Villa Savoye et loge du jardinier, 1928

Built on a large plot of unfarmed land (over 17 acres), free of all constraints, the Villa Savoye is in the form of a simple parallelepiped with four equivalent sides, placed on pilotis and covered by a roof terrace on which the more flowing forms of a solarium stand out . The forms are pure, immaculate, universal.
The decision to open up an entire bay of pilotis and set back the ground floor, painted in dark green with its mass lost in shadow, accentuates the impression of elevation. The curve of the ground floor is based on the minimum turning radius of a motor car. Motor vehicle traffic becomes an integral part of architectural composition. Inside, distribution and spatial design are defined according to the movements of users along the ramp, giving access to the entire villa from the ground floor to the solarium.

The lightweight effect comes from the purity and perfection of the ideal shape of the prism as represented by the facades, from the absence of a ground floor and the elevation on stilts, as well as the importance given to the glass surfaces. The architecture is further dematerialized by the use of purist polychromy, erasing the texture of the materials and transforming the walls and partitions into sheer coloured surfaces, as in an abstract composition.

This is the archetype of minimum housing as presented by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret at the second CIAM congress in Frankfurt in 1929. It displays the same formal principles as the master villa, illustrating the quest for an architecture that is at once universal and without social differentiation.
The compact plan, designed for 3 to 4 people, offers only 30 m² of living space together with 9.5 m² for the boiler room and storage room. Four small rooms accessible through sliding doors are placed on either side of a shared room of 12.7 m². Nothing to compare with the neighbouring mansion’s 400 m² on the ground, yet the two realisations have in common their unity of architectural thought.