Villa Savoye - Legacy

Legacy

The Villa Savoye was a very influential building of the 1930s and imitations of it can be found all over the world. The building featured in two hugely influential books of the time: Hitchcock and Johnson's The International Style published in 1932 and F. R. S. Yorke's The Modern House published in 1934, as well as the second volume of Corbusier's own series The Complete Works. In his 1947 essay The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, Colin Rowe compared the Villa Savoye to Palladio's Villa Rotunda.

The freedom given to Corbusier by the Savoyes resulted in a house that was governed more by his five principles than any requirements of the occupants. Despite this, it was the last time this happened in such a complete way and the house marked the end of a phase in his design thinking as well as being the last of a series of buildings dominated by the colour white.

Criticism has been levelled at Corbusier's five points of architecture from a general point of view and these apply specifically to the Villa Savoye in terms of:

1. Support of ground-level pilotis - the piloti tended to be symbolic rather than representative of actual structure.
2. Functional roof - poor detailing in this case led to the roof leaking.

After the Villa Savoye Corbusier's experimentation with Surrealism informed his design for the Beistegui apartments, but his next villa design, for Mademoiselle Mandrot near Toulon had a regionalist agenda and relied on local stone for its finish.

The west wing of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra designed by Ashton Raggatt McDougall, is a near exact replica of the Villa Savoye, except its black colour. This antipodean architectural quotation is according to Howard Raggat "a kind of inversion, a reflection, but also a kind of shadow".