Villa Le Lac Exhibition Pushes Back Against Le Corbusier Revisionism

Switzerland's Villa Le Lac opened "Remettre les pendules à l'heure," a bilingual exhibition drawing on more than 25 years of archival research to push back against what the show's organizers describe as a wave of historical revisionism around Le Corbusier.

The exhibition runs June 26 to October 25, 2026, at the 64-square-meter lakeside house Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed between 1923 and 1924 for Le Corbusier's parents on Lake Geneva. The building itself anticipates three of the architect's future "five points of a new architecture."

What is the exhibition's argument?

The show reassesses Le Corbusier's legacy alongside Eileen Gray and Charlotte Perriand, and reexamines works including Villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. It draws on research by Arnaud Dercelles, Jean-Louis Cohen, Jacques Sbriglio, Tim Benton, and Robert Belot, advancing a history grounded in contextualized sources and historiography over narratives it attributes to social media and post-truth culture.

Why did the UIA and United Nations focus on housing?

World Architecture Day, observed Monday, carried a joint UIA-United Nations message naming the global housing crisis as a fundamental element of human dignity, inclusion, and well-being. The 2026 call directs disciplinary effort toward building not only residential structures but also the systems that better distribute and use what already exists.

Which reuse projects moved this week?

Marlon Blackwell Architects' timber-framed U.S. Pavilion, originally presented in Venice's Giardini as part of the 2025 Architecture Biennale's PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, will be reconstructed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in late 2027. TAELON7's Limbo Engawa installation traveled from Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, to Art Omi's Sculpture & Architecture Park in Ghent, New York, retaining its architectural language across two contrasting sites. Ammodo Architecture announced the first Ammodo Architecture Days, a two-day program on November 9 and 10 staged at Westergas in Amsterdam around six themes including Reuse and Heritage.

What new venues and tools bridge heritage and innovation?

• Design Museum Gent reopened inside Ghent's UNESCO World Heritage center, with a wing by Carmody Groarke and ATAMA knitting 18th-century buildings, including the Hôtel de Coninck, around a restored garden courtyard.
• Amman Design Week returned under the theme "Accumulations," using the city's Hangar building, public spaces, and archaeological landscapes as stages.
• HENN launched CarbonBudget, a free digital tool that calculates project-specific CO2 budgets for European building projects against the Paris Agreement's 1.5°C target.

What is Snøhetta building in Miami?

Snøhetta has broken ground on Sweetbird North, an eight-story, approximately 11,150-square-meter mixed-use office and retail building in Miami's Design District. Its defining feature is a custom-engineered veil of coiled stainless-steel mesh, tensioned to a structural frame and working simultaneously as sunshade, guardrail, and hurricane-resistant exterior screen.

The design integrates impact glazing, reinforced concrete, and protective screening into a single architectural system, required by Miami's stringent hurricane code. From head-on the mesh reads nearly transparent; at oblique angles it turns increasingly opaque, shifting with daylight and cutting solar gain to reduce mechanical cooling loads. Each office floor opens onto a planted terrace with tropical planting below and flowering bougainvillea above, capped by a landscaped roof. Foundation work starts in the coming weeks, with a full-scale mock-up testing façade performance ahead of fabrication and the veil installed in the final construction phase.

Who won the Linz campus competition?

A consortium of Klinglmüller, HENN, and a-stud.io won the competition to expand Sparkasse Oberösterreich's Linz-Urfahr campus. Sited south of the bank's 1979 office tower — a local landmark of seemingly floating glass cubes — the addition consists of three horizontally interlocking rectilinear volumes rotated off-axis and rising toward the original tower.

A glazed incision in the northern block echoes the floating-cube motif. The façade pairs glass, recycled concrete, and timber. A light-filled atrium links the BusinessCenter with flexible open-plan workspaces in the north, shared facilities including a marketplace, a Future Lab, and a rooftop garden at center, and a kindergarten and fitness area in the lower southern volume. A ground-level public plaza opens the campus to the city.

The Villa Le Lac exhibition, the Miami groundbreaking, and the Linz competition all reach full delivery over the next 18 months, putting the months ahead to a test of how architects, clients, and curators turn revisionist questions and resource shortages into built form.