Front (street) Elevation
Antonin Planeix House in Paris, France

This early International Style row house was the result of a collaboration between architects Le Corbusier (a.k.a. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) and Pierre Jeanneret, his cousin.  It was designed and constructed between 1924 and 1928 as a house and studio combination for an artist and his family.  The ground floor includes a central garage that is flanked by large windowed studios on each side.  Some sources claim that the side bays had originally been open, with the architects adding the studios in 1927.  The earlier version would have been in keeping with Le Corbusier's preference for a house on "pilotis" (stilts), allowing unobstructed access beneath the building.  The architects placed the major living spaces on the level above, much like a "piano nobile" from a more aristocratic era.  The topmost floor housed another studio.  A typically Corbusian rooftop garden reclaims much of the land lost to the building footprint.  His trademark ribbon windows (long bands of narrow, uninterrupted windows) also make a relatively early appearance in this work.  Le Corbusier as an architect, and as the painter Jeanneret, espoused a minimalist, engineered aesthetic that embraced "pure" geometric forms and rejected ornament.  Photograph taken in 1982 by Howard J. Partridge.

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