The Villa Savoye – Le Corbusier
“Our engineers are healthy and virile, active and useful, balanced and happy in their work, while our architects are disillusioned and unemployed, boastful or peevish. This is because there will soon be nothing more for them to do. We no longer have the money to erect historical souvenirs. At the same time, everyone needs to wash! Our engineers provide for these things and so they will be our builders.”
Corbusier believed that the houses of the future should be clean, ascetic and free of decoration. He believed that true, great architecture should be motivated by the quest for efficiency. The function of a house in Corbusier view was to provide “1. A shelter against heat, cold, rain, thieves and the inquisitive. 2. A receptacle for light and sun. 3. A certain number of cells appropriated to cooking, work and personal life.”
Inside the villa, there are tiles of the floor, naked bulbs, a basin in the middle of the hall and exposed pipe work. There is no ornamental decoration and the visual language takes inspiration from industry.
Modernism believed that the point of a house was to be functional, not to be beautiful. However, this creates a problem because there will always be an aesthetic choice made and modernism has chosen to create buildings that look functional no matter how functional they are in reality.
