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Le Corbusier began to study purism as he looked into the house as a “machine for living.” Maison Citrohan was the last of three prototypes, as he looked into a house with double height spaces that would function seamlessly with the daily lives of its inhabitance. The three prototypes were the Domino house, the Monol house, and finally Maison Citrohan. The way the house would function as a machine is how they were built, in series. Le Corbusier was interested at the time in industrialization and the machines that began to mass produce products, and he wanted to do the same for homes, but in doing so he also wanted to contain the humanist expression inside of the building.             Each house would include a double height space with two walls, which was inspired by his visual experience of space inside of popular Paris bars. The houses would include a mezzanine and have a large light near the darker areas light did n...

 Café l'Aubette, Theo van Doesburg, (Strasbourg, France); 1927; De Stijil, the Avant-Garde in Modern Europe and the Emergence of the Modern Movement Concealed behind an 18th century Baroque façade in Strasbourg’s Place Kléber, the Café L’Aubette is a dazzlingly incongruous expression of the 1920s De Stijl movement.  Designed by Theo van Doesburg, one of the movement’s founders and leading lights, the Aubette’s minimalist, geometric aesthetic was heavily influenced by the work of contemporary artists such as Piet Mondrian. In designing the café’s interiors, Van Doesburg sought to do more than simply place viewers before a painting; he wanted to envelop them in it. Van Doesburg saw in the cafe the opportunity to implement his own theories of Elementarism. Much like Mondrian, he designed in a purely rectilinear, orthogonal manner; the walls were covered in large grids of brightly colored rectangles. However, Van Doesburg did not rigorously bin...