Villa de Mandrot 1931

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Villa de Mandrot. The first scheme for the house was a refined version of his Maison Locheur, his prototypical dwelling for rural areas in which prefabricated metal walls imported from Paris are combined with the rustic masonry walls that local contractors preferred to erect. The final design also adapts the purist concerns of his Parisian villas to the situation at hand. In between the stone end walls, at the center of the house, is a concrete frame of columns and beams set in from a free facade. The thin infill panels of glass and stucco together with the masonry create an ambiguous composition of transparent and overlapping planes. Even the terrace steps and dining table are articulated as abstract horizontal slabs. A dynamic geometry of asymmetrical and overlapping parts figures in the composition of the site plan as well. From the perspective of the lower courtyard, the garden wall is a vertical plane that continues below the terrace along the edge of the podium and into the ground. In contrast to these purist qualities are the expressive use of rough stone and the manipulation of the landscape, both of which hark back to the naturalism of Le Corbusier's earliest Swiss architecture.