Le Corbusier And Ex-Urban Wright
4 Pages 1024 Words
Le Corbusier and Ex-Urban Wright
1. How is Le Corbusier’s “Villa Savoye” and F.L. Wright’s “Falling Water” an exemplary representative of its designer’s ideals and ideals?
Both the Villa Savoye and Falling Water are perfect examples of architects expressing themselves through their work. These two houses exhibit their designer’s ideas and ideals throughout many different aspects of their design.
When Le Corbusier built the Villa Savoye in 1929 he did so with a set of ideas and design principles that had been exhibited in other structures such as Villa Meyer and the villa at Garches. These houses can be described as “abstract cubes of space in which various geometric elements are freely disposed in as in a Purist painting.” (Jencks, Charles: Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture; pp85) All of these houses depended on Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture: “(1) the pilotis, or columns, elevating the mass off the ground, (2) the free plan, achieved through the separation of the load-bearing columns from the walls subdividing the space, (3) the free façade, the corollary of the free plane in the vertical plane, (4) the long horizontal sliding window or fenetre en longeur, and finally (5) the roof garden, restoring supposedly, the area of the ground covered by the house.” (Frampton, Kenneth: Modern Architecture: A Critical History; pp 157) The Villa Savoye reinforces Le Corbusier’s ideas of simple forms and unadorned surfaces giving it the appearance of apparent classical influence. “The plan of the Villa Savoye is nearly square, one of the ideal shapes which the architect so admired, and part of the richness of the building comes from the dynamics of curved forms within a stable perimeter.” (Curtis, William J.R.: Modern Architecture Since 1900; pp278) The house looks like a large, horizontal rectangle set atop pilotis. The curved front wall of the ground floor is made of verticall...