Radicare piccole “scatole bianche” al suolo: attorno alla Petite Maison e altre case sull’acqua

The Petite Maison by Le Corbusier (1924), the maison en bord de mer E1027 "by E. Gray (1926- 29), as well as the Casa in Vello di Marone designed by G. Grassi (1962) have recurring similarities in the way they settle, interpreting the given natural context with inventive adaptation strategies, detaching or adhering to the ground. This text finds its origin during a lecture of the Residential Seminar that took place in Villa Malaparte, on Capri, organized by the Achitectural Association School of London, in 1988. The author gave the lesson “Small houses near the water: progressive movements of a typology”. The lecture was published for the first time in the collective volume "The single-family house", edited by G. Mainini (Beccu 2002). The original text explored the theme of the settlement strategies extending the analysis of Le Corbusier's Petite Maison to Gray’s E 1027 and to Grassi’s Casa a Vello di Marone. The new text, reviewed in many parts and with updated notes and bibliography, starts with the observation of the "machinistic" character of these architectures, focusing rather on their settling, a term more suitable to describe the meticulous and sophisticated acts of inventing a place, of its definition as a limit.