Maisons La Roche et Jeanneret, 1923

Maisons La Roche and Jeanneret are two terraced houses enclosed in a verdant cul-de-sac in the 16th arrondissement in Paris. Although conceived as a single architectural ensemble, they were not part of the same programme: Maison La Roche was intended for a wealthy collector who was also a bachelor, while Maison Jeanneret was designed to meet the needs of a couple with three children.
Designed when Le Corbusier was publishing Towards an Architecture and three years after the publication of the Manifesto of Purism (1919), the La Roche and Jeanneret houses concretize the coming together of Purist painting and the beginnings of modern architecture.
Maison La Roche is also a pioneering building in terms of spatial innovation. Le Corbusier revolutionised interior space, developing what he calls the “architectural promenade”, also presented as the fourth, or space/time, dimension.
The use of colour, still very rare in 1923, apart from the experiments of the De Stjil movement in the Netherlands, also contributes to this new perception of space. Here Le Corbusier applies an architectural polychromy resulting from Purist theories.
Brought together in one and the same architectural ensemble of pure geometric forms devoid of all decoration,  in 1923 Maisons La Roche and Jeanneret represented a unique avant-garde work in France. The rooftop terrace, accessible and transformed into a hanging garden, further illustrates the radical nature of this composition. Here, very early in the history of architecture, are laid the foundations of the new modern architecture: pure geometric shapes, absence of decoration, pilotis, roof terrace, ribbon windows. All these points were theorised by Le Corbusier in the Manifesto of the Five Points for a New Architecture in 1926.