Le Petit Maison Villa Le Lac

A house for the parents of the architect, an elderly couple, on the shores of lake Geneva. It is small, (16m x 4m), a simple white plaster parallelogram with one floor consisting of a living room, a bedroom, powder room, a small salon that could be converted to a bedroom for guests, a vestibule, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a closet for storing clothing and other items. The front exterior wall was added later, when a new road was built in front of the property. A sober and even humble porch precedes the entrance door.. An elevated additional (guest)room, accessible by stairs in the entrance courtyard, has a magnificent view at the lake over the roof. Hollow concrete blocks that were used for the walls are good conductors of heat and cold, which was bad. For these and other technical reasons, a coating of galvanized panels was added to the façade. Structural problems caused by the lake and cheap construction materials led Le Corbusier to coat the outside with aluminum in the 1950s.