Journées Nationales de l'Architecture 2026 : Deux ateliers, une histoire partagée

For the Journées Nationales de l'Architecture, AiR Arts wishes to offer a reading of the artist's studio through the lens of architecture: that of rehabilitation, or how to build the future from a heritage. This theme takes as its thread the figures of the sculptors Oscar Miestchaninoff and Jacques Lipchitz, whose careers very concretely link Atelier 11 at the Cité Falguière in Montparnasse with their shared house-studios in Boulogne-Billancourt.

The Cité Falguière studio complex was built on the initiative of the sculptor Jules-Ernest Bouillot, by artists for artists, notably Atelier 11 in 1875. A pupil of Alexandre Falguière, Bouillot wanted to build low-cost studios for artists who had no money.

The studios were built on the ruins of a former brickworks and were, for the most part, designed as spaces for sculptural production.

Over the decades, artists from all over the world gravitated around the Cité Falguière, among them Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine and Tsuguharu Foujita.

Among them was Oscar Miestchaninoff, who lived and worked there from 1912 to 1923: a rustic, poor, charming place, but almost in ruins, mirroring the precarity of the many artists who stayed there at the beginning of the twentieth century.

It may be precisely this deprivation that led him, a few years later, to seek a radically different studio: spacious, new, resolutely modern.

After frequenting the same artistic community in Montparnasse, Miestchaninoff and Lipchitz then teamed up in 1923 with the aim of building their own studios, this time in Boulogne-Billancourt.

With the architect Le Corbusier, whom they had met in 1921 at an art sale, they commissioned two adjoining house-studios for the two of them, at the corner of the allée des Pins and the rue des Arts, thus continuing the spirit of sharing of the Cité Falguière community.

The houses designed by Le Corbusier offer generous, airy spaces for creation: located on the ground floor to facilitate the handling of sculptures, each has a double height and large north-facing skylights, for constant light throughout the day.

Upstairs, the living quarters are arranged around the studios, similarly to the layout of the studios at the Cité Falguière.