Modernism's Heart Thumps

I studied Le Corbusier and his "purist" white houses floating on stilts. From the back of a darkened room, the slides of his designs seemed cold, rational, sterile. Even though for the Villa Savoye, he claimed to have designed with light, air, and nature in mind, it was the opposite of that to me: a white box that mitigated nature's effects through horizontal bands of windows. Really, a "machine for living", just as this cold, cold man wanted it. Had he no heart that swelled with the sunlight and singing birds and rainbows?

Today I went to the Villa Savoye in Poissy and realized that architectural photographs are lies. They don't give a sense of what it feels like to move and breathe in spaces. Now I feel that buildings are like Minimalist Art according to M. Fried: it must be experienced through and in relation to the human body. Being around and inside Villa Savoye was not at all cold or sterile, although many details certainly were rational. For example, the skylights' glass tops were tilted so as to better persuade precipitation to slide off. Similarly, the laundry room's wall-sized sink contained a ledge that sloped slightly to let the waste water run off. Many of the windows also had a built-in shelf underneath its ledges, as though to accommodate the very human urge to put things on window ledges. The skylights not only lit up the spaces underneath them dramatically like a spot light, but also had small side windows for ventilation that one could open by a pulley system from below. Many of the built-in storage functioned to also divide spaces, such as the closet that separated a bedroom from its mini-office. The kitchen was divided also by its storage, but this time, the storage communicated: one could access the shelves from both sides as well as the counter space.

Even better, light and air were really everywhere except for one intimate room in which I actually felt crowded. I could see into other spaces from almost every room, a density that made my body feel open yet sheltered. And the nature? The terraces were actually supposed to have been "hanging gardens", but they were too sparsely populated to be properly called gardens. Le Corbusier had planned for grass to grow in between the concrete tiles he used on the terraces. Functionally, they kept the concrete humid and expanded. And I think he liked the nature interwoven with the concrete. And the views from the horizontal bands are beautiful, framing the ex-orchard just so. I only wish that today it was sunny, as I could see from photos that shadows thrown onto the stark white would have made a non-negligible visual impact.

There is a guardian's house on the edge of the property, next to the gate. I asked if one could visit it, as it is built in the same design: house on stilts with a band of windows, but just smaller. It turns out that one of the museum workers LIVES there and no, we could not visit it. I peeked inside the gates and noticed that he has a huge garden with a scarecrow.

I settled for picking up twigs on the still wooded property while waiting for the bus to come. There were mushrooms also but my travel partner M told me not to pick them.