While I was in Paris for New Year I visited the famous Maison de Verre, translated as the House of Glass, designed by Pierre Chareau and Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet. Visits to the house are by appointment only (see the bottom of the post for visiting details) and we were only able to see the exterior of the building by sheer luck in passing a woman who lived in the same courtyard or hôtel particulier. But, just seeing the translucent glass block walls, tucked behind a traditional porte-cochere on a quiet street in the wealthy seventh arrondissement, was well worth the visit.
The building on rue Saint-Guillaume was designed as a family home and surgery for a Dr. Jean Dalsace in 1931. Built at around the same time as Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the Maison de Verre embodied the inter-war obsession for an honesty of materials, transparent forms and industrial elements, including bare steel beams and mechanical light fixtures. The Dalsace family purchased the site in the late 1920s, but unable to evict the woman who lived on the top floor, were forced to demolish the bottom three floors and insert the glass addition below, without disturbing the original top apartment. The glass facade thus appears ‘stuck onto’ the original building, concealing the extent of the rooms behind.
Internally, the spaces are divided by the use of sliding, folding or rotating screens in glass, sheet or perforated metal. Other mechanical components include an overhead trolley from the kitchen to dining room, a retracting stair from the private sitting room to Madame Dalsace’s bedroom and complex bathroom cupboards and fittings.
Dennis Sharp described the building as “one of the unique buildings of the twentieth century” in his Twentieth Century Architecture: a Visual History:
It is like a complete mechanized scenario, a set clinically constructed for the performance of modern medicine. The earlier Scheerbartian ‘glass architecture’ notion finds its full interpretation in the hands of Chareau and Bijvoet, whose attention to detail in this building is breathtaking. The dissolving of the views through semi-transparent materials, the juxtaposing of metal and glass, ‘free’ space and solid add a dynamic dimension to this house which almost takes it into the realms of Surrealism.
The house is now owned by Robert Rubin, a former Wall Street trader, who went on to study architectural history at Columbia University. You can watch a lecture by him about the Maison de Verre here.
-You must be a student or professional working in architecture or a related field.
-If you’re eligible, send a letter describing your interest and your qualifications to mdv31@orange.fr to reserve a tour.
-If you plan on visiting the Maison by yourself, reserve your tour 3 to 4 months in advance. If you’re visiting as part of a group, you’ll need reserve your tour 5-6 months in advance. Groups cannot exceed 10 people.
-Tours last for an hour and a half and are scheduled for Thursdays at 2 and 3:30 p.m. Tickets cost 40 euros per person and 20 euros for students and professors of architecture.
Pingback: Architect's Inspiration: Maison de Verre | DSLocicero, Architect