House Dom-Ino

Le Corbusier – Cité-jardin aux Crêtets – La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, 1914

The Dom-Ino house is a project developed by Le Corbusier in 1914 to facilitate the reconstruction of buildings at the end of the First World War, with the philosophy of using a few months to rebuild the destroyed cities by hypothesizing a house in reinforced concrete "where the floors were slabs suspended on pillars".
In 1914, stimulated by the first war-related destruction in Flanders and by the increasingly pressing need to reconstruct the destroyed building heritage, Le Corbusier decided to propose a construction system so simple that it was almost obvious: he gave this prototype the name of the "Dom-Ino project", combining the words Domus [house] and Innovation [innovation] and evoking, with a clever play on words, the possibility of extending the aggregative logic of dominoes to building organisms.
The system proposed by Le Corbusier is based on a "skeleton structure" in reinforced concrete elementary composed of three rectangular floors supported by six very slender pillars, set back from the line of the facade and descending in a clear, rigorous manner to the foundation plinths (also used to emblematically detach the building from the ground) and connected by a staircase integrated into the structure. This structural matrix, if appropriately completed with perimeter walls and partitions, allowed for a "total independence and reproducibility of the elements" (Manfredo Tafuri), being able to act as an independent living element or, alternatively, as a modular unit that could be systematically aggregated, in full respect of the architect's freedom of design. The entire structure was obviously to be conceived in reinforced concrete, one of the most radically innovative construction materials offered by the building industry in the early twentieth century. (Source Wikipedia)