AA Pavilion
Maison Dom-ino
To celebrate the centenary of Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-ino- a housing prototype that he dreamed could quickly and efficiently relieve the chronic housing shortage after the destruction of the First World War — London’s Architectural Association and vbvb studio constructed a timber facsimile on the lawn outside the Central Pavilion.
Le Corbusier was 27 when he designed Maison Dom-ino. The name alludes to a game of dominoes because the units could be multiplied to form a row of houses. And although the system — made up of horizontal slabs and pilotis — was never put into production, it anticipated the concrete structural frame that would make his name and transform 20th-century architecture beyond recognition.
Rather than concrete, this remake uses engineered timber, so it could be easily and quickly assembled on site. It was a long process — copyright clearance had to be sought from a protective Parisian foundation, information modelled on screen and then mapped on to plywood sheets. A new system of timber foundation was also developed.
Manufactured by automated machines in Switzerland, it travelled by truck and boat to Venice, and there are plans for it to embark on a worldwide tour. ‘Like the Somme in 1914, building anything in Venice is like operating in a war zone, in the sense that we were working with a tabula rasa,’ says Valentin Bontjes van Beek, project architect. ‘The completed structure looks wonderful, and standing within it really is strangely familiar.’
