A day in Paris with Le Corbusier

Villa Savoye stands in Poissy, half an hour outside Paris. Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret built it between 1928 and 1931; it was only habitable in 1931. It is the building in which his five points all stand together, in their purest form: the volume rests on pilotis, the roof is a garden, the plan is free because no wall carries anything, the windows run as a band across the façade, and that façade carries nothing.

Down below is a detail you only notice once somebody points it out. The ground floor runs in a curve — and that curve is a car’s turning circle. Le Corbusier drew it to the turning radius of a 1929 car, so that you could drive underneath the building and swing straight into the garage. The plan of that floor is literally the path a car describes.

Inside, a ramp runs through the middle of the house, not a staircase, from the entrance all the way to the roof. Le Corbusier called it the promenade architecturale: you walk the house upward instead of climbing it, and because you turn slowly the view changes with every metre.

Right beside it stands a spiral staircase, and that is not redundancy but a second route. The ramp was for the residents, the stair for the staff — two entrances, two ways up, in the same house. In the hall between them stands a washbasin on a column.

The bathroom is tiled from floor to ceiling, and along the edge of the bath lies a built chaise in small blue tiles. Not a piece of furniture: it is masonry, built where it stands, in a single undulating movement — the same wave as the lounge chair that came out of his studio in those same years.

It lies so that you slide straight from it into the sunken bath. And the room next door is Madame Savoye’s boudoir, with a shelf under the window that serves as a writing desk and a door opening directly onto the hanging garden.

The kitchen is long and bright, with worktops in white tile under the windows, a double sink and a work table in the middle. In the wall unit there is a pass-through hatch that opens on the other side, so that plates go straight through to the dining room without anyone leaving the kitchen.

That hatch is more than a convenience. Twenty years later the same idea turns up in the kitchens of the Unité in Marseille, only pushed further into an open bar arrangement that keeps whoever is cooking in contact with the table. Here you see the first version of it.

The roof terrace sits on two levels here. On the living floor there is an enclosed outdoor space, a hanging garden, which you look out onto from the living room through a glass wall and onto which the boudoir opens. The ramp continues along its left — from here outside, in the open air.

Right at the top it ends at the solarium: a terrace screened by curved walls, built around the idea that sun and open air are healthy. In one of those walls there is an opening without glass — the shape of a window, but onto the sky and the trees. In front of it a concrete bench.

That is the roof terrace as the fifth point, but meant literally: the roof is not a cover but a room without a ceiling, and that window is there to frame the landscape.

The house only just made it. When the town of Poissy acquired it in 1958, demolition threatened. Architects protested, Le Corbusier himself intervened, and in 1965 it was listed — the first building to be restored while its architect was still alive. Since July 2016 it has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list, together with sixteen other works of his.

Back in the city, in the sixteenth arrondissement, stands Villa La Roche — built between 1923 and 1925, also by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Five years before Savoye, and two years before those five points were on paper.

The client was Raoul La Roche, a banker from Basel who moved to Paris in 1911. There he became friends with Le Corbusier and with the painter Amédée Ozenfant — together the founders of Purism.

What that friendship produced is remarkable: the same two men who designed his house also bought his paintings. Between 1921 and 1928, as his advisers and his agents, they built a collection of some hundred and sixty works — Braque, Gris, Léger, Picasso. Much of it came from two auctions of sequestered art dealerships: that of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in 1921 and that of Wilhelm Uhde in 1923, seized by the French state during the First World War.

So La Roche did not ask for a house with a wall for art. He asked for a house in two parts: a gallery for the collection, and his own home beside it. His collection later went to museums in Switzerland and France; the house today holds the Fondation Le Corbusier.

That gallery is the heart of the house: a curved volume with, once again, a ramp running through it, along the walls where the collection hung. So the house was not built to live in with something hung up afterwards — it was built around looking.

And then the colour, which you rarely see in photographs of Le Corbusier. It is not decorative here, and not accidental either: he worked from a palette of his own.

In 1931 he wrote the essay La polychromie architecturale about it, and that same year he issued a series of colour keyboards with the Swiss wallpaper manufacturer Salubra: 43 shades across twelve cards on which a slider let you isolate combinations. In 1959 another twenty brighter ones followed. Sixty-three colours in all — his complete palette, and he kept drawing on it his whole life.

These were not matters of taste but working instruments. Blue and green make a wall recede and create distance; red and warm tones fix it in place and confirm exactly where it stands. In the workers’ quarter at Pessac he therefore painted narrow streets in alternating colours, so that they look wider. Colour, in his words, is “as powerful a means of architecture as the plan and the section”.

That explains what you see here. The dining room is salmon pink: a warm tone that pulls the wall towards you and marks the room out. Elsewhere a blue beam runs through the volume, which pushes away instead. White is the exception, not the rule.

Although that system only reached paper after this house. La Roche is from 1925, the keyboards from 1931 — so this is one of the places where he was still working it out. The same pattern as this morning, only with colour instead of five points.

The day ran backwards. In the morning we stood in the house where everything holds and where the rules are stated in full. In the afternoon in the house from five years earlier, where those same rules were still taking shape.

That is not clumsy planning but a good order. You see the answer first and the question second, and only then do you notice how much was left out of that first house to get it that clear.

We build websites, not houses. But what we take away is not the style — it is the thought underneath: that a form ought to come from somewhere. A plan that follows a car’s turning circle. A colour that comes from a fixed set of sixty-three. That is not decoration, it is a decision whose origin you can point at.