With so much written about Le Corbusier, it’s hard to find a new angle. So this short post is simply to look at three of his buildings in France with some brief commentary on the importance of each in terms of their architectural contribution to how people live today.

The first is Villa Savoye, in Poissy, near Paris, built between 1928 and 1931. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it represents modern architecture and has been hugely influential on international modernism. It is a beautiful, geometric and thoughtful house, built with ideals of how we might live, with new considerations of what such a building’s function should be. This functionalist purpose was outlined in his book, Vers une Architecture (or Toward an Architecture), in which he famously referred to houses as being machines for living in.

Villa Savoye’s significance is that it contains Le Corbusier’s Five Points of his architectural vision and aesthetic These points are:

1) Pilotis (pillars) to elevate the building, allowing circulation space underneath

2) A functional roof to be used as garden space

3) An open floor structure without load bearing walls and allow free use of space, with walls where desired

4) Wide horizontal rather than vertical widows, to maximise light and ventilation

5) Facades to function as shaped walls holding windows rather than being load bearing.

Photographs of Villa Savoye, visited in 2023.

 

Next up is the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, a pivotal point for Le Corbusier when in 1947 he was commissioned to design a residential unit to house those displaced by wartime bombing with a creative, all embracing and provisioning new form of residence. Here he applied his individual living principles from Villa Savoye to community design  into La Cité Radieuse, employing his mathematical theories and and use of light to maximise and modernise the residents living experience. This goes beyond just housing and includes multiple elements of living, including shops, a restaurant, a communal rooftop area for arts and sports as well as a hotel, set in green space to enhance health (towers in the park) and with good transport links. Again it is a World Heritage Site. It was hugely influential in the post war era and new housing solutions were sought at a time when resources were scarce and béton brut – or rough cast concrete – was used. This building was reinforced concrete containing modular form. The most immediate example of its influence in England is the brutalist Park Hill, Sheffield. (More on this coming soon).

Photograph of Unité d’Habitation, visited in 2022

 

Finally, this mini trip take us to eastern France and the Roman Catholic Chapel, Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, in Ronchamp. It replaced the earlier chapel destroyed during world war two and was completed in 1955. It has a completely different feel from Villa Savoye, with its machine for living aesthetic and instead has a more sculptured style from the outside. Inside, the modern stained glass windows and their unusual shapes throw beautiful and unexpected soft light patterns. Some have described this chapel as one of the 20 century’s most important buildings and needless to say it also has World Heritage status. Unfortunately photography is not permitted outside except for personal use and inside not at all (visited in 2015).

 

Further reading:

Stewart, J. (2016) Housing and Hope: the influence of the interwar years. Available at: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/housing-and-hope/id1138338603