A Long, Long Time Ago
This is an oldie but a goodie. Reminiscing about trips taken and works of architecture visited, I mentally wandered back to France some time ago. I took a pilgrimage from Paris to Poissy, west of the city, to pay my respects to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. The day was quiet and grey and beautiful. I believe it was my first visit to a well known piece of modern architecture of this significance, and probably the first that I fully realized that early 20th century materials - revolutionary for their time - are certainly more heavily subject to decades passing than stone and steel, even at preserved famous works of architecture. I was a bit shocked to see how the reinforced concrete - perhaps the most recognizable part of the house - has aged, how the whites have slightly greyed, how the steel of the windows have shown their 80 years, and how worn the slick plastics and thin aluminum panels look now. Tiles become rusty, grout is irregular. Restrooms and kitchens have grown so much over the last century, and I marvel at the small scale every time I visit preserved early and mid-century residences. I am also continually surprised at the thinness of the windows - single paned glass and thin steel or aluminum frames create such a different profile from our standard double paned glass (1”) and 2 inch thick frames.
That being said, the house was beautifully filled with light. The continuous, wrapping ribbon windows are well known and provide views directly into the treetops, but more surprising were the skylights that make interior volumes luminous. The use of color in the house was also a delightful surprise. The most popular images of the Villa Savoye showcase the stark whiteness of the interior and exterior painted concrete walls. Denying color in the house is a disservice to its design, as pops of saturated color activate the living spaces - deep blues, bright greens (perhaps as a means of obscuring the house’s base and blending it in with the surrounding trees?), corals (today, this color is more commonly known as millennial pink), tiled aquas, and ocher.
As an architecture student, I primarily studied the Villa Savoye’s spatial organization, circulatory promenade, materiality, and form. There was great focus on how the house explored and firmly embodied Corbusier’s five points of architecture. Almost a decade and a half later, I find myself much more interested in how the house was inhabited by the Savoye family (Mies van der Rohe’s famous Farnsworth House, designed and built over a decade later and a part of the Villa’s modernist lineage, was excoriated by it’s owner, Dr. Edith Farnsworth). The Villa was a county house and the design lay fully with Corbusier as it was not heavily discussed or influenced by the family’s needs or desires; I am curious about what they thought of it’s modern design (I am sure they appreciated the attention to the car!). The Villa’s post-residential life was quite rough - it was occupied twice during World War II, by the Germans as hay storage (!) followed by the Americans, and then used as a public youth center by the village of Poissy. It faced demolition mid-century, was saved by the intervention of Corbusier himself, and was eventually restored through the 1980s and 1990s.
