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Long
before Pei's glass pyramid in the Louvre, there was another house
of glass in Paris. The Maison de Verre (lit. House of
Glass), a modernist icon built in the late 1920s by Pierre Chareau,
has an important symbolic role in the history of
architecture. It is, in fact, the house as cult
object. It's strength is its poetry -- the vocabulary of
transparency and contrast, the early use of steel and glass, the
industrial feel of exposed beams and rubberized floor tiles, and
the very idea of revelation -- of structure, of glass façade like
some translucent veil that lets all that glorious light in.
Heavy metal fixtures and glass block transformed into functional
lyricism. The structure is literally inserted into an old
18th century building…model perhaps for New York City where so
little construction is new and where the idea of a home/work space
has so rarely been articulated this brilliantly. There is the
famous double height grand salon with marvelous high metal
bookshelf, light filtering in through expanse of glass, and where the
only views to the outside are to the back garden.
Pierre
Chareau is far better known for his furniture and interior design
-- this is the only house of his which survives. Built for
Dr. Dalsace, who bought an old 18th century hôtel particulier but
was unable to procure the top apartment, this modernist
construction was integrated into the antique structure with the
old apartment above. There is spatial play with forms that
interlock and overlap, the 2 floors of living quarters appearing
suspended above the workspace below. Worked
metal screens which rotate separate the house above from what
was originally the doctor's office below. At night, seen
from inside the courtyard, the house glows like some lovely
translucent lamp, the direction of light through the glass now
beautifully reversed....
Photo
by François Hallard for La Maison de Verre, Dominique
Vellay, Thames & Hudson
Dominique
Vellay calls the Maison de Verre a "touchstone
for architects throughout the world, notably Richard Rogers, Renzo
Piano, Jean Nouvel, Glenn Murcutt and I.M.Pei, and in many of its
elements is a model, indeed an exemplum...."
and perhaps one sees traces of this house in all those Parisian
icons: in Pei's pyramid in the Louvre, in Rogers'
Pompidou Centre, in the facade of Nouvel's
Institut
du Monde Arabe,
which eCognoscente
wrote
about earlier.... So here's to houses of glass, to
transparency, and to light.... Read:
La
Maison
de Verre, Dominique Vellay
Read:
The
Best House in Paris, nytimes.com
Read:
Institut
du Monde Arabe, eCognoscente
Tags:
paris
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