The Most Famous Villas of Modernism: from Robie House to Farnsworth

The most famous villas of Modernism are Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye outside Paris, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater above a waterfall in Pennsylvania, Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat in Brno and Farnsworth House outside Chicago, Rietveld's Schröder House in Utrecht, Eileen Gray's E-1027 on the Mediterranean, Alvar and Aino Aalto's Villa Mairea in Finland and Philip Johnson's Glass House. The villa was the laboratory of Modernism: a small commission for a wealthy and curious client, in which the architect could try out ideas that later spread to the whole of society.

Facts

Before Modernism: the Prairie House and the Artist's Home

The open plan, in which rooms flow into one another instead of lying behind closed doors, is Modernism's most important idea for the home, and it came first from America. Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House in Chicago, 1909–1910, is long and low, with eaves projecting several metres and a living room and dining room in a single space, separated only by the fireplace. When Wright's works were published in Berlin in 1910 and 1911 they influenced a whole generation of European architects.

In Europe the villa was still part of the world of the arts and crafts. Hvitträsk outside Helsinki, 1901–1903, was built as a shared home for three architects, in natural stone and timber, with furniture and textiles they designed themselves. In Sweden Gunnar Asplund designed Villa Snellman in Djursholm, 1917–1918, a classicist manor house in which the windows do not line up vertically. Both show what the modernists would break with, and at the same time the care for the whole that they took with them.

The 1920s: Utrecht, the Mediterranean and Brno

The Schröder House in Utrecht from 1924 was designed by Gerrit Rietveld together with Truus Schröder-Schräder, who wanted a home without conventional rooms. Walls and planes are pushed against one another like a Mondrian painting in three dimensions, and the upper floor has sliding partitions that can open it into a single room. Rietveld was a cabinetmaker, and his Red and Blue Chair belongs to the same world of thought; the interior is in the design section under the Schröder House.

Eileen Gray, an Irish designer in Paris rather than a trained architect, built E-1027 on the Mediterranean in 1926–1929 with Jean Badovici. The name is a code for their initials. The house has pilotis, ribbon windows and terraces, but Gray thought in terms of how the body moves and rests, with furniture, cupboards and shutters that can be folded out and turned. In Brno Mies van der Rohe built Villa Tugendhat with Lilly Reich, 1928–1930, at the same time as the Barcelona Pavilion. The living room is a single space of about 280 square metres, divided by a wall of onyx and a semicircular wall of Macassar ebony, and the window panes can be lowered into the floor.

Villa Savoye and Fallingwater

Villa Savoye in Poissy, 1928–1931, is Le Corbusier's five points in a single house: pilotis, roof garden, free plan, ribbon windows and free façade. The main floor floats on slender columns, the ground floor is rounded to the turning circle of a car, and a ramp leads from the entrance up to the roof terrace, so that the house is experienced in motion. It was threatened with demolition in the 1950s but was saved after a campaign by architects around the world.

Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, 1936–1939, is Wright's answer. The Kaufmann family expected a view of the waterfall, but Wright placed the house on top of it, with reinforced-concrete terraces cantilevering out over the stream from a core of local stone. The rock pushes up through the living-room floor. The house shares Villa Savoye's open plan but not its white abstraction: where Le Corbusier lifted the house from nature, Wright let it grow out of it. The concrete soon began to sag and was reinforced in 2002.

Nordic Softness and American Glass

Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, 1938–1939, was designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto for the art collectors Maire and Harry Gullichsen, who gave them a free hand. The white volumes of Functionalism meet timber, natural stone and brick, and in the living room stand columns wrapped in rattan like trunks in a forest. The plan is L-shaped around a courtyard with a sauna and pool, a modern Finnish farmyard. More about Aalto in the guide Alvar Aalto.

After the war the glass house was perfected. Farnsworth House, 1950–1951, is two white slabs on eight steel columns by the Fox River, with walls entirely of glass and only a core with bathroom and kitchen. The client, Dr Edith Farnsworth, and Mies ended up in a legal dispute, and she called the house impossible to live in. Philip Johnson had seen the drawings and built his own Glass House in New Canaan in 1949, with a brick cylinder for the bathroom and fireplace as its only fixed part. He lived there for almost sixty years.

The End and What the Villas Taught Us

The Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia, 1962–1964, which Robert Venturi designed for his mother, is a counter-image: a large gabled roof, a gable split down the middle, an arch that is only a moulding and a staircase that leads nowhere. The house became the first icon of Postmodernism and puts a full stop to the Modernist villa. More about the style in the guide to Postmodern architecture.

Compare the villas and see what recurs: the open plan, the glass, the terrace and the house as part of the landscape. See also what differs: Le Corbusier's white box, Wright's stone and terraces, Mies's glass, Aalto's timber and Gray's care for everyday life. Several are museums today, and Villa Savoye, Villa Tugendhat, the Schröder House, Fallingwater and Robie House are World Heritage Sites. All twelve are on the map, and the styles in the guides to Functionalism, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.

How to recognise the Modernist villa

Exercise

Which villa has a living room with window panes that can be lowered into the floor and a wall of onyx?