______A PATAPHYSICAL READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE ______183

A “PATAPHYSICAL” READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE

Mary Vaughan Johnson Virginia Tech

The Maison de Verre (1928-32) is a glass-block the general…(It) is the science of imaginary house designed and built by Pierre Chareau solutions...”3 According to Roger Shattuck, in (1883-1950) in collaboration with the Dutch his introduction to Jarry’s Exploits & Opinions architect Bernard Bijvoët and craftsman Louis of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, “(i)f Dalbet for the Dalsace family at 31, rue St. mathematics is the dream of science, ubiquity Guillaume in Paris, France. A ‘pataphysical the dream of mortality, and poetry the dream reading of the Maison de Verre, undoubtedly of speech, ‘pataphysics fuses them into the one of the most powerful modern icons common sense of Dr. Faustroll, who lives all representing modernism’s alliance with dreams as one.” In the chapter dedicated to technology, is intended as an alternative C.V. Boys, Jarry, for instance, with empirical history that will yield new meanings of precision, describes Dr. Faustroll’s bed as modernity. Modernity in architecture is all too being 12 meters long, shaped like an often associated with the constitution of an elongated sieve that is in fact not a bed, but a epoch, a style developed around the turn of boat designed to float on water according to the 20th century in Europe albeit intimately tied Boys’ principles of physics.4 The image of a to its original meaning related to an attitude boat that is also a bed, at the same time, towards the passage of time.1 To be truly brings to mind the poem by Robert Louis modern is to be in the present. However, it is Stevenson, My Bed is a Boat thereby achieving also implies the awareness of an ever-changing a ‘pataphysical fusion of the two seemingly present. A ‘pataphysical reading of the Maison disparate worlds of science and poetry. de Verre takes this idea further, critiquing the Similarly, in “How to Construct a Time limits of our current view of a modernity Machine”, anticipating Einstein’s theories of associated with the kind of worship of modern relativity, Jarry sets out to prove that to the scientific technology such as that of Le traveler in his Machine time is reversible and Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau and the Futurist because the machine always starts off in the movement, for while Pierre Chareau was “au direction of the future the past will always lie fait with the vicissitudes of Cubism and beyond the future. Jarry’s ‘pataphysical Time Futurism”, his work embodies a more Janus- Machine is an affirmation of the need to search like image reminiscent of Alfred Jarry’s for an open reality that includes all possibilities ‘pataphysical time machine where the view into as reality so that the absurd and the the past lies beyond the future.2 impossible can coexist on equal footing with the reasonable and the rational thereby Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), a French dramatist presenting reality in its totality. It is also a and writer, renowned for his Ubu Roi plays, critique on the age-old view of time analogous first coined and defined the term ‘pataphysics to a flowing river where time travels in a single as “the science of that which is super induced more linear direction. For Jarry, without his upon metaphysics…‘Pataphysics will be, above Machine “an observer sees less than half of the all, the science of the particular, despite the true extent of Time, much as men used regard common opinion that the only science is that of the Earth as flat.”5 Using Jarry’s ‘pataphysical

184_____FRESH AIR ______

time Machine to reflect on the Maison de Verre, The Maison de Verre was commissioned to this paper will demonstrate how Chareau, a Pierre Chareau in 1927. Its construction, which ‘pataphysician in his own right, while working began in 1928, was completed four years later, in a world where many of his contemporaries in 1932. Chareau’s idea of the architectural sought to escape the past, was able to fuse the machine-edifice reflected in the Maison de seemingly disparate worlds of ancient magic Verre, while it continues to inspire the kind of architecture and modern scientific building into high-tech architecture such as that of Richard one. Rogers, is born out of the empirical technology used in the practice of Renaissance natural Pierre Chareau was born in Bordeaux, on magic. At the same time, it embodies August 3, 1883, to Esther Carvallo and characteristics of Alfred Jarry’s neo-scientific Adolphe Chareau. His father was a wine theory of ‘pataphysics as a systematic toying merchant who lost his fortune and moved to with the arrangement of things and their Paris to work on the railroad. Not much is significance until what begins as an impossible known of Pierre Chareau prior to the meeting hypothesis, even absurd, makes the leap into of his future wife, Louise Dyte (Dollie), from the concrete world. Chareau’s endless devices whose account we know they met when he was in the Maison de Verre, like the bidet that 16 and she was 19. Chareau worked as a swivels or the ventilation windows operated by tracer or draftsman from 1900-1914 for the cogwheels, while exhibiting the precision of a firm, Waring and Gillow, a large British mechanician and craftsman, are clearly not Company specializing in furniture and interior wholly meant to be practical and often appear design for banks, government buildings, clubs, absurd. offices, palaces, steamships, royal yachts and railway cars. During this time he also pursued The development of natural magic during the interests in painting, music, and architecture at Renaissance was a revival of secret knowledge the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts. Dollie, who was from ancient Greek philosophy by humanist born and raised in England, helped support scholars. Such human knowledge of the them financially by tutoring English. It was cosmos was thought to come about only through the friendship developed between one through a mathematical and empirical study of of her students, Annie Bernheim (later Annie nature itself. The belief was that every natural Dalsace), that Chareau was later to be thing in the terrestrial world had some virtue commissioned by the gynecologist Dr. Jean inherent in it, associated with something in the Dalsace and his wife, Annie, to build their new celestial world. The role of the magician was to home at 31 rue St. Guillaume. discover these virtues through natural philosophy by searching for signs, which linked The years between 1919, after being drafted the two worlds, and to use these to manipulate into the war in 1914, and the mid-1930s when things through natural magic. his work began to decline, are considered Chareau’s most productive years. Through the In his manual on Natural Magick, arguably the Dalsace family and their circle of friends, he most popular and widely read manual of its was introduced to the Parisian artistic avant- kind, Giambattista della Porta asserts that “the garde and bourgeois milieu. He collaborated works of Magick are nothing else but the works with Jean Luçat, André de Herring, Mallet- of Nature, whose dutifully hand-maid is Stevens, Gabriel Guevrekian, Francis Jourdain Magick,” immediately followed by the definition and Jacques Lipchitz, with whom he became of human art as a technique to perfect very good friends.6 He was also among the deficient natural processes. 7 Even more architects from France who met in the Villa of significant is his need to distinguish between Madame Mandrot in La Sarraz, Switzerland, in two categories of magic: There are two sorts June 1928, for the purpose of founding the well of Magick; the one is infamous, and unhappy, renowned Congres Internationale because it has to do with foul Spirits, and d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Chareau was consists of incantations and wicked curiosity; known to have the works of Paul Klee, Juan and this is called Sorcery…the other Magick is Gris, Braque, Picasso, Chagall, Max Ersnt, natural; which all excellent wise men do admit Lipchitz and Modigliani, hanging on the walls of and embrace, and worship with great his home, while his own work was often seen applause… Others have named it the practical in exhibitions of the salon des Artistes part of natural Philosophy, which produces her Decorateurs.

______A PATAPHYSICAL READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE ______185

effects by the mutual and fit application of one to the natural forces.12 As one contemplates natural thing unto another.8 Ramelli’s windmills, which, with the force of only one man, appear to take on a life of their It is to this form of natural magic that I relate own using forces beyond human imagination, it Chareau’s work. Natural magic, according to is not unlike the experience Hermann Porta, operates by setting things apart and Hertzberger describes on his first visit to the putting them together in a particular way and Maison de Verre: “I entered a spaceship, out of so different animals were coupled and different this world, with wonderful panels of curved plants grafted to generate new ones as metal which you could turn or slide just with compensation for what was considered lacking your finger, mysteriously to open up a space in nature. Chareau similarly assembled which had temporarily been hidden from different machine parts to create a new kind of view.”13 “machine for living” providing for a new way of life that he considered more suitable for In one of the last books to be written on the modern living, compensating for what he subject of natural magic by Johann Christian thought was lacking.9 The Maison de Verre Wiegleb’s book, Die natürliche Magie (1786), is became an assemblage of windows from trains a long detailed description of Wolfgang von that slide up and down, lightweight airplane Kempelen’s famous Automaton Chess Player stairs, and cog-wheels from ships, exposed that toured all of Europe for an unprecedented and giving clue to how the windows opened eight years, that has been referred to as “the and closed. golden age of the philosophical toy”. In Kempelen’s original engravings the back view The analogy of the machine-edifice in is the most unsettling. As Gaby Wood architecture has a long-standing tradition that describes it, the audience must have gasped can be traced back to Vitruvius, who described with both terror and wonder at seeing “the the invention of machines as one of the three boxed in levers that replace the spine, and branches of architecture.10 A literary genre something shameful about looking at it, behind referred to as the Theatre of New Machines its back, so to speak, as if one were catching became very popular during the 16th and 17th someone’s private bionics unawares.”14 centuries. It owed its success to the printing of Similarly, one imagines the same kind of the first machine book that was to become the unexpected terror, wonder and shame if one most widely read and copied, Agostino were to open one of the closets or wardrobes Ramelli’s Le Diverse e Artificiose Macchine that form the wall between the passage (Various and Ingenious Machines, 1588). While overlooking the main living room and the Ramelli’s work is his own, he borrowed heavily children’s bedrooms on the second floor of the from Heron, the best-known resource on Maison de Verre, to discover yet another set of machine technology in Greek antiquity when doors that if opened would unexpectedly reveal machines were made solely to bring the the toilet unit including the swiveling bidet and audience to wonder at the hidden powers at if anyone was found seated on it their backside work in the world. Ramelli described and would be in full view. Chareau’s wardrobe also illustrated for the first time what at times brings to mind C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch appear to be fantastic designs exhibiting and the Wardrobe of The Chronicles of Narnia technological developments in hydraulic and (1950) where the backside of the wardrobe pneumatic machines of the period that ranged magically opens out into another world full of from water pumps and siege engines to magical and dreamlike adventures. Chareau household gadgets. The influence of Ramelli’s understood that the feeling of unexpected work “can be traced explicitly for more than terror and wonder occurs when the world of 200 years until it merged, in the early 19th dreams and the concrete world meet, a century, into the essentially modern theory of moment when we become conscious of our machines elaborated by engineers associated own presence in the world. with the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.”11 It is important to distinguish the two-fold Wandering through the Maison de Verre is like architectural machine-edifice embodied in the wandering through Agostino Ramelli’s Le Maison de Verre: one exhibits a mythology Diverse e Artificiose Macchine. Like Ramelli, based on the human body and another tells the Chareau’s preoccupation in the Maison de story of its own construction. The first is Verre revolved around movement as it related evident when comparing the original floor

186_____FRESH AIR ______

plans of 1927 and 1928 to the final plans absurd. Additionally, they were placed on a drawn after its completion. It is quite raised floor allowing water to drain away from remarkable to observe the transformation from the bedroom area, immediately bringing to the first more conventional and rigid plans mind Jarry’s Ubu Roi marionettes on stage where the steel columns are trapped within the embodying a sense of humor in the manner of walls, and doors unfold from their hinges, to Francois Rabelais belonging to the lower strata the final plans where columns, walls, closets, of the human body and vulgarity of the doors, and furniture appear, like Pinocchio, to everyday.17 suddenly be endowed with a life of their own, appearing more like dance notations where the The second architectural machine-edifice is columns standing erect support the walls, more characteristic of the dome at Santa Maria doors and closets like limbs sliding and moving del Fiore by Brunelleschi described by Marco about their pivots. With Chareau’s insistence Frascari as a machine that has in its building on rotational movements around pivots one design, clues that make visible the working out cannot help but think of Heinrich Kleist’s of its mechanical forces.18 In the Maison de marionette in his thought-provoking essay Verre it is evident in the red steel columns and Uber das Marionettentheater (On the Puppet beams, the glass block and steel frame. The Theater), 1811: I inquired about the story of its construction begins with an elderly mechanism of these figures and how it was woman who, in accordance with a Parisian possible, without myriad strings on the fingers, tenant law, refused to quit her lodging on the to control the separate members and their tie third floor of the original Eighteenth century points as the rhythm of their movements or hotel particulier. This resulted in the choice to dances required. He answered that I must not insert beneath her floor the new construction imagine that each member, in the various of the Maison de Verre. The bottom floors were motions of the dance, had to be placed and removed and with the use of steel columns and pulled individually by the puppeteer. Each beams the floors above were propped up so as movement, he said, had its center of gravity; it to remain in place. By disassociating these would suffice to control that center, on the completely from the compartmentalizing of the inside of the figure; the limbs, which are really new interior, the clues to the working out of its nothing but pendulums, follow of themselves, mechanical forces remain visible. Also, in1928 in a mechanical way, without further aid. He the French manufacturing firm Saint Gobin added that this movement was a very simple introduced for the first time a square glass lens one, that even when the center of gravity was of 20cm x 20cm x 4 cm known as the Nevada- directed in a straight line the limbs began to type lens whose deep edging grooves allowed describe curves; and that often, when shaken for its vertical use within a steel frame. in a quite random way, the whole puppet Chareau’s proposal to use it to construct a assumed a kind of rhythmic motion that was continuous wall was so ahead of his time that 15 very much like a dance. the manufacturer would not insure its 19 stability. In order to avoid cracking on the In the case of the swiveling bidets, located in lower levels, the façade had to be constituted all the bedrooms, Chareau went to a lot of of a steel grid in 4-block wide panels (91cm), trouble to create something especially peculiar, thereby becoming the basic measure for the which many scholars dismiss as just another of project’s arrangement in its totality. Chareau’s fascination with movement and mechanization. If one were to ride Jarry’s Many view Chareau’s work, after the ‘pataphysical Machine, however, one would completion of Maison de Verre, as a “rupture” very soon discover that it was not too long that reflected a disenchantment based “…on before, that bidets set on wheels, attached the impossibility of preserving architectural culture…a sort of compensatory worship of ‘the with a flexible pipe advantageously connected 20 to the plumbing of the sink allowing them to be dumb and the ordinary’”. Contrary to this neatly stored under the sink cabinet, were view I would suggest that the house and studio commonly used particularly by those who could Chareau built for the painter Robert Motherwell not afford a bathroom with a tub.16 In the case at East Hampton, New York, 1945, is evidence in its totality of the architecture of magic of the Maison de Verre, there was certainly no 21 need to take advantage of the pipes carrying present in Maison de Verre. It is not, as water to and away from the sink, and as they Frampton suggests “a hidden nostalgia, were installed separately the bidets appear expressed in crude material, which brought

______A PATAPHYSICAL READING OF THE MAISON DE VERRE ______187

back in one way or another the memory of the philosophical-aesthetic-metaphysical- lost glories of the Maison de Verre…”22 I would programme”.25 instead argue that Pierre Chareau never lost sight of the future and that these As a true modern and ‘pataphysician, Chareau constructions, which may appear as if a tower understood that the forecasting of a future had fallen, are the residues of true magic. building is always an assemblage of fragments Once again, Chareau makes visible the magical from the past. His use of techniques from potential reminiscent of Renaissance natural Renaissance natural magic is not with an magic with the poetry of a ‘pataphysician. attitude of nostalgia but rather it is an adoption of a way of thinking that provided him with a At East Hampton, Pierre Chareau assembled means to his own inventions. In reviving two Quonset huts, constructions of memories from the past for his design of the prefabricated semi-circular steel supports swiveling bidets and the use of the Quonset sheathed with corrugated iron that was the huts, albeit with a completely new modern WWII American solution to the temporary understanding and perspective, Pierre Chareau housing of soldiers on foreign soil, which had is affirming and reminding us that memory is exhausted its usefulness. To this, Chareau the essence of humanity and so there can be added a 36-foot- long window that had been no architecture without historical reference. salvaged from an old commercial greenhouse, flooding natural light into the living area. Endnotes During storms, rain poured down the overlapping panes of glass “in a delicious 1 The term modern finds its origin from the 23 waterfall”. The Motherwell house and studio, Latin roots, modus, meaning measure or an assemblage of discarded machinery telling a manner, and hodiernus, meaning today. story of dreams and possibilities in a world Oxford English Dictionary. where there seemed to be no hope for the http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl future, is not unlike the story of The Little (accessed August 13, 2006). Machinery by Mary Liddell (1926), which begins: 2 Alfred Jarry, “How to Construct a Time “Somewhere there is a Little Machinery, a Machine,” in Michael Moorcock, ed., The Traps magic creature. He grew up out of pieces of a of Time (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1970). steam engine that was in a wreck, an old The quote is from Kenneth Frampton’s article trolley car that couldn’t run anymore, and a “Pierre Chareau, An Eclectic Architect,” in Marc broken automobile. This Little machinery would Vellay and Kenneth Frampton, Pierre Chareau rather work more than anything in the world.” (New York: Rizzoli, 1985).

According to Brian Taylor, an anecdote 3 Alfred Jarry, Exploits & Opinions of Dr. recounted by Francis Jourdain, a long-time Faustroll, Pataphysician (Boston, MA: Exact friend and fellow designer, at Chareau’s death Change, 1996), p. 21-22. ‘Pataphysics is elucidates both his humorous and practical etymologically derived from Greek and the side: “Jourdain said that he once had a dream apostrophe is intended to avoid puns in French in which he was watching one of the old- such as, “patte à physique” (physical leg), or fashioned French elevators of wood and glass “pas ta physique” (not your physique). Jarry, going up and down. Inside the elevator was a in the spirit of François Rabelais who was his wood-burning stove with a stovepipe attached, master, attempted to combine disparate which extended and contracted like a telescope elements such as science, symbolism, humor as the elevator went up and down. When and the occult into a single body of work. Many Jourdain awoke from his dream, the first name colleges of ‘pataphysics are currently in that came to his mind as the inventor of such a existence worldwide. machine was that of Pierre Chareau!”24 Like the great Renaissance Magi, Pierre Chareau 4 C.V. Boys (1855-1944) was a contemporary was everything from an ensemblier to an English physicist who invented the radio- engineer-constructor, at the same time, his micrometer and wrote Soap Bubbles and the method of operation was “pataphysical, a Forces Which Mould Them, published in 1890, method often described by a hyphenated series in London. In much of the chapter dedicated to of words such as a ‘pseudo-scientific- C. V. Boys, Jarry paraphrases him.

188_____FRESH AIR ______

5 Alfred Jarry. “How to Construct a Time there are plenty of examples in catalogues for Machine.” Michael Moorcock, ed., The Traps of bathroom fixtures at the turn of the 20th Time (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1970), p. century. 207. 17 Alfred Jarry particularly admired the work of 6 While he did not collaborate with him, it is François Rabelais (1495-1553) most renowned well known that Chareau was also good friends for his book, Gargantua and Pantagruel. and neighbor of Max Jacob, a writer and known advocate of Alfred Jarry. 18 Marco Frascari, “An Heroic and Admirable Machine, the Theatre of the Architecture,” 7 Giambattista della Porta, Natural Magick Poetics Today (Spring 89). Brunelleschi is (New York, NY: Basic Books, Inc. 1957), considered one of the greatest of the editor’s preface and Book 1, Ch. 2. Renaissance Magi.

8 Ibid., Book1, Ch.2, p.1 19 Until then, glass block had only been used in commercial and institutional settings outside of 9 The house as a “machine for living” was a France. phrase coined by Le Corbusier. 20 Kenneth Frampton, “Pierre Chareau, An 10 Marcus Polio Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Eclectic Architect,” in Marc Vellay and Kenneth Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, Frampton, Pierre Chareau (New York: Rizzoli, Inc., 1960). Reference is made in Book 1, ch. 1985), p. 247. In the same article, as a 2. reflection of this view, Frampton also refers to Rene Herbst’s choice to exclude the Anik 11 Quoted from Martha Teach Gnudi and house, while clearly being aware of it, in his Eugene S. Ferguson in the preface to The monograph of 1954 in memory of Chareau. It Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino is also explicitly evident in the significant Ramelli (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. amount of documentation existing on the Press, 1976), p.11. Maison de Verre, while anything on his work after its completion is rare. 12 We have forgotten this magic. Once upon a 21 time refrigerators used to close magically on This house was destroyed in 1985. their own because they were pivoted at a slight incline toward the opening. 22 Kenneth Frampton, “Pierre Chareau, An Eclectic Architect,” p.247-248. 13 Herman Hertzberger, “L’Espace de la Maison de Verre,” Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 236 23 Alastair Gordon, Weekend Utopia: Modern (December, 1984): 86. living in the Hamptons (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001), p.50. 14 Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: 24 Brian Brace Taylor, Pierre Chareau: Designer Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 66. and Architect (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1992), p.36. 15 Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Puppet Theater,” Philip B. Miller, ed., An Abyss Deep 25 Kimberly Jannarone, “Puppetry and Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a ‘Pataphysics: populism and the Ubu cycle,” Selection of Essays and Anecdotes (New York, New Theatre Quarterly 17: 67 (August 2001), NY: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1982), pp.239-53. http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts /week9/puppet.html.

16 Briefly mentioned by Henri-Roger Guerrand and Fanny Beaupré, Le Confident des Dames: le bidet du XVIIIe au XXe siècle: histoire d’une intimité (Paris: La Décourvete, 1997), although