by Luisa Ferro

Pierre Chareau. La Maison de Verre 1928-1933. Un objet singulier, edited by Olivier Cinqualbre, Jean-Michel Place Paris, 2002 (163 pages)

‘Living in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence’.
Walter Benjamin

Pierre Chareau had little inclination for controversy in his actions, writings and words, but he became polemical as soon as he began to build. Like a real mythical object, over time his maison de verre has turned out to be a valid manifesto for new theoretical structures that frequently differed or even diverged (Richard Rogers Domus, 1966; Kenneth Frampton, Perspecta, 1970). This was because he applied the relations between ideas and formal creativity in architecture in an exemplary fashion. This house is a possible type for the contemporary city. It was erected for everyday life in 20th-century Paris, so it sought to meet real needs; it was also intended to satisfy aspirations that are the essence of living. It was not a capricious product of the imagination. Chareau’s house, his daring experiments, paved the way for fresh solutions and today still point the way. This is exactly what this slender volume wants to recall, reproducing the writings and period photos published in 1933 by the French journal L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Le Corbusier frequently visited the site of the maison de verre while it was under construction. In fact, many of the work’s attributes belong to our time, such as the expressive means of the context, scale, colours and materials (glass, glass bricks, plywood, steel, plastic seals and rubber flooring).

So do its criteria (continuous space, movable partitions, hierarchy between private and common spaces, independent service spaces).The house is the space inside. But first a boundary had to be made: a translucent membrane that lets faint daylight through encloses the space. The subtle, surreal result is that the outside and inside merge. The pictures of the house while it was going up contained in the book clearly show that the house is within an old courtyard. In other words, they illustrate that the outside is actually an interior as well. Modern humanity knows space and is even more cognizant of the movement of space; what is more, the fourth dimension (time) plays a part. One has to go through the spaces in a certain time; for those who live here, one has to be able to perceive the fourth dimension.

As Guillaume Apollinaire wrote during the same period, the latter is the dimension of infinity and the spiritual. Inside the house’s boundary of glass bricks the fourth dimension is felt through the contrast between dynamics and statics. In architecture, statics are the structural frames, representing the eternal and immobile. The dynamism expressed by the horizontal and vertical circulation system, the fixed and movable partitions, the sliding screens and the rotating screens that continuously transform the space is totally independent. Chareau’s house is neither still nor photogenic: it is cinemagenic. You have to move through the spaces to appreciate it, for the entire interior is animated. When you enter you get involved, comprehend and are driven to live there; you want to go through the whole building. The house itself sums up a world, a modern French artistic context derived from cubism. Chareau was one of the founders of CIAM; he joined the Union of Modern Artists and was one of the people behind L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Rather than being a cubist manifesto, this creation followed a cubist procedure.

Like Braque and Picasso, Chareau kept to the concrete terrain of the object balanced between ‘materiality’ and ‘abstraction’; this maintained continuity with the classical tradition, extracting the elements that would become stimuli for the future from the complexity of the past. Chareau did not separate the material of his volumes from the rituals of habit. So-called analytic cubism is practically circumscribed to the deconstruction of the spatial perspective (the objects were simultaneously visible from several viewpoints) and the interpenetration of forms in movement by cutting planes. This can lead to sculptural solidity or the bright, crystalline transparency of geometrically arranged planes. Two other facets are the use of both a modular grid and the introduction of curved, sinuous forms, plus the direct participation of the observer. Cubist paintings are devoid of air – more precisely, the air is just as real and physical as the material figures, and the same is true of the great central void, the lynchpin of the whole design.

The maison de verre’s structural steelwork was even then assembled traditionally. The I-beams and columns consist of simple profiles beaten in situ by the workers. The same method was employed for the Eiffel Tower and the metro and characterized the entire 20th century. As Chareau put it, the house was supposed to be a model constructed by artisans in light of industrial standardization. But he ‘wanted to do more than clarify the term decoration... The cut and shaped columns fit into the building as a necessity: they do not represent ornament and are not an addition’. This is the opinion of Alberto Sartoris, who assigns a very special trait to Chareau’s work: elegance.

‘Elegance is a quality of the form; furthermore, it has the strength and variety of the form. Apollo is both elegant and touching’. This is why he employs two words to define Chareau’s work: ‘divine proportion’. Every detail is a perfect machine. Here Chareau did more than merely organize, he invented; he utilized the new materials in a correct functional interpretation, but he also predicted the possible effects (light, transparency, surface). After perusing the photographs taken after the 1994 restoration published in this volume, the house still represents a worthwhile point of departure for pondering the value of construction in an age in which images are king. It works.

Not only is it based on abstract guidelines, it moves. The walls hold and open. The idea, formal innovation and construction have been fully achieved.

Luisa Ferro is a lecturer in architectural composition at Milan Polytechnic