RESTORATION OF AN ARCHITECTURAL VANGUARD FROM THE 30s
The Molitor building on Rue Nungesser-et-Coli, in which Le Corbusier resided perched on the top floor, was built by him for the developers from the Paris ‘Parc des Princes’ Real Estate Company in the 1930s.
In this architecturally avant-garde district, Le Corbusier dreamt of building large villa-buildings in line with his "radiant city" concept developed in 1931, focusing on light and space.
Upon his death in 1965, and after 30 years of living there, the apartment was entrusted to his former workshop foreman, who has then occupied the premises with his team for nearly 20 years. Although it has regularly been the subject of repairs and maintenance work, defective sealing from the origins along with the simple fact of remaining unoccupied for such a long period, led to problems with the apartment.
In 2014, the Le Corbusier Foundation set up a multidisciplinary team that worked collaboratively to provide simple answers to some complex questions. The ambitious restoration program allowed us to deepen our knowledge of the site and to recover the former state of the apartment-workshop from 1965.
An initial phase of works concerning the walls and roof allowed us to solve the sealing issues and to recover the original aesthetics of the glass bricks, which had been replaced. The second phase – focusing on the interiors – resulted in the restoration of the floors, the interior woodwork, the meticulous replacement of degraded materials, and the rediscovery of the site's polychromy.
