Then comes the furniture. The built-in elements of the duplex embody the concept that had defined Jeanneret and Perriand’s interiors from the outset: the so-called casiers standard. These modular units are integral to the composition of volumes and voids in an interior that operates much like the architecture itself, like that famous “free play of volumes in light,” celebrated and criticized in equal measure over the decades. More concretely, and above all, furniture in this house simply supports and contains. As Renato De Fusco once described it, it is “a limb”: a functional extension of the human body.
The opportunity here is therefore to inhabit the very heart of an experiment at the moment it moves from theory into practice, something almost unique among famous residential architectures, and even within the Cité Radieuse itself. In short: not the “usual “, transformed, Unité d’Habitation.