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The pilotis (supporting columns): 'The house on pilotis! The house is firmly
driven into the ground - a dark and often damp site. The reinforced concrete
gives us the pilotis. The house is up in the air, far from the ground: the
garden runs under the house...'
The roof gardens: '...the garden is also over the house, on the roof...
Reinforced concrete is the new way to create a unified roof structure.
Reinforced concrete expands considerably. The expansion makes the work
crack at times of sudden shrinkage. Instead of trying to evacuate the
rainwater quickly, endeavor on the contrary to maintain a constant humidity
Free plan: 'Until now: load-bearing walls; from the ground they are
superimposed, forming the ground floor and the upper stories, up to the
eaves. The layout is a slave to the supporting walls. Reinforced concrete in
the house provides a free plan! The floors are no longer superimposed by
partition walls. They are free.'
The horizontal window: 'The window is one of the essential features of the
house. Progress brings liberation. Reinforced concrete provides a revolution
in the history of the window. Windows can run from one end of the facade to
the other.'
The free facade: 'The columns set back from the facades, inside the house.
The floor continues cantilevered. The facades are no longer anything but
light skins of insulating walls or windows. The facade is free.'
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 reinject the ideal content that relativism and materialism had destroyed.'
Souce 2:
Situated in Poissy, a small commune outside of Paris, is one of the most
significant contributions to modern architecture in the 20th century, Villa
Savoye by Le Corbusier. Completed in 1929, Villa Savoye is a modern take
on a French country house that celebrates and reacts to the new machine
age. The house single handedly transformed Le Corbusiers career as well as
the principles of the International Style; becoming one of the most important
architectural precedents in the history. Villa Savoyes detachment from its
physical context lends its design to be contextually integrated into the
mechanistic/industrial context of the early 20th century, conceptually
defining the house as a mechanized entity.
Le Corbusier is famous for stating, The house is a machine for living. This
statement is not simply translated into the design of a human scaled
assembly line; rather the design begins to take on innovative qualities and
advances found in other fields of industry, in the name of efficiency.