House of Beistegui

Le Corbusier – Maison De Beistegui (apartment on the Champs Elysées) Paris France, 1930

The completely new structure on top of an old building, the apartment is in fact on the sixth and seventh floors of a building on the Champs-Elysées, near the Arc de Triomphe.
The Parisian apartment was commissioned by a wealthy client named Charles de Beistegui who was a collector of surrealist art and loved exaggerated imagery and upholstered furniture. 
The aim of the project was to create a penthouse not necessarily for living, but for hosting parties.

The rooftop garden had a beautiful view of famous Parisian monuments. Le Corbusier designed the garden walls to effectively limit the views from the garden, transforming the large monuments into small pieces of art sitting on the shelves of his outdoor living room.
The hanging garden was about the size of a living room and the walls were about five feet high.
All the hedges on the roof were hydraulically controlled and could be raised up and down to control the view. The roof garden was also detached from the house and a separate ladder was needed to reach it.
The Beistegui apartment designed by Le Corbusier stands out as an outlier in his work. While it exemplifies one of his principles with the hanging garden, many details are more decorative and ornate than his typical clean, modern lines, fanciful furniture, the fireplace, and the grassy “carpet” suggest a surrealist experience.

Le Corbusier demonstrated in this work that architectural modernity did not consist only of horizontal windows, white parallelepipeds and pilotis… the architect could – or should – also have recourse to other much more suggestive ingredients such as mystery or ambiguity.