‘Pisé, concrete with rubble, exposed brick’

In the 1940s Le Corbusier returns to his text La pierre, amie de l’homme from 1937, with a new essay in mind, possibly to be entitled Pierre matériau éternel. Stone and other vernacular construction materials are the focus of his studies on the reconstruction of houses destroyed by war, summed up in the book Les constructions ‘murondins’, published in 1942 by the Secrétariat Général de la Jeunesse of the Vichy government – a “technical manual” aimed at young people planning to rebuild their own houses themselves. As at the time of the projects for the Maison Monol, Le Corbusier envisions walls made with different techniques, often using materials salvaged from the ruins: pisé (rammed earth) or shuttered concrete, raw brick, blocks fabricated on site; for the roofs, he proposes a framework of logs (rondins) and a covering of “branches,” “clods of earth.”