Today, we've made an architectural pilgrimage to a town just north of Paris Poissy, because there Le Corbusier, one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, designed one of his most iconic buildings.
This is Villa Savoy.
And as its name suggests, it is a villa.
That is, it's a country house.
So a family that lived in Paris would hop in their car.
Their chauffeur would drive them into the country.
This was a place that they were meant to entertain and to unwind.
Originally, it would have looked onto the Seine River.
The house is at such odds with nature.
It is an ideal geometry.
I was expecting the landscape around the house to be more beautiful.
But nature is more beautiful when viewed from inside the house.
One of the most famous maxims of Le Corbusier is that the house is a machine.
He meant that the house was meant to support the people who lived there.
And this house does that beautifully.
That story reminds me of another story where Le Corbusier was asked what do you think is the most perfect, most beautiful chair?
And he said, the cockpit of an airplane.
And that idea that something is made so perfectly for a very specific purpose and its design and purpose are one, in a way, and that there's nothing superfluous, only what's necessary.
Even though this house was finished in 1929, it incorporates this very modern invention of the car.
In fact, the car is supposed to drive up to the house, drive through the columns at the base, which the architect calls piloti, And the car is then meant to drive around the central core of the house until it enters into the garage.
And the base of the house is designed to accommodate the turning radius of an automobile of this era.
And so even the base of the house perfectly accommodates the automobile.
Now, while this house was designed specifically with the needs of the family in mind, it's also considered one of the great expressions of the theoretical ideas that Le Corbusier had been developing.
This begins with his idea of the Dom in O House.
That is a structure that is elementally designed of just a very few elements.
Reinforced concrete slabs that function as the base of where one lives and then creates not only a ceiling for those rooms but then also a platform for recreational space on the roof.
Reinforced concrete slabs are held in place by a series of peloti, that is uprights, which are also made of reinforced concrete.
What this allows is for a kind of play of interior and exterior, of a kind of open plan.
And in fact it led to the Corbusier's development of what he called his five points of architecture.
The first of those points is the piloti, these columns.
A column is a familiar form in the history of architecture, but these are incorporating a modern material of iron and reinforced concrete.
The pelotti almost seem like classical columns.
They are some starkly set against the dark green painted wall of the garage.
On two sides, the pelotti are flush with the facade above.
But on the other two sides, they're actually set in.
And so they feel dynamic.
They feel purposeful.
On the side where the peloti are inset.
The rectilinear nature of the second floor steps out and feels geometrically more assertive.
Whereas on the other two sides, where they're flush, the peloti seem to be literally part of that geometry.
The second of the five points is the idea of a free plan, the idea that the walls are not supporting the roof, that the pilot team are what supports the building, and then rooms, walls can be arranged variously within that space.
And that's so different from traditional architecture where the support system are the walls themselves.
And since the walls are doing the foundational work of holding the building up, they have to be in very specific places.
Here Le Corbusier has created a technology that allows for this freedom of these walls, so that walls can become sculptural.
They can become aesthetic decisions.
And they can let in light.
When we get to the third point, we have the idea of the free design of the facade.
And because the walls are not supporting the building, Le Corbusier was free to put windows wherever he chose.
And the windows do something really important in this building.
They frame nature beyond.
But they also are used sculpturally, and they're used to help define the geometry of the building.
And that brings us to the fourth point, which is the ribbon window.
And Luc Boussier loved long horizontal windows.
Here, the windows are sometimes fully glazed, and sometimes they're actually just apertures.
That is, they're open, but they create nonetheless a continuous geometric horizontal that emphasizes the geometry of the structure and also really makes the point that this building is not being held up by its exterior walls, that something much more innovative is at work.
Most windows are vertically oriented, but if you turn the window, your view matches the idea of a horizon.
And there's something really lovely about looking out at a horizon.
So there's almost something panoramic, something cinemagraphic about the view that is afforded by these extraordinary ribbon windows.
And that brings us to the fifth point, which is the idea that the top slab is something that we can actually occupy where the sky is available to us.
We also notice from the exterior that on the roof we have rounded forms, just as we do on the ground level, and connecting the rounded forms is a semi-spiral staircase which does turn and almost functions as a kind of spine vertically through the building.
The windscreen at the top has a window that allows one to look out past it and seems to sort of almost be a cylinder of the sort that you might expect to see on a steamship, the great stacks of the steamships of the 1920s that Le Corbusier saw as a kind of modern miracle, as one of the great expressions of modern design.
And in his famous book Toward Architecture, Le Corbusier offers photographs side by side that place, for instance, the Parthenon against an automobile, and other kinds of references to sources that were important to him, including steamships.
But Le Corbusier thought of that machinery as a kind of new classicism, and he makes reference to antiquity in a number of different ways.
We've already mentioned the way that the piloti refer to the columns of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
But in addition, when you walk into the building, you're confronted first with a sink, with a little light just above it, which feels industrial and modern, almost the way that one would find holy water when one walks into a church, or one might wash themselves before entering a mosque.
I found that I was almost drawn in the entrance, even welcomed into the house by the rounded windows.
And there was something really pleasing, I think, when I encountered those rounded spaces, as opposed to the strict rectilinear geometry that governs the exterior of the building.
What's so interesting is that when you enter into that lower section of the house, you're confronted with this beautiful ribbon of a spiral that is the staircase that goes up.
And next to that is a POT that is singularly rectilinear in the house.
It's, I think, the only one that's not round.
And it so beautifully offsets all of the circular motifs that exist in this space.
But we're really meant to ascend the ramp slowly, in a kind of procession, in a way that separates the outside world of work and industry from the sanctity of the home.
The ramp is fairly steep and relatively narrow.
And when we get to the end of the first length, we have to turn 180 degrees for the second half of the ramp, which doubles back on itself.
And there, the building begins to open up.
There's a window that floods the space with light, shaped almost like an arrow that seems to point us up to the Piano Nobile.
What we're seeing is actually the atrium, the open space in the center of this main floor of the building.
When you arrive at the Piano Nobile, that is the primary floor for living.
Everything that you're seeing in front of you and to the left is really a public space.
The main room of the house, with this beautiful freestanding fireplace and with ribbon windows that bring nature inside.
Then immediately to the left of that is the large open atrium, and there the glazed windows give way to ribbon apertures with no glass.
But if you look to the right you see the top of the spiral staircase, and if you were to go forward you would enter into the kitchen which wraps around to the right, and behind the kitchen are all the bedrooms and bathrooms.
The house is filled with metallic, modernist forms.
The lighting in the main room I find especially inviting.
The sliding doors of the cabinets below the windows seem as if they're made of stainless steel.
The little metal light switches give the sense that the house is a machine.
There's almost what seem to be pipe fittings that are used for the door handles.
And so all of the hardware of the house feels very mechanistic.
There is a kind of intense abstraction that focuses your vision even when you go outside, even when you step into the atrium.
I am drawn to the atrium.
As wonderful as the large room is, I want to go outside.
And it's lovely here.
The skies open above us.
There are lovely horizontal views to our right.
But the space is also defined.
It is a geometric space.
And one art historian has used the word fantastical to describe the geometries that Le Corbusier gives us, because they're exciting.
Well, even looking at the far end of the atrium, it's almost like looking at a painting by Mondrian.
We have a small square.
We have a large rectangle.
We have this strict vertical and horizontal.
On the other hand, we have diagonals.
And one of the most powerful diagonals in this space is an additional ramp that leads us up to the roof itself.
Let's go up there.
We've walked up the two ramps to the very top of the building.
And although it's a rainy day, I can imagine being up here in the summer in the sun, behind the protected windscreen, with all the privacy that it affords.
The windscreen necessarily creates a wall, but Le Corbusier has given us a large window to look out.
We have this wonderful view out from the very height of the building.
The building moves you through it, and as you progress, you're treated to view after view.
Each one feels considered.
Every view out every window feels purposefully framed.
You really, in a sense, feel as if you're being brought along this journey in this house.
