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This essay presents three interpretations of Villa Savoye, planned at the end of the 1920s by one of the founding fathers of modernist architecture, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. The Villa, located on the outskirts of Paris in Poissy, is a unique structure that many see as a masterpiece of modernist architecture, in particular, and of architecture, in general. Since its completion, the Villa has been the subject of many interpretations.
The first interpretation discussed in this essay was proposed by the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion in the early 1940s. Giedion, a contemporary of Le Corbusier who was influenced by the master himself, interpreted the Villa in a linear fashion, similar to the way in which Le Corbusier presented it. Giedion did not provide a critical interpretation of the Villa. The second interpretation was proposed in the late 1940s by Colin Rowe, the British-American architectural theoretician. Using a structuralist approach, Rowe showed that the modernist architecture of the Villa in fact draws much from the humanist tradition of the renaissance. Finally, the essay addresses the interpretation published in the 1980s of the Catalan-American architectural theoretician Beatriz Colomina. In her interpretation, Colomina referred to the Villa as a medium. Arguing that Le Corbusier was influenced by the emergence of mass media like cinema, Colomina showed that the Villa was planned according to cinematic principles.
The different interpretations not only present the Villa’s complexity, but also the changes in architectural historiography as a discipline in the 20th century. Whereas in the first decades of the 20th century the interpretation of architecture was intra-disciplinary and related mostly to the intentions of the architect, toward the end of the 20th century, the interpretations became more critical and utilized multi-disciplinary approaches.
Dr. Eran Neuman is an architect and a researcher of architectural design and planning processes and the interpretation of modern architecture, especially postwar architecture.