Esprit Nouveau Pavilion

The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts was held in Paris from 28 April to 30 November 1925; each country showed its most emblematic decorative-art achievements there in ephemeral pavilions. Two currents clashed, Art Deco and modernism. A plot behind the Grand Palais was allotted to Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret; they worked out their final project in February 1925. The pavilion took its name from the review that Le Corbusier had founded with the painter Amédée Ozenfant.

Shocked by a scheme they judged too modernist, the organisers had a fence put up that partly hid the pavilion; Le Corbusier went to the Ministry of Fine Arts, which gave the order to demolish the fence. Opened on 18 July 1925, the pavilion was destroyed between April and May 1926. In 1977 a replica was built in Bologna, Italy, by the architects Giuliano and Glauco Gresleri and José Oubrerie, with the authorisation of the Fondation Le Corbusier.

On this wooded plot Le Corbusier built the pavilion with a tree at its centre, which passed through the roof. Fitted with an interior terrace, the building combined two parts. The first was an L-shaped dwelling cell, a full-size model of the dwelling Le Corbusier had been studying since 1922 for the "Immeuble-Villas". The second, a diorama, a kind of cylinder used as exhibition space, presented his projects for urban reform and the inexpensive house, including the Plan Voisin and the City of Three Million Inhabitants. On the plans of December 1924 the diorama, set slightly back, stayed aligned with the loggia facade, to mark the independence of the two parts: the vision of the modern city and the individual house, both under one roof.

The basic cell spread over two levels; the upper one, double-height, formed the main room, serving at once as sitting room, studio and "living". For the interior fittings, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret devised standard wooden "casiers", a chromed steel-tube table with a wooden top and a smaller one with a matt-varnished sheet-metal top. They also showed series-produced furniture, which broke with the costly one-off pieces of the other pavilions.