Villa Savoye
Poissy-sur-Seine, France. Le Corbusier (architect). 1929 C.E. Steel and reinforced concreteThis was a radically new view of the domestic sphere, one that is evident in his design for the Villa Savoye. The architect has created a space that is dynamic. This design concept was based on the notion of the car as the ultimate machine and the idea that the approach up to and through the house carried ceremonial significance.
Form
Boxlike horizontal quality, and abstraction of a house. The main part of the house is lifted off the ground by narrow pilotis--thin freestanding posts. There is a turning circle on the bottom floor that functions as a carport so that family members can enter the house directly from their car. All of the space is utilized including the roof which features a patio. There is no historical ornamentation. The whire on the exterior is symbolic of the modern cleanliness, new simplicity and healthy living.
Function
A three bedroom villa with servants quarters for Pierre and Emilie Savoye. The house is meant to be humankind’s assertion on nature.
Content
The building was designed to be a functional living space with a partially confined ground floor containing a 3 car garage, bedrooms and a bathroom, utility rooms and today a gift shop for visitors. The house features an open concept plan with thin columns holding up the main living area and roof garden. It has strip windows wrapping the exterior of the building providing illumination and views. The rooftop patio is accessed via a ramp that is protected by a wind break.
Context
LeCorbusier’s dictum that a house should be a “machine for living” sums up the International Style from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Greatly influenced by the streamlined qualities of the Bauhaus, the International Style celebrates the clean spacious white lines of a building’s facade. The internal structure is a skeleton system which holds the building up from within and allows great planes of glass to wrap around the walls using ferro-concrete construction. A key characteristic is the lack of architectural ornament and an avoidance of sculpture and painting applied to exterior surfaces.
Innovation
The building incorporates several changes of direction and spiral staircases. Spaces and masses interpenetrate so fluidly that inside and outside spaces intermingle. Reinforced concrete was surprisingly malleable, enabling the architect to create livable sculptures, or homes that were effectively works of art. Le Corbusier’s five points iof the International Style of Arhcitecture were: Use of pillars instead of walls on the ground floor, A ground plan that could have multiple uses because it didn’t need load bearing walls, A building that was free of structural concerns, Ribbon windows, and Terrace gardens. Johnson and Hitchcock defined the International Style as a building that was purely functional, down to each room and shape, and Villa Savoye was the shining pillar of this hyper-functional style.
Interpretation
Le Corbusier thought of houses as machines for living, containers for families and extensions of public services. Architecture for him was the masterly and magnificent play of masses brought together in the light. Cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders, pyramids, e said, are the great primary forms that reveal themselves in sun and shadow. He raised his structures on piers to assert the “independence of things human.”
Artistic Decision
Le Corbusier maintained that the basic physical and psychological needs of a human being are sun, space, and vegetation combined with controlled temperature, good ventilation and insulation against harmful and undesirable noise.
Details
Le Corbusier’s real name is Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. In 1940, at the beginning of WWII, the Savoyes smartly hit the road and never looked back. The house fell into disrepair for many years and was slated for total destruction in the early 1960s, until the gov- ernment added it to its list of historical buildings and it was protected from demolition. Corbusier was still alive at the time, and the building wasn’t all that old. Nonetheless, it became the first modern building to enter the ranks of historical preservation.
