The Cité internationale universitaire de Paris was founded in 1921 to accommodate foreign students in the city. Within a decade it had grown into a collection of highly differentiated buildings, each associated with a different nation. Though Le Corbusier and his cousin and associate Pierre Jeanneret originally refused the commission to build the complex's Swiss Pavilion, they eventually designed it in accordance with nearly all the elements outlined in their 1926 manifesto "Five Points Towards a New Architecture." These included raising the building on pilotis, or pillars; using load-bearing columns separate from the exterior walls to allow a free plan and a free facade, distinct from the building's structural logic; and incorporating horizontal strip windows for greater natural illumination and for visual links to the landscape. Although this project was included in the Museum's 1932 show Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, the Pavilion's curved rubble wall relates to vernacular traditions and hints of an emerging primitivism in Le Corbusier's work.
Gallery label from 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA, 2007.
