Maison Guiette – Le Corbusier

100 years Maison Guiette: a visionary and modernist icon designed by Le Corbusier

In 1925, the Antwerp painter René Guiette approached Le Corbusier with an unusual request: a house and studio with a dozen or so rooms on a narrow plot in a new residential neighbourhood in Kiel. Maison Guiette (1926–1927) became Le Corbusier’s first completed project outside France and remains the only surviving building designed by him in Belgium.

This book shows how Le Corbusier’s radical design both clashes with and grows into its Antwerp setting: stringent building regulations, the hand of executing architect Paul Smekens, and a narrow terraced-house plot that gives Le Corbusier’s celebrated Citrohan type a distinctive form of its own. It reveals how, for Le Corbusier, colour is architecture itself, and traces the house through almost a century of use, decline, threat, protection (1978) and restoration, culminating in the recent campaign (2017–2023), which followed its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List (2016). Drawing on previously unseen archival material from the Guiette and Robyn-Demeulemeester families, the book concludes by foregrounding the perspective of those who lived in the house.

A hundred years after it was built, Maison Guiette remains a living monument: a layered whole that is still inhabited as it was designed to be a century ago, as a home for an artist’s family. A house that continues to invite new interpretations.

This publication marks the hundredth anniversary of Maison Guiette.

With text contributions by Rudy De Graef, Peter De Wilde, Bénédicte Gandini, René Guiette, and Anna Winston.