Villa Savoye

Interesting facts

The curve of the glazed ground floor was set by the turning circle of a car, which dropped its passengers at the door and drove round to the garage.

A washbasin stands in the entrance hall, a deliberate gesture by Le Corbusier to give the act of cleansing a place of its own on arrival.

To bring down costs, Le Corbusier moved the master bedroom down a floor and shrank the structural grid from 5 metres to 4.75 metres.

The plan is laid out using golden section ratios, starting from a square divided into sixteen equal parts.

Unlike most modernists of his day, Le Corbusier used timber rather than metal frames for the villa's long ribbon windows.

The structure was finished within a year, but the house could not be lived in until 1931.

The Savoye family lived in the house only until 1940, and after the war soon left it for good.

In 1958 the town of Poissy took over the villa, used it as a youth centre and considered demolishing it to make room for a school.

In 1965 it became the first modernist building in France to be listed as a historic monument.

In Canberra, a wing of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a near-exact replica of the villa, but painted black.

Why it is worth it

Villa Savoye looks like a white box hovering above a lawn. Raised on slender columns, wrapped in a single band of horizontal windows and topped by curved screen walls around a roof terrace, it is the clearest built statement of what Le Corbusier meant by modern architecture, and one of the most influential houses of the twentieth century. Inside, a gently sloping ramp rather than a grand staircase carries the visitor from the ground floor up through the living spaces to a sun terrace on the roof, so that walking through the house becomes the main experience of it.

Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret designed the villa as a weekend house for the Savoye family, and it was built between 1928 and 1931, with furnishings by Charlotte Perriand. It brings together all of Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture: pilotis lifting the building off the ground, a roof garden, a free plan unconstrained by load-bearing walls, ribbon windows and a freely composed facade. Its cost nearly doubled the original estimate, and the family soon found that the flat roof leaked badly every autumn. During the Second World War the house was used as a hay store under German occupation and then by American troops, and it was left badly damaged. Threatened with demolition afterwards, it was protected as a French historical monument in 1965, an unusual honour while its architect was still alive, and restored between 1985 and 1997. In 2016 UNESCO inscribed it as part of a World Heritage listing of Le Corbusier's work spread across seven countries.

Poissy, on the Seine west of Paris, is an old royal town, the birthplace of Saint Louis, and later a centre of car manufacturing. The villa stands on a rise above the town, on grounds that once looked out over open countryside.

Getting there

Villa Savoye is in Poissy, about 1.5 km from the town centre and roughly 25 km west of central Paris. Poissy station is served by RER line A and Transilien trains from Paris. The nearest airport is Paris-Orly (ORY), about 33 km away.

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From the encyclopaedia

Villa Savoye is a modernist villa and gatelodge in Poissy, on the outskirts of Paris, France. It was designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret with interior and furnishing by Charlotte Perriand, and built between 1928 and 1931 using reinforced concrete.

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Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia