PARIS

NO house in France better reflects the magical promise of 20thcentury architecture than the Maison de Verre. Tucked behind the
solemn porte-cochere of a traditional French residence on Rue
Saint-Guillaume, a quiet street in a wealthy Left Bank
neighborhood, the 1932 house designed by Pierre Chareau
challenges our assumptions about the nature of Modernism. For
architects it represents the road not taken: a lyrical machine
whose theatricality is the antithesis of the dry functionalist
aesthetic that reigned through much of the 20th century.
Its status as a cult object was enhanced by the houses relative
inaccessibility. For decades it was seen only by a handful of
scholars and by patients of a gynecologist whose offices took up
the first floor. Later it was mostly used as occasional guest
quarters for friends of the doctors family, who had long since
settled into a traditional 18th-century apartment across the
courtyard.
So when I heard over dinner here with some friends a year or so
ago that the family had sold the house to an American
entrepreneur, I was astonished. My dinner companion, an
architect who had never met the new owner, lamented the sale as
evidence of Frances cultural decline, akin to the construction of
Euro Disney. Waving a dismissive hand, she invoked the clich of

the ugly American, pockets stuffed with dollar

The Maison de Verres grand salon, where receptions took place, included an Erard
piano.CreditMark Lyon
As it turns out, although the buyer, Robert Rubin, made his money
on Wall Street, he is far from a crass trophy hunter. After buying
the house, he embarked on a painstaking renovation of its
intricate and for its time, ingenious mechanical systems. He
enlisted a corps of architectural historians and graduate students
to decipher its secrets. With the first phase of the renovation
completed, he plans to open it up eventually for limited tours. In
his loving devotion to the house and its historical particulars, he
has emerged as a role model for those who seek to preserve an
architectural relic without turning it into a mausoleum.
Mr. Rubin, 54, is a born collector. He restored his first car, a
Jensen Healy, when he moved to New York City in his early 20s.
After racking up money as a commodities trader in the mid-1970s,
he turned his eye to bigger prizes, like a 1960s Ferrari 275 GTB
and later a rare 1933 Bugatti that had once belonged to King
Leopold of Belgium. His fascination with industrial objects
eventually led him to the works of Modernist architects like Jean
Prouv and Chareau, whose creations were elaborate Machine Age
fantasies.

Approaching his new subject with the zeal of a scholar, Mr. Rubin
went back to school in 2001, enrolling at Columbia Universitys
graduate school of architecture at the age of 48. He worked as a
teaching assistant for Kenneth Frampton, the architectural
historian who wrote a celebrated textbook on 20th-century
Modernism.
Around the same time Mr. Rubin bought Prouvs Maison
Tropicale, a prefabricated metal shelter conceived in the late
1940s as a prototype for affordable housing in colonial Africa and
later erected in the Congo. After a methodical restoration, he
organized a series of exhibitions on the Prouv house, shipping it
to Yale and to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Last year he
donated it to the Pompidou Center. (By contrast the hotelier
Andr Balazs recently bought a version of the Maison Tropicale at
Christies, for $5 million and plans to make it the centerpiece of a
Caribbean resort.)
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Yet nothing Mr. Rubin had collected up to this point could
compare in scale or in the weight of responsibility to the
Maison de Verre. The house is often compared to another early20th-century masterpiece, Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye. Both
houses were built in the brief period between the two world wars,
the high point of classical Modernism. Both embody that
movements obsession with hygiene, and the fiercely held notion
that a house could function as a tool for physical and psychic
healing. But while Le Corbusiers masterpiece was intended as the
expression of a broad vision a philosophical rejoinder to the
squalid disorder of the medieval city Chareaus ambitions were
more humble.
Born in 1883, he began his career as a draftsman for a traditional
English furniture maker in Paris. By the early 1920s he had
designed the interiors of some elegantly appointed apartments for
wealthy clients and was mostly admired for his furniture designs,
elaborate wood and metal pieces with movable parts that reflect a
taste for refined machinery.
The Maison de Verre itself has been described as an elaborate
piece of furniture. It was commissioned in the late 1920s by Dr.
Jean Dalsace and his wife, Annie, who had bought the site, an
existing 18th-century htel particulier, but were unable to evict
the woman who lived on the top floor. As a result Chareau was
obliged to carve out his creation underneath her apartment.
Viewed from just inside the courtyard the house looks like a
glowing translucent box, its great glass-block facade embedded in
the 18th-century fabric and capped by the old one-story apartment
level above.

The houses poetic force has resonated through decades. Chareau

conceived its interior as a delicate composition of interlocking
forms, with the two-story private quarters seeming to float atop
the doctors office on the first floor. Upon entering, you can either
descend a few steps into the doctors waiting room or turn back
and climb a broad staircase. From there you turn again before
stepping up into the double-height grand salon of the private
quarters, which is illuminated through the towering glass block
wall.
The series of turns is a shrewd strategy. With each step the old
Paris the world of medieval squares and 19th-century
boulevards grows more distant, allowing you to become
enveloped in Chareaus fantasy. A towering metal bookcase of
small richly bound volumes stands along the salons back wall.
Stairs lead to a narrow balcony that frames two sides of the salon
and continues on to the bedrooms. The only views of the outside
world are at the back of the house, which overlooks a small private
garden.
The house has been compared to a Surrealist artwork, a theater
stage and an operating room. That effect is animated by the play
of light. During the day the facade has a strange milky glow; at
night floodlights illuminate the wall from the outdoors, so that it
glows like a lantern, bathing the salon in amber light. A singlestory dining room and a smaller salon are set just off this central
space, so that you are always conscious of its dramatic scale.
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But the house is above all an exquisite machine. Chareau worked
closely with Louis Dalbet, a talented ironworker, and the houses
detailing has as much in common with centuries-old craft
traditions as with the efficiency of the 20th-century assembly line.
Big curved perforated metal screens at the bottom of the entry
stair rotate to shut the apartment off from the office below. A
rolling ladder set along the salon bookcase is fabricated from a
single piece of steel pipe and inlayed with wood. The glistening
brass window casements at the back of the house are assembled
from the window panels of a passenger train.
The Maison de Verre had a profound impact on generations of
architects who were seeking to free themselves from the rigid
orthodoxies of mainstream Modernism. Richard Rogers, a
designer with Renzo Piano of the 1976 Pompidou Center, with its
exposed tubes and bright colors, was captivated by the house
when he first saw it in the early 1960s. A quarter-century later
architects like Ben van Berkel would visit to try to decipher the
uncannily fluid relationship between the houses spaces for work
and play, for public and private life.

The house stayed in the Dalsace family for more than 70 years. In
the 1980s Dr. Dalsaces daughter, Aline Vellay, and her husband
considered selling it to the French government. Their thought was
that it might be turned into a national landmark, as Le Corbusiers
Villa Savoye was decades ago. But the government did not take
them up on it.
Mr. Rubin and his wife, Stphane, approached the family in 2004
at the suggestion of a mutual friend and bought it for an
undisclosed price in 2006.
I think they finally sold it to me because of what I had done with
the Maison Tropicale, he told me recently in an interview in his
apartment on Central Park West. It was a very heavy
responsibility to have.
Although he loved the house, he added, I didnt want to fetishize
it.
The notion of owning a Modernist landmark has been fashionable
for decades now. The usual impulse was to embark on a
multimillion-dollar top-to-bottom renovation, then move into an
immaculate architectural gem, upgraded with a SubZero
refrigerator and a Viking stove.
The problem with this template is that something always gets lost:
the essential character, the gently worn eccentricities, the patina
that accumulates over time. French preservationists call this
unrenovated state dans son jus literally, in its juice. When it
is erased wholesale, the result can be sterile and artificial, like
radical cosmetic surgery.
To avoid that possibility Mr. Rubin approached his task
deliberately. He began by slowly restoring the houses mechanical
systems, first the electrical wiring, and then the original heating
and plumbing systems. The outdoor spotlights, most of which had
been lowered or taken down decades ago, were restored to their
original position on a steel frame in the courtyard. He also bought
a fancy new stove.
But he left many of the most visible scars untouched: the worn
textiles and dulled metal surfaces as well as some of the structural
alterations made over the years. He decided not to polish the
perforated panels in the salon. The old rubber flooring, whose
pattern of small disks looks cracked and worn down in some
places, is still there.
The whole question of originality and restoration always bugged
me, Mr. Rubin said. It started with cars. My Bugatti was
originally a Grand Prix car, and then Bugatti painted the car black.
But the exhaust had blown some of it off, and you could see
original blue factory paint underneath. I kept that. I thought if you

restore it, you lose its soul. You need to feel some direct
connection to the past.
I recently had the chance to test this idea firsthand. For a few days
this summer Mr. Rubin let me stay there with my girlfriend. The
visit fulfilled a fantasy, but it was also a concession to various
editors who have suggested that I briefly live in a house and then
write about it. (Usually this suggestion arises from one of the
tiredest clichs in architecture: that the more unorthodox a house
is, the more difficult it is to live in.)
We arrived at the house in the late morning after a long flight from
New York. A housekeeper greeted us at the door and methodically
took us through the rooms. Light switches. Check. Bathrooms.
Check. Where to hang our clothing. Check.
As we strode through the house, I was reminded of an essay by
Mr. Frampton that compared the house to Marcel Duchamps
1923 Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even). Like Duchamps work, he wrote, the house is separated
into male and female zones, with the downstairs office offset by
the bedrooms upstairs. These worlds leak into each other at
carefully controlled points. A narrow retractable ships stair links
the female realm to the main floor; a hidden stairway leads from
the office to an upstairs study.
But the assignment of gender roles could just as easily be reversed.
As the day wore on, my friend and I found ourselves locked in a
gentle pas de deux, slipping in and out of rooms, yet always
coming back to the grand salon, which seemed to arrest us
momentarily in space. We began to appreciate the houses
elasticity, allowing for varying degrees of solitude and intimacy.
This effect was amplified by the play of light and sound. By
turning on and off the various floodlights outside, you could adjust
the mood of the entire house. When the lights are dimmed, for
example, the house becomes less theatrical, more tender. Voices
too travel through the rooms, so that you are always faintly aware
of the presence of the other.
It wasnt until we arose the next morning, however, that we fully
understood Chareaus choreography. The bathroom floor is raised
in certain areas so that as we crossed it, we could catch occasional
glimpses of each other before suddenly dropping back out of view.
A pair of perforated metal panels that divide the shower and bath
can swing open, enabling us to chat with each other as we bathed.
When they were closed, you could see the outline of a human
silhouette moving behind the screen. It was the same dance we
had performed around the central salon, now brought to its most
intimate scale. The experience drove home how liberating the
house must have felt during those first years, when it still

hummed with life, with Mr. and Mrs. Dalsace circling into and out
of each others orbit. The house was a perfect balance between the
need for companionship and solitude, a utopia of the senses.
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Alas, Chareau barely got to witness his greatest accomplishment.
A few years after the house was completed the Germans marched
into Paris, and Chareau like the Dalsaces, a member of the citys
Jewish intellectual elite fled. He traveled to Marseilles, then
Morocco, and finally New York, where he arrived penniless and
unknown.
In the mid-1940s the artist Robert Motherwell commissioned him
to design a small studio house in the Hamptons. (That structure
an innovative experiment in low-cost construction that resembled
a Quonset hut was callously demolished in 1985.) Even
Motherwell would later admit that, like most people in New York,
he had never been fully aware of Chareaus accomplishments.
Chareau never received another commission after that, surviving
partly on what money his wife could earn giving cooking lessons to
wealthy Americans. In an attempt to resurrect his reputation, he
reached out in 1950 to the director of the Muse National dArt
Moderne in Paris. Around the same time he began negotiating
with the Museum of Modern Art about a possible New York show
of his work.
The Paris show never materialized. And Philip Johnson, the
mercurial director of MoMAs architecture department, who had
just completed his own Glass House in New Canaan, Conn.,
vetoed an exhibition. By the end of 1950 Chareau was dead.
And now it is an American who has taken it upon himself to
preserve the jewel of his legacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/arts/design/26ouro.html?_r=0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maison_de_Verre

Maison de Verre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre(front facade)

Maison de Verre's umbrella stand (at the entry) typical of the hand-crafted machine looking interior
Coordinates:

48.853910N 2.327990E

Maison de Verre (front left facade)

The Maison de Verre (French for House of Glass) was built from 1928 to 1932 in Paris, France.
Constructed in the early modern style ofarchitecture, the house's design emphasized three
primary traits: honesty of materials, variable transparency of forms, and juxtaposition of
"industrial" materials and fixtures with a more traditional style of home dcor. The primary
materials used were steel, glass, and glass block. Some of the notable "industrial" elements
included rubberized floor tiles, bare steel beams, perforated metal sheet, heavy industriallight
fixtures, and mechanical fixtures.[citation needed]

The design was a collaboration among Pierre Chareau (a furniture and interiors designer),
Bernard Bijvoet (a Dutch architect working in Paris since 1927) and Louis Dalbet (craftsman
metalworker). Much of the intricate moving scenery of the house was designed on site as the
project developed. The external form is defined by translucent glass block walls, with select areas
of clear glazing for transparency. Internally, spatial division is variable by the use of sliding, folding
or rotating screens in glass, sheet or perforated metal, or in combination. Other mechanical
components included an overhead trolley from the kitchen to dining room, a retracting stair from
the private sitting room to Mme Dalsace's bedroom and complex bathroom cupboards and
fittings.
The program of the home was somewhat unusual in that it included a ground-floor medical suite
for Dr. Jean Dalsace. This variable circulation pattern was provided for by a rotating screen which
hid the private stairs from patients during the day, but framed the stairs at night.
The house is notable for its splendid architecture, but it may be more well known for another
reason. It was built on the site of a much older building which the patron had purchased and
intended to demolish. Much to his or her chagrin, however, the elderly tenant on the top floor of
the building absolutely refused to sell, and so the patron was obliged to completely demolish the
bottom three floors of the building and construct the Maison de Verre underneath, all without
disturbing the original top floor.
Dr. Dalsace was a member of the French Communist Party who played a significant role in both
anti-fascist and cultural affairs. In the mid-1930s, the Maison de Verre's double-height "salle de
sjour" was transformed into a salon regularly frequented by Marxist intellectuals likeWalter
Benjamin as well as by Surrealist poets and artists such as Louis Aragon, Paul luard, Jean
Cocteau, Yves Tanguy, Joan Mir andMax Jacob. According to the American art historian Maria
Gough, the Maison de Verre had a powerful influence on Walter Benjamin, especially on
his constructivist - rather than expressionist - reading of Paul Scheerbart's utopian project for a
future "culture of glass", for a "new glass environment [which] will completely transform mankind,"
as the latter expressed it in his 1914 treatise Glass Architecture. See in particular Benjamin's
1933 essay Erfahrung und Armut ("Experience and Poverty").
American architectural historian Robert Rubin bought the house from Dalsace family in 2006 to
restore it and use it for his family residence.[1] He allows a limited number of tours to the house. [2]

Quick details[edit]

Address: 31 Rue St-Guillaume, Paris, France

Architect: Pierre Chareau with Bernard Bijvoet

Patron: Dr. Dalsace, a Parisian doctor

Construction Dates: 1928 to 1931

Alternate Name: Maison Dalsace

Style: Early Modern

Building Use: Home and ground floor medical office

lexander Calder, by Carl Van Vechten, 1947

Born

August 22, 1898

Lawnton, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Died

November 11, 1976 (aged 78)

New York City, New York, U.S.

Nationality United States

Education

Stevens Institute of Technology,Art Students

League of New York

Known for

Sculpture

Movement

Kinetic art, Surrealism, Abstraction (art)

Awards

Presidential Medal of Freedom[

Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) initially hesitated between the pursuits of music, painting and
architecture, before ultimately choosing the latter. For a long time he was viewed as a furniture
craftsman, before gaining recognition as an architect when he built his masterpiece the Maison de
Verre.
He was an inventor, an innovator who blended materials with extreme attention to detail. If one idea
could sum up Pierre Chareau's oeuvre, it would be, as he said himself, creating with passionate
contemplation to best satisfy the needs of our reason and our higher emotions, merged into an
admirable beauty of living.

http://www.pierrechareau-edition.com/history

PIERRE CHAREAU SOFA

This Pierre Chareau Sofa was originally designed in 1923 for the set of Marcel L'Herbier's film
"L'inhumaine". In 1925 it was also seen in the film "La Vertige," another film of L'Herbier. The
Chareau Sofa became one of the most distinctive pieces in the Maison de Verre (the home and
office of Dr. and Mrs. Dulsace) along with the corresponding chair. The structure was originally
covered in velvet and stuffings were covered in leather or tapestries. This sofa represents the
modern version of the French 19th century "canape a confident", since, with its round sides, it
invites the two sitting persons to converse looking directly at one another. The Chareau Armchair
was used for the small blue room of the Maison de Verre.

Pierre Chareau was born in Bordeaux in 1883. As early as 1900 he began his artistic career as a
student of the famous Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he focused on architecture and design.
By the 1920's he was already known in the design world for his complex structures and innovative
use of architectural space. Chareau began to explore an interest in Cubist space by the mid 1920's,
and soon after his designs became highly sculptural. He is known for his use of combining materials
such as lightly hammered steel, unpolished metals, and rich mahogany.

http://www.bauhaus2yourhouse.com/collections/pierre-chareau/products/pierrechareau-sofa