Le KBNN: an update of Le Corbusier´s refuge by OHM

Project description by Dana Barale Burdman and Pedro Pitarch

Back in 1952, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, built a project that would be considered a simplification of his architectural thinking: a humble small wooden cabin, elevated on top of a concrete platform with tiny uneven windows.

The so-called Cabanon de Vacances is actually a domestic cell that summarizes Le Corbusier’s idea of the machine of living. A modern refuge whose architectural purpose is the exile of the user, its distancing from society in order to meet nature and enjoy its own time… LC stated that he “had a 3,66x3,66m castle in the Côte d’Azur”.

Things have drastically changed since Le Corbusier designed his Cabanon, and within our society the living space has evolved into a more complex concept that relates to a virtual sphere. A space from where to produce our identity and from where to generate associations with others.

Contemporary media and digital technologies have overspeed such an update of our living spaces, transforming our homes into mediated scenarios where interconnections between multiple agents are performed. Far from being a space for exile, for self isolation, the house is nowadays a place for encounter, a node of a wider network.

Le KBNN is a ready made that rethinks in our contemporary context Le Corbusier’s Cabanon. It reinterprets the original scheme with updated devices and materials. Its interior explores the different original scenarios through virtual situations of the XXIst century.

Le KBNN stands as an archive of our historical moment, seen through the lens of Le Corbusier, emplaced within the measures of his Modulor, staged over his precisely measured furniture and hosted with the walls of his vacation cabin.

The new house is no longer a refuge but a media sphere.

Welcome to Korea LC, this is not a castle in the Côte d’Azur… but a digital hut in the Yellow Sea.