Presenting design – Villa "Le Lac" Le Corbusier, Switzerland
Join Patrick Moser, publisher and curator of Villa "Le Lac" Le Corbusier and Highland architect Karen Anderson as they discuss his experiences presenting design and architecture to the public. Patrick looks in detail at the various exhibitions and books he has produced and how he tells a story about heritage and the value of design.
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, was a Swiss architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. Over a 5 decade career, he was influential in urban planning and dedicated to providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded cities. His home on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Villa “Le Lac” is a little gem of ingenuity and functionalism – an architectural manifesto where one can find the key ideas of the program developed by Le Corbusier during the 1920s for his famous “white houses”. This laboratory of modern ideas is one of the architect's most personal and inventive works.
Patrick Moser:
Patrick Moser is a Swiss writer, translator, publisher, art historian, and museologist. He is the founder and curator of the Museum Villa "Le Lac" Le Corbusier in Corseaux / Switzerland.
Moser began studying literature at the University of Lausanne. After completing his formal education, he began teaching and studying translation and interpretation. In 2001, he obtained a post-graduate degree in museology from the University of Geneva for his thesis From the dwelling house to the exhibition space – example of the Villa "Le Lac" Le Corbusier. In the meantime, Moser became a translator. His work is noted by Kenneth Branagh, for whom Moser translated an adaptation of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost into French. Moser translated for Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York and Tim Burton’s Big Fish.
In 2010, Moser created, according to Le Corbusier's wish in one of his last letters (1965), a museum at the Villa "Le Lac”. Photographers Erling Mandelmann and René Burri contributed to the creation of the museum by lending their works for the first two exhibitions in 2010 and 2011. In 2015, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the architect's death, Moser invited Daniel Libeskind, Mario Botta, Zaha Hadid, Toyo Ito, SANAA, Rudy Ricciotti, Bernard Tschumi, Gigon/Guyer, Alvaro Siza and Rafael Moneo to an extension project of the Villa "Le Lac" – a competition of ideas and imagination in honour of one of the 20th century's greatest architects.
In 2013, he founded his publishing house Call me Edouard Éditeurs | Publishers and was invited to the Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg, Sweden, to present his research on the relations between architecture and literature. Several lectures followed, notably at Doctor Curutchet's Villa in La Plata, Argentina (2015), and at the Mies van der Rohe house of the Weissenhof Siedlung in Stuttgart (2016).
In 2017, the University of Lausanne entrusted him with curating the in situ exhibition"From BFSH 2 to Anthropole - 1987-2017 on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Building of the Faculties of Human Sciences. In 2019, a plea in favour of towers and skyscrapers in Switzerland came with the exhibition De Bel-Air à Babel at the Villa "Le Lac" Le Corbusier for which Moser analysed five towers built or planned between 1930 and 1970 in Lausanne, Vevey, Montreux and Aminona, works by five major 20th century architects: Jean Tschumi, René Deléchat, Alphonse Laverrière, Hugo Buscaglia and Philippe Gaillard. In 2019, Moser participates in the AHA! Festival in Gothenburg with a lecture on The Essence of Villa "Le Lac". In 2020, he exhibits for the first time John-Francis Lecoultre, a past master of the art of pastel. This turned out to be a major discovery for the history of Swiss painting – as Lecoultre is now considered as the Ferdinand Hodler of French-speaking Switzerland.
