A look back: Villa Savoye 1929

‘The approach is by car and as one passes under the building (a demonstration of urban doctrine), and follows the curve of industrial glazing (of which the geometry was determined by the car’s turning circle), it becomes clear that one is to be drawn into a machine-age ritual. The plan of the building is square (one of the ‘ideal’ forms from Vers une architecture), curves, ramp and grid of structure providing the basic counterpoint to the perimeter. The section illustrates the basic divisions of a service and circulation zone below, a piano nobile above, and the celestial zone of the solarium on top: it’s the section-type of Le Corbusier’s ideal city but restated in microcosm. If the Villa Savoye had been a mere demonstration of formal virtuosity it would not have touched expressive depths. The tension of the building relies on the urgent expression of a utopian dream. Icons of the new age such as the ship and the concrete frame blend into forms born of Purist painting. The rituals of upper middle-class existence are translated into an allegory on the ideal modern life which even touches upon the Corbusian typologies for the city: separate levels for people and cars, terraces open to the sky, a ramp celebrating movement. The fantasy is translated into conventions that avoid arbitrariness and that reveal Le Corbusier’s ambition to make an equivalent to the logic, order an sense of truth he had intuited in the great styles of the past. Rationalism was a point of departure, but not the aim. He wished to re-inject the ideal content that relativism and materialism had destroyed.’                                                             William Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, 1986

        designed by Swiss architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret

The villa is considered  as a representitive of the bases of modern architecture. It is also a demonstration of Le Corbusiers “Five Points” of a new architecture

1. Support of ground-level pilotis, elevating the building from the earth and allowed an extended continuity of the garden beneath.
2. Functional roof, serving as a garden and terrace, reclaiming for nature the land occupied by the building.
3. Free floor plan, relieved of load bearing walls, allowing walls to be placed freely and only where aesthetically needed.
4. Long horizontal windows, providing illumination and ventilation.
5. Freely-designed facades, serving as only as a skin of the wall and windows and unconstrained by load-bearing considerations.