Prefabrication experiments - 188 - Exhibition houses - 09 - Bivouac mountain shelter

The prefabrication of components or complete buildings has been employed most successfully in difficult situations. An area of exploration for prefabrication, the emergency hut or cabin deployed easily, for temporary use and designed for mobility habitually employs lightweight components, requires little manpower and can be assembled and disassembled without the use of complex tools. The mountain shelter or «Bivouac» used as a temporary dwelling and basepoint while mountaineering has the added constraint of being built in intricate topography with little or no access for materials.

Interested in climbing, Le Corbusier’s most famous female associate, Charlotte Perriand, designed and built her aluminum version of the Bivouac with engineer André Tournon.  Perriand and Le Corbusier co-designed an ideal polygonal hut in 1938 based on the ideas she had put in place in her Bivouac shelter. Attentive to and inspired by the era’s fascination with minimal dwellings, she designed the small 1.9m x 3.95m (in plan) structure to accommodate a small group of hikers. Built on Mount Joly in France’s Savoye region at an altitude of 2000m, assembly took a group of three (Perriand, Tournon and one other) just three days.  The system’s pieces were carried by animal power and assembled by the small team. The small one room hut confirmed Perriand’s attention to integrating furniture with flexible and adaptable dwelling patterns. 

The exoskeleton is a scaffold-like structure made from simple aluminum tubing positioned and connected with right-angle bolt clamps, the same type used in scaffolding. The infill panels seem to be aluminum laminate, although their exact composition is unknown and varies in the consulted literature. The shed roof slopes the length of the shelter from a height of about 2m to 2.5 m. The small compact interior is packed with moveable furnishings, which could be organized according to changing conditions. Makeshift beds and tables are hinged. The Bivouac’s framework was anchored to four pile foundations and braced by cables. A small balcony, the depth of a bench runs the width of the bivouac on the lower side of the section and introduces a spatial element not usually found in an emergency dwelling: a comfortable pew to contemplate the surrounding landscapes.

Bivouac shelter photographs