Mallet Stevens, Architect’s apartment, Paris, France, 1926/27. (view in google maps)

The district of Mallet Stevens’s apartment is located in Auteuil, at the edge of Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

It includes home and office buildings for the owner’s relatives.  The building is luxurious, the sculptural physiognomy of the architectural complex derives from the use of terraces with which Stevens structured the environment. A variety of volumes and solutions have been used for all the structural aesthetics elements. They are defined by their plasticity and by the furnishing elements.

We can see the continuity with the Cubist formalism while outlining the prospects of its overcoming. The volumes are heavy but their lines are plain; Mallet-Stevens uses colors and decoration sparingly, but to good effect. His compositions are strong and singular and details are subtle -easily overlooked but, when examined, beautiful.

References:

• Features: The Modern Home of a Modern Architect, Vogue vol. 72, no. 3 (Aug 1, 1928), p. 32
• Gennaro Postiglione, Cento case per 100 architetti, Taschen, 2007, 360 p
• https://untappedcities.com/2013/01/01/rue-mallet-stevens-modernist-architecture-in-the-16th/

Authors

Alexis Barnabe, Michel Nocture, Gin Joen Yau