Back in 1952, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, built a project that would be considered a simplification of his architectural thinking: a humble small wooden cabin, elevated on top of a concrete platform with tiny uneven windows. The so-called Cabanon de Vacances is actually a domestic cell that summarizes Le Corbusier’s idea of the machine of living. A modern refuge whose architectural purpose is the exile of the user.

Things have drastically changed since Le Corbusier designed his Cabanon, and within our society the living space has evolved into a more complex concept that relates to a virtual sphere.

Le KBNN is a ready made that rethinks in our contemporary context Le Corbusier’s Cabanon. It reinterprets the original scheme with updated devices and materials. Its interior explores the different original scenarios through virtual situations of the XXIst century. Le KBNN stands as an archive of our historical moment, seen through the lens of Le Corbusier, emplaced within the measures of his Modulor, staged over his precisely measured furniture and hosted with the walls of his vacation cabin. The new house is no longer a refuge but a media sphere.

The project participated to the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

KOOZ What drew you to re-explore Le Corbusier’s Cabanon today?

OHM Back in 1952, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, built a project that would be considered a simplification of his architectural thinking: a humble small wooden cabin, elevated on top of a concrete platform with tiny uneven windows.

The so-called Cabanon de Vacances is actually a domestic cell that summarizes Le Corbusier’s idea of the machine of living through an exquisite exercise in modulating in a micro space. Designed using the Modulor as a base, the whole project, as well as its furniture and finishing, is carefully dimensioned and sized through LC’s anthropometric scale of proportions. In fact, the first sketch of the refuge is featured at LC’s 1955 publication of Modulor 2. It is a project designed from its interior, from the very basic elements that it contains: a bedroom, a desk, a toilet and a sink. Le Corbusier would spend most of his summers at his wooden cabin, stating that he “had a 3,66×3,66m castle in the Côte d’Azur”. The cabin, annexed to his friend’s bar L’etoile de mer, is actually a modern refuge. A minimum living unit whose architectural purpose is the exile of the user, its distancing from society in order to meet nature and enjoy its own time…

Things have drastically changed since Le Corbusier designed his Cabanon, and within our society the living space has evolved into a much more complex concept that materializes and relates to a virtual sphere. A space from where to produce and configure our identity and from where to generate associations with others.

KOOZ What questions does this re-interpretation seek to raise and address?

OHM Le KBNN proposes a crossroads between the modern and the contemporary. This proposal places its framework within such an upgrade. Le KBNN pretends to rethink in our contemporary context Le Cabanon de Vacances designed by Le Corbusier.

Le KBNN is a ‘ready made’. LC’s piece is rebuilt reinterpreting its original scheme with updated devices and materials. Its interior explores each of the different original scenarios through the reinterpretation following situations of the XXIst century, examining the way we inhabit this dual reality. We are focusing on those shifts between the modern and the contemporary context and materialized with these new devices and new materials. Le KBNN is designed around six pairs of juxtaposed situations, six scenarios or scenes. Which are the juxtaposition between two terms. One modern and one contemporary:

1- Refuge vs. Exhibition
2- Toilet vs. Embellishment
3- Rest vs. Act & Interact
4- Storage vs. Archive
5- Seclusion vs. Diffusion
6- Support vs. Broadcast

KOOZ How does the project challenge the role that media technologies play within the sphere of the domestic?

OHM Contemporary media and digital technologies have overspeed such an update of our living spaces, transforming our homes into mediated scenarios where interconnections between multiple agents are performed. Far from being a space for exile, for self isolation, the house is nowadays a place for encounter, a node of a wider network.

Our current desk is not a support but the scenario for one’s online identity, from where the broadcast of oneself occurs. Others’ evaluations allow the construction of the self. Reality is post-produced, scripted and becomes a product of consumption. At LC’s wooden refuge, the bathroom was intended as a functional element and now it has become a scenario for the construction of identity. Daily routines that are performed in it range from the reconfiguration of profiles, one’s own embellishment and bodies’ redesign. The subject is premiered every day through diverse customization of the self. Everyday the consumer is rendered.

Architecture is regulated by devices from where we access the world. Devices such as the bed, which is no longer a passive object where we rest, but a place where we act and interact. The bed is performative. It is an agent for action. The bed is the physical-virtual link. Distancing from LC’s Cabanon wardrobe, the new archive is no longer the accumulation of goods, but of information. The wardrobe and the data rack are equally important in terms of storage of one’s own properties and digital lifes. They are the new virtual repositories that allow you to sort and catalogue one’s digital quotidianity.

KOOZ How is this explored within the axonometric drawing? How does this differ from the exhibited artefact in Seoul?

OHM Le KBNN is both a conceptual and material upgrade of LC’s refuge, and therefore two formats have been used: on the one hand, the axonometric drawing explores the conceptual reinterpretation of certain modern issues within our contemporary society. The drawing aims to reflect on the fact that within our society the living space has evolved into a much more complex concept that materializes and relates to a virtual sphere. On the other hand, the installation develops the material reinterpretation of the proposal.
In its original scheme, the Cabanon skin was opaque, its walls were cladded with wooden boards that, following the details of Marseille’s Unité d’Habitation, incorporated timber slats at the joints. The Cabanon’s furniture, all made of natural wood, followed the measures defined by the Modulor 2. They were materialized as simple geometric elements in the form of rectangular prisms or niches.

The refuge is no longer achieved from the opacity of materials. There is no refuge within the context of the total display of the digital showcase. There is an impulse to exhibit our daily life in the media sphere. The wood from the original facade is replaced with transparent acrylic cladded on a steel frame structure. In the original scheme the connection with the adjacent bar was mediated by a mural painted by Le Corbusier, which in our proposal is transformed into a neon light of the Modulor, that actually modulates and gives the measures to the whole proposal.

The exterior natural environment of LC’s Cabanon was completely natural, which has been transformed into an artificial black grass carpet. In addition, in the original cabin the floor had a wooden finishing, Le KBNN uses a mirrored surface that multiplicates the exposure of the interior to the maximum. Moreover, furniture elements are redesigned using black pyramid acoustic foam. The shift of materiality is also achieved at the desk, where the wooden surface is transformed into an acrylic transparent one.

KOOZ What is the potential of the permeation of the digital within the domestic for the architect?

OHM The new installation explores the social implications of the digital age. In the XXI Century, the house does not separate and seclude realities but act as a mediator of diffusion, as a link or connection between different conditions. Using each furniture element, each space of the cabin or even its architectural skin, we are proposing an exercise of review and juxtaposition between the original social context and our current one. Furthermore, the encounter between craft and digital becomes also a matter of relevance when the new installation explores the social implications of the digital, and its role in modeling our singularities out of a collection of networked information.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?

OHM The architectural imaginary serves us as a tool to rethink and design our contemporary moment. Works from a historical background do not just act as precedents for inspiration, but actually as active agents that help us to frame new realities. In this sense, Le KBNN stands as an archive of our historical moment, seen through the lens of Le Corbusier, emplaced within the measures of his Modulor, staged over his precisely measured furniture and hosted with the walls of his vacation cabin. Le KBNN is an example of how certain conditions can be re-adapted to a new temporal and spatial context, generating new imaginaries and architectural configurations by the post-production of an existing work. The architectural imaginary is not a catalogue of references, but instead a catalogue of design tools.

Bio

OHM operates in the intersections between architecture, media and cultural studies. Office for Holistic Miscellanea engages in the production and redefinition of architecture, urbanism and design, attempting to rethink and reveal new possibilities in the practice of architecture. Which leads to new configurations and narratives in design capacities, consistent with contemporary cultural and social production. Its latest project has been exhibited at Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021.The office is formed by Pedro Pitarch and Dana Barale.

Pedro Pitarch is architect (ETSAM, UPM) and contemporary musician (COM Caceres). He is Associate Teacher at the Architecture Faculty of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM-UPM). He has been Teaching Fellow in Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and Steedman Fellow at the Washington University in St Louis. Archiprix International (2015), Extraordinary Honour End of Studies Award (ETSAM-UPM), and Superscape – Future Urban Living Award (2016). His work has been exhibited at the 17th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Triennale Milan, 9th EME3 and Vienna Design Week. His projects have been awarded in several International Competitions. His writings have been published in platforms such as Monu, eFlux or Domus.

Dana Barale Burdman is a Madrid-based Architect, with studies from University of Bath and Delft University of Technology. Some of her projects have been part of the virtual Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. She got the 3rd prize at COAM (Architects Association) for her Graduation Project and Archdaily ́s prize: “Best Final Projects from Latin America and Spain 2021”. She has been a Nominee at RIBA Presidents Medals Awards and at YTAA by Mies Van der Rohe Foundation for Best final Master Thesis Project. She has been a guest lecturer on media culture and architecture at various institutions and she has taught in Architectural Communication Master (ETSAM, UPM). Her work has been published in various media as Pool UCLA, UC Berkeley Journal, Plurality University, among others.