The Inside Story

In art and architecture, the myth becomes an antidote to oblivion, giving misplaced importance to private creation where – besides the building or the canvas – the artist or architect too becomes a figure worthy of worship

- Gautam Bhatia

The most celebrated building of the 20th century, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye stands remote and isolated in the French countryside at Poissy outside Paris. Its detachment rang especially true at the crucial moment in the early phase of Modernism when it was built. The building’s legendary status grew more so in later years, when in fact it came to define the age itself. Corbusier’s own statement that ‘the house is a machine for living’ suggestive of the assembly line, industry and efficiency only cemented its place in the movement. Its philosophical radicalism aside, the house displayed new components for the future of domestic construction – pilotis, a free facade, open plan, a ramp and ribbon windows. The simplistic collective of spare parts was used in such personal artistic combinations, that it told you absolutely nothing of the secret life of the house, nothing of its internal organisation, the variety and sizes of rooms, their source of light. The plan, in fact, broke away from Classical symmetry, away from the surrounding peasant huts and farming countryside of sloped thatched houses, into a precise square concrete box – a brilliant white in the green vale that surrounded it. All that it revealed was a thin strip of window that ran the entire perimeter of the wall, regardless of whether there was a room behind or a terrace garden – the entire assembly raised on a sparse set of thin pillars. At the upper level, an internal courtyard opened up through full-height floor-to-ceiling windows, which were then enclosed by the surrounding wall. The building’s contradictions were clothed in such prosaic simplicity that it left the resident confronted with constant redefinitions of privacy, solitude, openness, intimacy and exhilaration.