Madeleine Zillhardt no relation Winnaretta Singer
Homeless shelter
In 1929, Madeleine Zillhardt bought the barge with the profit from reselling a drawing and donated it to the Salvation Army on condition it be renamed Louise-Catherine after her companion, Louise Catherine Breslau, who had died shortly before. A friend of hers and Breslau's, Winnaretta Singer, had it brought from Rouen and commissioned Le Corbusier to design, with Japonese architect Kunio Maekawa its conversion into a 160-bed homeless shelter. He created three dormitories, dining rooms, toilet facilities including showers, quarters for a boatsman and the shelter director, and a hanging garden on the former bridge. He installed square windows and thin columns and designed the furniture, including cupboards with sliding doors. Le Corbusier wrote that the intention was for the barge to be moored in front of the Louvre Museum in winter as a homeless shelter, and in summer to be used as a floating children's camp, further upstream at the Pont des Arts. Its use was suspended during the Second World War, and in 1950 it was repurposed to house ex-prisoners and discharged hospital patients as well as the homeless.
no relation