The Squares of Montchoisy

摘要

It's a Thursday afternoon in October 1929 and Geneva's Society for the Improvement of Housing has been invited on a tour around the first of the four Squares of Montchoisy - a model neighbourhood of what would ultimately comprise 900 dwellings designed by the architects Maurice Braillard and Louis Vial. The site, a former country estate covering almost seven hectares, slopes gently down towards the lake alongside the formal avenues of the city's 1918 Parc de la Grange. From an elevated position in the park, the view no doubt afforded to members of the society that afternoon is preserved today in a number of photographs that accompanied reviews of the development in the local press. They show the new six-storey buildings of Montchoisy juxtaposed against their surrounding landscape, but with the height of the buildings corresponding to that of the oldest existing trees in the park - a subordination, almost, to nature that makes Montchoisy appear as if in the background, at the end of a line of sight made irregular by vegetation, shadows and the geometry of the project.