To dwell means to leave traces: Modernism, mastery, and meaning in the house museums of Gaudí and Le Corbusier
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 34
To dwell means to leave traces
Modernism, mastery, and meaning in the house museums of Gaudí and Le Corbusier
Georgina Downey
Houses of architectural significance built by architects for themselves (and later converted to museums) have, through the modern period, been on the itineraries of not only tourists but also architecture students. The better-known architect’s house museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that attract visitors include those of Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Victor Horta, Le Corbusier, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris, Carlo Mollino, Bruno Taut, Harry Seidler, John Soane, Jørn Utzon, Henry van de Velde, Charles Voysey, and Otto Wagner. These architects’ homes – conserved, signposted, and given museal treatment – have not only helped cement the legacy of the architect in question, but have also provided architecture, design, and art history students an opportunity for access to “hands-on” sites of learning.
In The Architect’s Home, Gennaro Postiglione proposes that architect’s house museums are valuable because, “as sites, [they] always
engage two lines of interest: they are works, and they afford biographical testimony to their creators. Architect’s house museums, he offers, represent “a more sturdy relation between occupant and dwelling … which allows us to determine the real, actual intention prevailing in the organization of the daily living space and the private work space.” We assume a direct relationship between an architect’s practice and their ideas for their own homes, and in the course of a visit, we hope to encounter and to understand their conceptual “program for living” by walking through the house. Thus, as Postiglione asserts, we need to preserve the many – and in some cases deteriorating – modernist architects’ houses because they stand as “poetic manifestos” to the creative spirit of the architect.
The historic house as museum stands as a site of memory; it reflects its times, its environment, and its encompassing society with appeals to the mind and heart that continue to attract growing numbers of visitors around the world. Furthermore, as observed by a recent graduate student,
By their very nature, house museums give visitors the ability to stand inside of history. The objects in their collections are not housed in a building designed for that purpose, but rather, the building itself is part of the collection.
House museums can also convey narratives about the occupant(s) that can be told in no other way; they can convey stories told in the round, through all the senses, which is why house museums are sites of pilgrimage where visitors attempt to re-experience past senses of interiority and spatiality. Above all, they contain traces, objects, features, and small signs of dwelling that provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation. This chapter explores the house museums (and once homes) of two colossi of modern architecture, Antoni Gaudí and Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), with focus on, respectively, Casa Gaudí in Park Güell in Barcelona and Corbusier’s beach cabin, the Cabanon, in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the French Riviera. Both of these house museums, one grand, the other modest, were designed by the architects themselves (in Gaudí’s case in
partnership with his “right hand man,” Francesc d’Assis Berenguer i Mestres). The major issue bearing on this analysis is how do these conserved interiors function in relation to the architect’s public persona, and what role do traces of habitation have to play in shifting perceptions and the development of new discourses on their work and lives? The meaning of trace used here evokes that of Elizabeth Grosz, who describes this Derridean notion as a kind of linking signature between author and text, and insists there is always a “trace,” a kind of infusion or double bind, between the interior and exterior of the text. Grosz therefore counsels us,
The signature cannot authenticate, it cannot prove, it cannot make present the personage of the author; but it is a remnant, a remainder of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces.6
“Famous person house museums,” of which the architect’s house can be classified as a subcategory, have been described by Pierre Nora as lieux de mémoires, or sites of memory.7 Yet the notion of a site of memory that was once somebody’s home is reliant on the modern conception (explored by Walter Benjamin, among others) that the domestic interior is both an extension and a representation of the modern individual. Consequently, when these are recreated and given museum treatment, we are considering a kind of double modernist text. Trevor Keeble puts this neatly when he proposes that the period room in the museum represents “the layering of one age through the optic of another.” He contends that we have to be continually aware that history is made and remade according to the needs of the present, since its very premise that “this is how things really were,” periodizes experience into incommensurable slices of history; thus the house museum cannot avoid some key tropes of modernity, including its utopian and/or dystopian polemics.8 Jeremy Aynsley agrees, claiming further that modern house museum visitors are aware of the manipulability of the period room as a text, with a “use, life, and afterlife.”9 Aynsley concludes, therefore, that the actual value of these “intrinsically modern”
forms of historical text may lie, not in what the spaces themselves reveal as “authentic” documents, but rather in what they reflect about the attitudes, values, and ideologies of those presenting them (here he means visitors in addition to curators and other custodians). Thus, readings of the interiors of architect’s house museums will constantly shift in relation to the theatrics or forms of display and didactics selected by curators, which constitute constructed discourses in themselves.
The Casa Museu Gaudí was originally constructed in 1905 as a display home in the Park Güell housing the estate owned by wealthy aristocrat Eusebi Güell, a friend and patron of Gaudí’s. For a variety of reasons, development plans for the estate took quite a different direction after 1914, with only one other plot turned into a house. Gaudí began building an interrelated series of extraordinary monuments, and the rest of the estate overlooking Barcelona became a kind of symbolic universe – a world famous public park – and, since 1984, a UNESCO Cultural Heritage of Humanity site.
Casa Gaudí, the three-story house which contains the museum, was designed under supervision by Francesc Berenguer, Gaudí’s main collaborator, and the plans were signed by Gaudí (as Berenguer was not then technically qualified). Gaudí occupied the home from 1906 to late 1925, first with his father and niece, then with visiting Carmelite nuns who watched over his health. After he died on June 10, 1926, the house was sold to Italian tradesman Francesc Chiappo and his wife, Josefina. They moved there in December 1926, and since they were enthusiasts of the architect, they started calling the house “Casa Gaudí.” In 1960, the Friends of Gaudí Association bought the house from the Chiappos’s heirs, and in 1963 it opened to the public as a museum. In 1992, the Construction Board of La Sagrada Familia Foundation acquired the Gaudí House Museum, and since then has used the profits from the house museum to fund ongoing construction of the basilica – still unfinished despite having commenced in 1882.
The museum entrance is on the ground floor, and continues on the first and second floors, with a museum shop in the basement. Casa Gaudí is
presented primarily as an exhibition space for furniture. Placing Gaudí’s most daring pieces in a domestic setting allows visitors to appreciate his designs in context and in the round. While the furniture here in most cases was designed specifically for Gaudí houses elsewhere, notably for Casa Batlló (one of Barcelona’s most visited house museums, located in the Old Town) and Casa Calvert, these locations display few original items of furniture, so being able to study a large portion of the collection at Park Güell is a drawcard and provides a complement to other Gaudí sites. Didactics are provided in English, Spanish, and Catalan in the form of wall texts, and there is even a video using a lithe dancer demonstrating the postural variations for sitting in Casa Batlló’s famous Double Bench (1907) using a rotating three-dimensional view. The rest of the ground floor interior architecture features the original mural-covered ceilings, the highly modern kitchen, and the bathroom. In contrast, rooms upstairs have been curated to suggest some of the private life of Gaudí, and these are furnished with a small collection of the architect’s personal effects. It is in the bedroom in particular where some trace of the architect’s daily life is preserved. His Catholic devotions are clearly evident through the stack of prayer books, the narrow single bed, the crucifix, and the prie dieu with a wicker base (Figure 34.1). Here, the contemporary viewer cannot help but wonder at the astonishing contrast between the quite otherworldly munificence of La Sagrada Familia and the monastic – even ascetic – interior decor of the man who designed it and who commuted daily between these two extraordinarily contrasting interiors.
These ideas are allowed to play, without any foregrounding, in the display theatrics of the exhibition areas of the museum, in a manner that subverts at least some of Gaudi’s mystique and reminds us again of Keeble’s notion of the shifting optics and layered meanings of the period room/house
museum display. In another subtle allusion to the traces of Gaudi’s dwelling, a wall text in an upstairs gallery devoted to the telling of the history of the house notes that Gaudi’s friend and collaborator, the sculptor and creator of several works in the garden and for La Sagrada Familia, Llorenç Matamala i Piñol, often “slept in the house.” In the context of the statement, it is apparent the writer intended to imply that Matamala provided some much needed company (and there may be some further confusions as a consequence of translation), but this said, the twenty-first-century reader of this text could not possibly avoid the allusion to a cherished, if not a romantic, relationship. If this were so, it would constitute a radical new reading of Gaudi’s life. Much has been written of his life; in fact, there have been more books and articles written about Gaudi than about any other architect in the modern – or any other – period. Yet the question of his private life (aside from an early heartbreak from a certain Pepeta Josefa Moreu in 1884) has yielded to view no other intimate affairs, thus the conclusion has been that he was celibate. Gaudi’s vie privé may be shrouded in mystery; however, from his time as a young dandy to that of an older ascetic, he had a close circle of male friends. Furthermore, he also obviously had the aptitude and ability to lead large teams of male construction workers through extremely complex and new building methods, so that the homo-social orientation of his life has been observable, and yet, until this hint in the wall text, it had not been inferred.
Le Corbusier’s Cabanon is another architect’s house museum that enfolds a succession of enigmas; however, here recent scholarship has revealed passions, envy, and violence that have reshaped the careers, reputations, and identities of all involved – particularly of the architect himself. The Cabanon stands on a steep slope, between Monte Carlo to the west and Menton to the east, on the coastline of the French Riviera. It overlooks the small sandy beach of Roquebrun, a bay sheltered by the promontory of Cap Martin and extending out toward Monaco. The Cabanon is rendered entirely in wood and faced in split pine logs like a Canadian log cabin. “Robinson Crusoe-ish” on the exterior, the interior is a tender poem to the rationality of early modernism and draws on Le Corbusier’s use of
prefabricated built-in units, based on the dimensions of the Modulor (a mathematical benchmark based on the height of a man with his arms up) he had used three years earlier for Unité d’habitation in Marseilles. These “interior shell” components were built by colleagues of Corbusier, and pioneers of industrial construction in their own right, Charles Barberis and Jean Prouvé, who had the sections made up in Ajaccio, Corsica. Barberis and Prouvé then arranged the delivery of the presized pieces to the tiny house by boat in mid-1952. Partially hidden in eucalyptus and vine thickets, it stands a stone’s throw above Eileen Gray’s celebrated 1926–29 modernist tour de force, E.1027, the roof of which is about level with the terrace in front of the cabin (Figure 34.2). In 1979, the Cabanon was acquired from the Foundation Le Corbusier by the Conservatoire du Littoral, an oceanfront land conservancy, which turned over the management of the tours of the cabin to the tourist department of the town council of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. The building was designated a French historical monument in 1996.
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Like Casa Gaudí, the Cabanon was a significant long-term place of residence. At a tiny 3.66 square meters, the Cabanon, while modest in every way, played a major role in Le Corbusier’s life. It shares a partial wall with a small bistro, L’Étoile de Mer, accessed through a connecting doorway only seventy centimeters wide. Thus, in the summer, Corbusier and his wife, Yvonne, took all of their meals at the restaurant and sat under the vine-covered terrace. The cabin is presented in a completely different manner than Casa Gaudí, and yet its premise in terms of constructing memory for visitors by means of interiority is the same. At the time of writing, the Cabanon was only open to visitors twice each year through pre-booked tour groups arranged through the town of Menton’s tourist center. The need to control visitor numbers is driven by a variety of factors – most significantly the fact that descendants of a local family, who entered into an agreement with Corbusier in the early 1950s about connecting the bistro to the cabin, still own and vacation on the property. The tour of the Cabanon is conducted by guides from the tourist council in both French and English. It includes guides around the exterior and entry into both the bistro (featuring Le Corbusier’s murals on the bar), the Cabanon itself, the Unités de Camping, as well as a look inside the tiny storage shed southwest of the cabin (apparently built by Le Corbusier himself to work in bad weather and to store paintings and drawings) (Figure 34.3). It is comprehensive, with a full and detailed account of the conception of the Cabanon, acquisition of the land, the build, and significant architectural features, as well as its relationship to the Modulor and other contemporary projects of Le Corbusier’s in the mid-1950s.
The tour delineates how, among other issues of lifestyle and friendship, the Cabanon was critical to his thinking about modern space. Le Corbusier is identified as one of the major architects of the twentieth century and as a leader in terms of the modern movement, but not, in fact,
as “god-like.” The site’s current interpretation illustrates how the layering and lenses of contemporary readings of the space have dramatically altered the kind of stories that are currently told within it and about the reasons for its significance, and this is often driven by scholarship. Witnessing firsthand Corbusier’s shed, Yvonne’s sleeping platform, the prie dieu, and the proximity between the Cabanon and E.1027, recalls Postiglione’s “more sturdy relations” between dwelling and occupant where these relations manage to in some way shock, overturn, or subvert the main discourse being presented. One humorous anecdote highlighted that while Corbusier’s built-in bed platform was under an airy window, Yvonne’s pillow laid approximately twelve inches from the curtained off toilet area. This story is an effect of postfeminist inquiry within architectural history and theory, itself shaped since the 1980s by poststructural theory. Stories about “masters” of modernism are no longer complete without reference to their companions, intimates, lovers, and supporters, so the idea of the interior as constructed discourse highly shaped by gender has spread.
Similarly, the E.1027 murals story has been subjected to a sustained rereading by Beatriz Colomina, in her 1996 essay, “Battle Lines: E.1027,” where she took a feminist and Freudian reading to the violent dramas surrounding the three closely sited buildings the Cabanon, E.1027, the bistro, and Unités de Camping, and scholarly attention turned to the
ruined relationship between Eileen Gray and Le Corbusier. In the summer of 1938–39, he defaced the pristine exterior walls of his neighbor (Irish architect and designer) Eileen Gray’s E.1027 by painting eight large “murals” in what she called “an act of vandalism.” Colomina has shown that the murals were an “effacement” of Gray’s sexuality and genius, and were the consequence of Le Corbusier’s psychosexual complexes. Up to the present, Colomina continues to explore, write, and lecture on the E.1027 vandalism some ten years after her initial study and has confessed to being obsessed with the story. Colomina’s scholarship has cleared up many misconceptions around Gray’s authorship of E.1027 (attributed in the past to her lover Jean Badovici, and in some sources, Le Corbusier himself), and has influenced a generation of architectural history scholars, as well as creating a thirst among the general public for Gray’s work and its implications for modernism. Many tourists come not to see the Cabanon, but to see E.1027. A 2014 straw poll conducted amongst visitor groups revealed that about a third were Irish nationals who had come to find out more about E.1027 and the lower gardens of the Unité de Camping, which at the time was the site providing the closest possible view of the house. The interior can now be visited thanks to the Conservatoire du littoral de Alpes-Maritimes, but the fact that some thirty percent of the group had come to explore Gray’s work instead of Le Corbusier’s suggests a “shifting lens” of which stories are told, why, and how.
Both of these architects’ house museums, pivotal in the lives of their occupants, are presented with differing curatorial analysis, and yet the materiality of the spaces trace back to corporeal occupation. In both architects’ house museums, there is a deliberate curatorial tactic to leave interpretations fairly open; visitors are encouraged to think and experience the spaces as authentic, while what is and is not original is signposted. Casa Gaudí is presented not as a home, per se, but as an exhibition space, with the exception of two to three small rooms (bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen). Nonetheless, the sense of interiority is strong, supported by the inclusion of a few original artefacts. Even given the reduced access to original artefacts, the pieces that are on display allow for other optics and layered viewpoints
from the contemporary period. Moreover, whether the optics or layering of current readings of Gaudi’s materials proposed here alter the major biographies is not in question, and yet they do bring a new Gaudi to light, one that may not have been possible even twenty years earlier; it opens new lines of inquiry in the process of his work via relationships with male friends, companions, and collaborators, in much the same way that Colomina’s exploration of the psychosexual dynamic behind the defacing of E.1027 has altered scholarship on both Gray and Le Corbusier. Useful concepts such as Keeble’s notion of viewing the house museum through the lens of the present age, along with Aynsley’s concept of the house museum as a text with a “use, life, and afterlife,” when allowed to work in conjunction with the trace that is signed as authentic or not, can permit the interiorities of the spaces to reflect attitudes, values, and ideologies of the present. We are then encouraged to make new and diverse readings of these architects’ house museums, for as Walter Benjamin reminds us, “to dwell means to leave traces.”
Notes 1 In the mid-eighteenth century, at his École des Beaux-Arts, the gifted architectural educator Jacques-Francois Blondel “made full use of field trips (‘conferences sur les lieux’) to help students make the transition from theory to reality.” Reed Benhamou, “The Education of the Architect in Eighteenth Century France”, Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies 12, no. 2 (September 1989): 190. 2 Gennaro Postiglioni, The Architect’s Home (Köln: Taschen, 2013), p. 9. 3 Ibid. 4 Postiglioni, The Architect’s Home, p. 11. 5 Anna Jug. “Moving Forward: How Are House Museums Engaging With New Audiences, While Attracting Visitors Back?”, MA Coursework Thesis, Curatorial and Museum Studies, University of Adelaide, submitted June 2015. 6 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: the politics of bodies, (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 22.
7 A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community (in this case, the French community). These may include places such as archives, museums, cathedrals, palaces, cemeteries, and memorials; concepts and practices; and objects. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 27.
8 Trevor Keeble, “Introduction”, in The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the Exhibited Interior 1870–1950, ed. Penny Sparke, Brenda Martin, and Trevor Keeble (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 2–4.
9 Jeremy Aynsley, “The Modern Period Room: A Contradiction in Terms?”, in The Modern Period Room: Ibid., p. 18.
10 Jeremy Aynsley, Ibid.
11 Gaudi’s health was inclined to be fragile due to his untiring labors on his masterpiece La Sagrada Familia (1882–) and his mid-life conversion to an extreme form of Catholicism involving fasting, penance, and self-denial. Late in life, he took total lack of vanity in personal appearance to extremes, and when he was struck by a tram on June 7, 1926, he failed to get emergency medical treatment that might have saved him, since he was assumed to be a beggar. Rainer Zerbst, Gaudi, 1852–1926: Antoni Gaudi i Cornet: A Life Devoted to Architecture (Cologne, Germany: Taschen, 2002), p. 13.
12 James H. Grady and César Marinell, “Gaudi: His Life, His Theories, His Work”, reviewed in Art Bulletin 59, no. 3 (September 1977): 457. “No other architect of the period [modernism] has been so thoroughly studied. Writings on Gaudi form one of the longest bibliographies of any architect of any time.”
13 Gij van Hensbergen, Gaudi: A Biography (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), p. 59.
14 Pilar Viladas, “Le Shack”, New York Times Magazine, 1 April 2001, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/specials/20010325mag-leshack.html (accessed 8 June 2015).
15 Beatriz Colomina, “Battle Lines: E.1027”, Renaissance and Modern Studies 39, no. 1 (1996): 96.
16 Tim Benton, “E-1027 and the Drôle de Guerre”, AA Files 74 (2017): 123–143.
17 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Robert Eiland and Kevin McLaughlan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 9.
