Moving Through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye

8/12/2019 Moving Through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye

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attracted to ossuariums, Rococo and Neo-Rococo spaces, and the Art Nouveau

interior spaces of Antoni Gaudí, Victor Horta and Henry Van de Velde. What

I like about these kinds of whimsical spaces is their concern with effluvium-

feminine forms, and the swirling, tendril-derived patterns that are applied

throughout the space in frivolous spirit. For example, High Art Nouveau's

foremost feature is an emphasis upon ornamental value distributed throughout

an entire space. As a result the entire space might be experienced as swaying,

bending, floating, arching, smoking, curling, throbbing, dripping, melting,

aching, writhing.

A case in point was Horta's idea to construct lyrically enchanting space out of

whimsical arabesques (noodles, whiplashes and eels) that is particularlyevident in his 1900 Maison Personnelle (personal home) that I visited at 23-

25, rue Américaine, in Brussels. It is one of the most exquisite Art Nouveau

buildings in the world and open to the public. Here an immersive fin-de-siècle

milieu is achieved through a warped suppleness of space created through thin,

windblown, and whip-lashed lines that disposed me to the feelings of sprite

underwater hair and, of course, writhing seaweed.

This kind of lyrical sweep is an experience we tend not to attribute to

Modernism, but we can, if we swap the ornamental for the non-ornamentally

homogeneousness. In that case, there is the same over-all consistency of

shaped gesamtkunstwerk style shared with Horta-like excessiveness that I am

so keen on.

Recently, I experienced just such a gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic pleasure

(white, Euclidean, minimal) with a visit to Poissy-sur-Seine (a suburb near

Paris) to see Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s aka Le Corbusier’s masterpiece

Villa Savoye (1 9 3 0). It is one of the most famous houses of the modern

movement in architecture, created with associate Pierre Jeanneret, a Swiss



architect, designer and cousin of Le Corbusier. To prepare for building it, they

published a manifesto entitled “Five Points to a New Architecture” (1926) that

served as the architectural guidelines for the aesthetic of the villa and so

became a representation of their aesthetic ideology: to create a house which

would be a machine a habiter (a machine for living (in)).

This building (a white b o x o n stilts) emerged from Art Deco principles that

originated in France in 1908 and reached its zenith in 1925. In the mid-1920s,

Art Deco dominated the stylistic gesamtkunstwerk ideals of architecture and

domestic interior design. However a change was soon heralded by Le

Corbusier's Pavillon de I'Esprit Nouveau which he presented at the Paris 1925

Exposition Internationales des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes -specifically the lean artist's studio interior he exhibited in conjunction with the

artist/theoretician Amédée Ozenfant and through his theoretical writings “Vers

une Architecture” (1923) which maintained gesamtkunstwerk ideals by

defining architecture as total concept .

The heightening of perceptual sensitivity experienced through total concept atVilla Savoye encourages a sense of unified delectation, as the churned blocky

forms define the space and are picked up in the shapes of the stairs and

furniture. Consequently, it collides high art complexity with simplicity.

The tonal and syntactic surfaces are of course white and spare with their

logical trajectories seemingly resolved. And yet there are visual arguments-

within-arguments to be discerned behind the axiomatic, as Villa Savoye

embodies and deepens the multiple ramifications of a phrase easily (and aptly)

applied to describe it: deceptively easy. In referring to something as

deceptively easy, it is implied that to be merely easy would be deficient, and

that difficulty has inherent value.



Villa Savoye is both complex and intimate as it plays on an undercurrent of

smooth transformations, both tonal and imagistic, that works itself out over

the course of viewing the entire building. I did not stand still here and look,

but pass in and out of the white unified shapes. Consequently, it was I that was

moved.











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Moving Through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye