Villa Savoye
A white box on columns in a meadow outside Paris, designed as a weekend house. The villa realises Le Corbusier’s Five Points: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, ribbon windows and free façade. A ramp leads through the house from the car’s approach up to the roof terrace.
Pierre and Eugénie Savoye commissioned a country house for weekends in Poissy, outside Paris, and Le Corbusier designed it together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. The house was designed in 1928 and completed around 1931. A few years earlier Le Corbusier had formulated his Five Points of a new architecture, and here he had the chance to realise them all on an open site with no neighbours. The structure is of reinforced concrete with columns supporting the floor slabs, so the walls can be placed freely. The house was rendered white. The family came by car from Paris, and the car was given a central role in the design. The house cost more than planned and was not free of technical problems; among other things, the roof leaked.
The ground floor is set back and curved, and the curve follows the radius a car needed to drive up to the entrance and on into the garage. This level also housed rooms for staff and the chauffeur. The main floor hovers above on slender columns and has a long ribbon window running round all four sides. Living room, kitchen and bedrooms are grouped around an open terrace, so that the house almost has a garden inside. A ramp leads from the entrance hall up to the main floor and on to the roof terrace, where curved screen walls give shelter from the wind. There is also a spiral staircase. In the bathroom there is a tiled chaise longue beside the bath. The house is meant to be experienced in motion, as an architectural promenade.
The Savoye family did not live in the house for long. During the Second World War it was used first by German and then by Allied troops and fell into disrepair. In the late 1950s it was threatened with demolition when the local council wanted to build a school on the site, but a campaign by architects around the world saved it. The house was listed as a historic monument in 1965, the year Le Corbusier died, and was then restored in several stages. Since 2016 it has been part of the World Heritage listing of Le Corbusier’s works. Villa Savoye became one of the most influential houses of the 20th century, and the Five Points spread through journals and exhibitions. In Sweden its influence can be seen in functionalist villas of the 1930s, with flat roofs, white render and ribbon windows.