Books
The Penthouse Apartment of Carlos de Beistegui
The only surreal work by Le Corbusier is not by him. As the monumental monograph by the Aachen University professor Wim van den Bergh shows, the very famous image of the grass-floored terrace with Paris’s Arc de Triomphe rising behind a wall where a historicist fireplace opens comes not so much from an unlikely flirtation of the architect with a surrealist movement he was not part of, but from a client’s determination to have a chambre en plein air in which to receive guests. The author professes a fascination for what he calls ‘autobiographical houses,’ which he classifies into three categories: those where clients entrust the materialization of their dreams to an architect, the case of Farnsworth to Mies, Fallingwater to Wright, or Villa Savoye to Le Corbusier and Jeanneret; those carried out in a fertile dialogue between client and architect, as in Rietveld’s Schröder House or Aalto’s Villa Mairea; and those where clients impose their stylistic preferences on the designer to the point of erasing authorship, as in Villa Malaparte or Villa Noailles, only nominally attributed to Libera or Mallet-Stevens, and also in the Beistegui apartment, which after this recherche patiente cannot be fully ascribed to the Swiss-born French master and his cousin Pierre, signees of the penthouse renovation and authors of the 340 drawings preserved at Fondation Le Corbusier, which also keeps the detailed correspondence between the architect and the client...
