Commissioned by the painter Amédée Ozenfant from his friend Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, it was built in 1923 on Avenue Reille, across from the Montsouris reservoirs. This studio-house embodies the artistic and intellectual bond between the painter and the architect, which began with their first reflections on Purism and L’Esprit Nouveau, the journal that they founded with the poet Paul Dermée in 1920, dedicated to the concepts of order and geometric precision.

Characterized by a monumental all-glass corner (roof and walls), the building is a showcase of Le Corbusier’s nascent modern style and experiments in form, in particular the free façade and open spaces. It exemplifies the architect’s idea of the simple, economical, rational and industrial dwelling. With the Ozenfant House, he introduced for the first time an “architectural promenade,” a pathway emphasizing elevation across the levels of human activity. This activity culminates in the studio, with its hanging library accessed by a narrow ladder.

Taking an active part in the architectural process, Ozenfant drew the preliminary sketches, entrusting the design to Le Corbusier and his cousin Jeanneret, who had recently joined his firm as an associate architect. “I would have been happy with a functional house – they built me a little gem,” Ozenfant wrote in his memoirs. “I was the engineer, Pierre perfected the floorplan and the technical aspects, Le Corbusier was the artist.” The painter worked in the house until 1939, when, fleeing the rise of Nazism, he sold the property and went into exile in New York.

A painter, theorist, and teacher, Amédée Ozenfant was born in Saint-Quentin, in the Picardy region of northern France, in 1886. Growing up with an architect father and a painter mother, he decided to pursue a career in the arts and enrolled at the Académie de la Palette in Paris in 1907. In 1915 he founded the journal L’Élan as a means of maintaining links with artists who had been sent to the front. Two years later, his friend Auguste Perret introduced him to Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who quickly became his intellectual cohort. Together they defined the theory of Purism in their manifesto After Cubism(1918) and later founded the journal L’Esprit Nouveau(1920), in which they cultivated their vision of modernity in the realms of both art and architecture.

In 1928, Ozenfant gathered his artistic thoughts and theories in a book entitled Art, which achieved impressive success in France and internationally. Thereafter, his paintings became a reflection of his philosophical doubts and spiritual quest. In the 1930s he joined the movement against the rise of fascism in Europe and developed his devotion to teaching as a means of exalting the arts and the mind. He opened an academy in his Paris studio-house before moving to London. There, in 1938, he completed his painting Vie (“Life”), the result of seven years of work and a symbol of the loss of humanism. In 1939, he opened the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York. Persecuted during the McCarthy era due to his political convictions, Ozenfant returned to France in 1955. His paintings then evolved in several directions (fireworks and clouds, mountains and seascapes, foliage, architecture) before returning to his Purist themes. He died in Cannes in 1966.

Born in 1887 in La-Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was an architect, urban planner, painter, designer and theoretician. After early training in engraving and chasing, Jeanneret soon turned his attention to architecture. He learned the principles of reinforced concrete construction working with Auguste Perret before opening his own firm in Switzerland in 1914. The widespread destruction of World War I led him to rethink the standard architectural modules. He moved to Paris in 1917, where in 1918 he and the painter Amédée Ozenfant marked the birth of Purism with their manifesto After Cubism, whose publication included an invitation to a joint exhibition. The paintings by the two men from this period are characterized by simplified shapes, the rejection of decorative elements, a reduced chromatic palette, and an emphasis on a mechanical aesthetic. With the poet Paul Dermée, Jeanneret and Ozenfant founded the artistic journal L’Esprit Nouveau in 1920, using its pages as a sounding board for their theories and visions of art and architecture.

In 1922 the architect began working with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (1896 –1967), and in 1924 opened a studio at 35 Rue de Sèvres in Paris. A few years later, the Villa Savoye in Poissy (1928 –1931) crystallized his Purist principles and the foundations of modern architecture. After World War II, Le Corbusier designed the Cité Radieuse housing complex in Marseille (1947–1952) along with many other Brutalist structures, including the Saint-Dié factory (1946), the Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp (1950 –1955) and the Sainte-Marie de la Tourette priory in Éveux-sur-l’Arbresle (1953 –1960). The architect died in 1965, felled by a heart attack while swimming in the Mediterranean in front of his cabin in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the encapsulation of his reflections on the minimal dwelling space. Today, 17 of his buildings have been named UNESCO World Heritage Sites.