In every great artistic project, there is also a great concept. The French architect and artist Le Corbusier built his famous house Le Cabanon as a present to his wife, Yvonne. It was created through countless hours of research, as Le Corbusier had produced the concept of the Modulor, an anthropometric scale based on the human body. Designed on the basis of the minimum possible dimensions but the maximum physical and spiritual comfort it could offer, he sometimes called it a scale of "Mediterranean balance”.
Our Cabanons, made of concrete, are our take on the concept of Le Corbusier’s Le Cabanon. It is us showing our appreciation to a great thinker who showed his appreciation of the Mediterranean.
For 18 years Le Corbusier spent every August at his Le Cabanon, living the modernist utopian dream of a simple summer life. He loved the Mediterranean and its light, its long history of great civilisations and its rough nature with its scenery of rocks, olive trees and the sea.
We share both the love and the scenery. It’s about spending endless hours over a simple meal, reading a book on the terrace and dozing off during the hot midday sun to the sound of the cicadas. It’s about picking the tomato from the soil and eating it right away. Or be mesmerized by an evening sky with all the stars you can count.
We, too, focused on simplicity as we eliminated unnecessary space and kept it as close to the essence as possible. We interwove the inside with the outside and created a space where everything is allowed to take its time and the emphasis is on the essential things in life - like feeling the sea breeze and taking time doing nothing - because that is what inspiration needs in order to be refuelled.
Mixing his methods of expression, Le Corbusier was an architect, artist, writer and designer. We’re sure he knew all about the importance of the time in-between productivity.
As an artist who is concerned with how history and identity are connected to a certain physical place, Antonis artistic work explores social, political and cultural conditions and how they form people and places and our impression of them. From another point of view, Sofias research as an art curator evolve around the notion of site-specificity, the studying of how a person and their environment interact in an organic, never-ending interchange.
A site is never merely a physical architectural entity with compositional challenges. As everything is part of a context, a site can never only be its physical attributes as much as an ancient site is completely different without its history. This is the intriguing aspect of a place - it’s so much more than just a location.
