Villa Savoye

Villa Savoye is the building in which Le Corbusier most completely realised his Five Points of Architecture: pilotis lifting the volume from the ground, a free plan unshackled from load-bearing walls, a free facade, horizontal windows running the full width of each elevation, and a roof garden reclaiming the footprint lost to construction. Completed in 1931 for the Savoye family as a weekend house outside Paris, it is less a home than a diagram of ideas made habitable. The experience is spatial rather than picturesque. You arrive beneath the building, car and body passing under its lifted mass, before ascending via ramp — never stair — through the levels. The ramp is the promenade architecturale in concentrated form: movement as the organising principle, each turn revealing a new relationship between inside and outside, floor and sky. On the roof, curved walls shelter a solarium open to the sky. The horizontal windows fill every room with an even, panoramic light, dissolving the boundary between architecture and landscape. Abandoned after WWII and nearly demolished in the 1960s, the villa was saved by Le Corbusier himself lobbying the French government. It became a listed monument in 1965 and is now managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux. The ground-floor rooms include an informative exhibition on the building's history and Le Corbusier's broader project. Come early — the numbers are limited and the experience rewards slow attention.