Shedworking's Garden Shows correspondent
Emma Townshend recently visited Le Corbusier's marvellous shedworking structure in France and sent us back some photos. "You walk down a little footpath with cactuses by the sea to get to it," she writes.
"There's also a gorgeous little bar there - next door, owned by a friend who was a plumber = so they didn't have to cook. They show you lovely pictures of the interior when Le Corbusier lived there, when his wife slightly disturbed the minimalist interior by draping everything in very French tablecloths. The most amazing thing is how everything folds away into a little cabinet of some kind. And these little windows at all different elevations which light out onto different parts of the amazing sea view."
Le Corbusier built the cabanon in the mid-1950s as an exercise in minimal habitation but also intending it to be a birthday present for his wife Yvonne. It look him less than 60 minuted to design and six months to build using prefab pieces of oak from Corsica for the interior and rough pine boards for the exterior (rather better than his first plan of using aluminium). In all it's 16 square metres (Le Corbusier boasted not a square centimetre was wasted) with colourful mural-type paintings inside.
It's also an early eco-shed since there's plenty of recycling going on such as crates standing in for chairs. He also built a smaller shedworking atmosphere nearby to really work in. There's a particular good article about the Cabanon at the
Twentieth Century Society site and the Cabanon is open to the public, organised by La Commune de Roquebrune-Cap Martin, Office du Tourisme, 218 avenue Aristide-Briand, tel: + 33 (0)4 9335 6287 or office-du-tourisme.rcm@wanadoo.fr.