| Artist: | Le Corbusier |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Villa Savoye, exterior | |
| Date of Work: | 1929-1930 | |
| Nationality: | French | |
| Context: | Post WWI | |
| Movement: | International Style | |
| Medium: | architecture | |
| Subject: a house "designed as a machine or tool for living." Corbusier's answer to the problems of the industrial age and the need for low-cost housing and urban planning. Conceived of the house as a prototype rather than a site-specific, one-of-a-kind, unique model. Built one in Poissy, France, and proposed one be built outside Buenos Aires, as well. "The house must not have a facade. Situated at the top of a dome-like hill, it must open onto all four directions. The living area with its hanging garden will be raised above the columns so as to give views right to the horizon." Could be placed, thus, on any site. Architecture as the ultimate art form because it combines beauty of design with utility, a Bauhaus ideal here carried over to what became known as the International Style of modern architecture. Style: picking up from the Bauhaus's dislike of "lying facades and trickeries," Corbusier's designs echoed Gropius's desire "to create a clear, organic architecture, whose inner logic will be radiant and naked . . . an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios, and fast motor cars, an architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its form." These Bauhaus ideals led Corbusier to embrace the slogans of Louis Sullivan, "form follows function," and Mies van der Rohe, "less is more." The Villa Savoye is a wonderful example of the characteristic traits of the International Style: in the avoidance of applied decoration; in the new concept of spatial organization with its flexible, free flow of interior space rather than a stringing together of static, symmetrical boxes; in its elimination of strong contrasts of color; in the way its forms are clearly stated through clean, even stark surfaces; and in its style formulated primarily at the Bauhaus during the 1920s, with its emphasis on the stainless steel skeletal structure and the glass "skin" or curtain (here ribbon) walls, the flat, roof garden, and the elimination of the heavy, load-bearing walls replaced by space definers or free-standing, screen walls not fixed in place or time (reminscent of Mondrian's grid with its asymmetrical flat planes in space). To sum up, the International Style translates Bauhaus ideals into a lightness, whiteness, and openness that dematerializes the mass, weight, and fixidity of traditional architecture. Context: Corbusier had been part of a movement known as Purism, which stressed a Platonic, absolute reality of pure forms over any illusion of nature. We see that ideal of purism reflected in the lightness, whiteness, and openness of the Villa Savoye, which is an example of applied abstraction. The house has a cubistic quality that also recalls Mondrian's "schoon" grids in the way its design follows a geometric, rational order rather than one derived from nature (contrast Gaudi's more organic, Art Nouveau-inspired achitecture from Barcelona, for example). But it owes the greatest debt to the Bauhaus, which is the foundation for the International Style of modern architecture that spread worldwide. Corbu loved a machine aesthetic; he extolled the beauty of the ocean liner, the airplane, the automobile, the turbine engine, bridge construction and dock machinery--all products of the engineer, whose designs had to be functional and unembellished with unnecessary decoration. He wrote an important treatise on architecture in 1923 in which he claimed that an American grain elevator, whose massive simplicity was a direct consequence of its function ("form follows function"), was architecture in the finest sense. It is this utopian machine aesthetic that convinced Corbu to conceive of the house as "a machine for living" appropriate for the new machine age. | ||
