Information about the work and context of creation
La Maison au bord de l'eau was designed by Charlotte Perriand in 1934 as a vacation home for French workers who for the first time had paid vacations but couldn't afford a large beach property.
The project was originally conceived by Charlotte Perriand for an architecture competition sponsored by the magazine L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, for which she won second place.
Although this project never materialized while Charlotte Perriand was alive, eighty years later, Charlotte Perriand's daughter, Pernette, and Louis Vuitton, came together to make the first prototype in 2014.
Pernette Perriand-Barsac, who worked as her mother's assistant for 25 years, led the construction alongside Louis Vuitton’s team of architects.
Pernette's collaboration was key to the construction and equipment of the project since she knew how to adapt the loose sketches. The plans for La Maison au bord de l'eau were first drawn in 1934.
The project is structured around a patio that organizes the space organically. It is ecological and with an easy mounting on stilts so that it can be located in the middle of the field, in the sea, in a lake or a river.
The house is a compact structure with four rooms oriented towards a central patio open to the outside, and it represents all of Perriand's architectural concepts: open spaces, straight lines and structural simplicity, without artifice.
Perriand brilliantly designed the ease of construction and assembly, and the affordability of the house, which was decorated and furnished with pieces designed by Charlotte between 1929 and 1942.
Although Perriand was still working with Le Corbusier, when she entered the competition, she did so under her name alone. Later, the architect reviewed the project and worked on different variants for wealthy clients although, like her first choice, they were never built.
Alongside Charlotte Perriand in France, within the modern movement in architecture and design, we find parallel pioneering women architects and designers of the time: the Irish Eileen Gray; the Austrian Margarete Schüte-Lihotzky, with her extensive work in social housing and her obsession with facilitating women's work at home so that they could have more free time; the Finnish Aino Aalto; the Danish Ragna Grubb, interested in social housing; the Chinese-American Anne Tyng, co-author of the most significant buildings of Louis Khan's office in the 1950s in the USA; and Lilly Reich, who promoted Bauhaus designs amidst so much productive activity. The designers who came out of the Bauhaus school, such as Marianne Brandt or Gunta Stötzl, among others, must also be highlighted.
Some links where you can learn more about the commented work are:
https://www.arte.tv/es/videos/086760-005-A/la-casa-a-orillas-del-mar-1934/
https://www.designboom.com/design/charlotte-perriands-la-maison-au-bord-de-leau-is-a-louis-vuitton-tribute-12-14-2013/
https://youtu.be/Ecm2-Tn2IIM
