Curator, Barry Bergdoll: This is the interior of Villa Le Lac, another house Le Corbusier built for his parents—this time a cottage in Corseaux, Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Geneva.
On the right side of this sketch you’ll see one of Le Corbusier’s most significant architectural innovations: the “ribbon window”—a horizontal rather than a vertical window that provides an uninterrupted view.
Architect, Jean-Louis Cohen: Le Corbusier breaks with the notion that the interior was a dark area with points of light—a church-like space—in order to introduce a much lighter, some said, clinical, light into the house. The ribbon window is also an idea of opening up a view to the landscape of the lake and the mountains on the other side of the water.
It allows for what we call now the ‘capture’ of the exterior into the indoor space.