with little attention to the real conditions - environmental, social - of the places in which he built. From the Ville Radieuse to the Unité d'Habitation, his work has been read as an attempt to organize life according to a model, not always connected to reality.

And yet, when Chironi actually goes into these houses-and stays there, uses them, goes through them-something changes. "I disagree," he says.

In the duplex inhabited within the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille, the house is organized around the body: "My center of gravity stood still, I simply made a movement and so I cooked, washed dishes, dried. The use of minimum space with maximum comfort." The large window holds interior and exterior together, the light changes throughout the day, the landscape enters the space: "in the morning I had all the pinks of dawn, in the evening all the reds of sunset." And the wind across the terrace-often cited as a limitation-becomes part of the experience: the mistral crosses the building as a continuous sound, and Chironi records it, follows it, listens to it under the pilotis, turns it into working material. "I got tired of working, I went up ... the old man strolled, the children played, the couples kissed."

Chironi's is a narrative made of micro-gestures, of habits, of time spent in space. It does not deny the criticalities of Le Corbusier's architectures, but it goes through them, and what emerges is not a building that works or does not work at all, but a space that changes depending on who lives in it, that adapts, that is even contradicted.

In this sense, Chironi's Le Corbusier ends up being a slightly different, almost displaced Le Corbusier: not the one of posters or models, but the one that takes shape in use and experience, and also in distance.

It is a Le Corbusier, perhaps, a bit reinvented - like the house in Tunis that cannot be lived in and exists mostly in images, stories and projections. It lives in the gap between what architecture wants to be and what, once delivered to people, it ends up-sometimes even in spite of itself-to become.