Maison La Roche

Maison La Roche stands in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, designed by Le Corbusier together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret and built between 1923 and 1925 for Raoul La Roche, a Swiss banker and art collector who commissioned both a private residence and a gallery wing to display his collection of Cubist and Purist paintings. The house is considered a key early demonstration of the architectural principles Le Corbusier was then formulating, built in reinforced concrete and raised on pilotis, with elongated ribbon windows and a roof garden, and its interior circulation was deliberately composed to be experienced from staged fixed viewpoints as visitors moved through the gallery spaces. In 2016 UNESCO included the house within a joint World Heritage inscription covering seventeen works by Le Corbusier across several countries, recognizing its place in the emergence of modern architecture. The house now operates as a museum under the Fondation Le Corbusier, holding roughly 8,000 original drawings and studies alongside some 450 paintings and extensive archival material documenting Le Corbusier's work between 1922 and 1940.