The motor car is a machine for traveling. The aeroplane is a machine for flying. The house is a machine for living in. Machine a abity.
In this program about the Villa Savoie, I want to ask two questions. Firstly, why did Corbusier invent this phrase, machine à habiter, to describe houses like this one? And secondly, and I'm sure you'll make up your own mind about this as we go on, what sort of a house is this like to live in?
Why is this house like a machine for living in? Well, I think part of the answer lies in the structure of the house. Rather like an aeroframe, the house is supported by a grid of thin concrete struts, which Le Corbusier called pilotti. The pilotti support the floor and roof slabs, so that the walls are freed from any load-bearing roll and can be made from any material.
Here, a wall of sliding glass separates the salon from the terrace. You can see the structural skeleton in this photograph, taken in the summer of 1929. The roof slab is composed of flat blocks cemented together and reinforced with steel rods. Do you see the transverse beam which helps spread the load linking the pilotti?
At the ends of the roof slab the wall is composed of a framework of concrete beams filled with brick blocks. On the right, the pilotti is set back, and the wall above the window is actually hung from the roof slab. In its finished state, the structural mechanics are unobtrusive.
The slender pilotti on the right takes the strain, allowing an uninterrupted window. It's a logical solution to the problem of lighting interior spaces, and on the exterior, the clarity of the result is powerful. From the sides, you can see the effect of the candelivering at the front and back of the house. Le Corbusier emphasises this overhang by stopping the window exactly above the front and back lines of the pilotti.
This creates a continuous white frame round the long window. The effect of the overhang at the front is increased by cutting back the ground floor to create free space under the building. At the front, the ground floor is glazed.
It's from here that we get the strongest impression of levitation. The house seems to hover above the ground. It's also the most monumental of the facades, with its dramatic roof structures most clearly visible. Inside the entrance hall, the glass wall threads its way through the forest of thin white piloti, creating a transparent membrane which subtly divides interior and exterior space.
Light floods into the centre of the house. Like many architects of the modern movement, Le Corbusier does not use his facades to reveal the nature and function of his interior spaces. The long window runs right round the house, ignoring all internal divisions. Behind this part, for instance, is the kitchen, while now we're seeing into the sitting room.
Suddenly we find we're looking right out through the sitting room to the trees beyond the first floor terrace. This opens the inside of the house right out and suggests glimpses of private but open and airy space in the heart of the building. The sense of unreality is heightened by the slickness of the forms.
From the pilotti, along the outside walls and their windows, there are no mouldings at all. When we reach the roof, the walls have absolutely crisp edges. There's no cornice to throw off the water, since the roof is flat. Skylights are placed exactly where they're needed, and Le Corbusier laid gravel to collect the water. It's drained off by soak-aways into downpipes that pass through the house.
In these sketches, Le Corbusier shows the limitations of the traditional house. Wasted roof space. Small windows weaken the structure. The ground floor dictates the plan of successive floors.
He compares this with his own structural system. Pilotti raised the house off the ground. Air and vehicles circulate underneath.
Floor slabs supported by Pilotti. Wool is made of glass. The roof, a garden.
At the Villa Savoie, the Pilotti take the load, allowing Le Corbusier to flank the entrance with a curving wall of glass. On the first floor, there is more freedom in the spatial treatment. The open terrace and around it the living area. See how Le Corbusier tucks away the essential services for these rooms.
The lavatories, bathrooms, kitchen. This leads us on to another mechanical analogy. Le Corbusier's interest in the way space was apportioned in ocean liners.
The tiny cabin with its built-in cupboards, air conditioning and washing facilities saves space which is used for large dining rooms, ballrooms and endless promenade decks. Structural freedom and the resulting planning freedom meant freedom to create grand spatial effects. And this was the phrase, promenade architecturale, which Le Corbusier used to describe the way we should respond to great architecture.
He wanted to create a controlled succession of vistas and spatial experiences for us to discover as we move through his architecture. This promenade architecturale begins, in the case of the Villa Savoy, as you have first driven up in your motor car. This is the most formal façade, with a crisp, apparently solid surface which belies the recessed piloti which support it.
The car runs right in under the first floor slab, inside the outer row of the piloti. Then the ground floor wall dissolves into the curving wall of glass, which the car follows round. As well as the spiral staircase, there's the ramp, which is the ceremonial route to the first floor.
The ramp continues the fluid movement without a break, upwards through the house. Light comes in from windows on the left, which also give glimpses of the terrace. This is the centre of the first floor.
The diagonal ramp almost touches the vertical staircase, which continues upwards to the roof. From here, we have access to the main living rooms of the house. From the terrace, the ramp continues its flow upwards in the open air.
As we reach the flat roof, the enclosing walls fall away, except for the curving concrete screen of the solarium. Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Again and again in his writings, Le Corbusier insists that architecture, as opposed to mere building, must satisfy the soul, it must engage the mind.
So why does he keep returning to this idea of the machine habite? Well, we've already looked at part of the answer in his structural innovations. and in his use of planning. I want to now talk about something a little bit different, the machine aesthetic.
The machines that Corbusier admired, cars, aeroplanes, but especially the buildings like grain silos, encouraged him to think big, to go for very grand, scanty, sculptural forms. Up here, in the solarium on the roof, Le Corbusier deploys his repertoire of crisp mechanical volumes. We could be looking at an extraordinary landlocked ocean liner.
The view is framed by a picture window. There are the painted handrails, the curved form of the staircase housing, like a ship's funnel, and this central heating stack, rather like a ventilation shaft. The skylights, like engine room hatches. This could almost be the bridge of a ship.
From here you feel master of the surrounding landscape. Le Corbusier formulates this situation precisely, placing a concrete table where you'd want to sit and look out of the view. Even the structure of concrete rib and infill panel echoes the welded plates of ship construction.
But we don't have to think of ocean liners when we look at these marvellous sculptural forms. From the terrace, these volumes moulded by light seem solid and monumental, and the solarium reuses space that was left open at ground level as well. The great window of the salon can be rolled back to let air as well as light in.
The ramp itself is an amazingly effective form, with the acute-angle windows incisive against the brilliant white. The terrace is laid out as a continuation of the space of the salon. The flow of space seems endlessly varied.
From three sides, light flows into this room. From the privacy of the enclosed terrace, the floor-to-ceiling window admits most of the light, while the long, thin window lets in a more diffused illumination and gives a more discreet view over the countryside. What makes this room beautiful are not details, of craftsmanship, but the abstract aesthetic values which Le Corbusier admired.
Pure planes, volumes, open space, floods of light. That is, sophisticated pleasures from simple means. Rather like these cheap bentwood chairs in front of me. He was determined to use as simple materials as he could. These tiles here, they're yellow, whereas the ones in the hall are white, but they're the same quality, simple industrial products.
And again, these radiators here, they're simple, standard industrial radiators. and he doesn't attempt to hide them from view. Again, he provides a shelf running all the way along this window here of concrete, solid concrete here. The windows slide sideways in order to take as little room as possible and they work very nicely.
In this free, elastic space, the columns, the piloti, take up almost no room. One doesn't notice them. And even the fireplace is built like a stove. It's freestanding in the room.
Corbusier does rather limit the freedom of his clients. He doesn't want them cluttering up the space with unnecessary furniture. So he builds in their cupboards for them. These are solid concrete slabs set into the wall. You couldn't get rid of them if you wanted to.
The doors are of aluminium. The mechanism for operating the big window is more complicated. The electric lighting consists of a long opalescent glass tube suspended from the ceiling containing 40 25-watt light bulbs.
When illuminated, it produces a continuous strip of light echoing the effect of the long windows by day. There are many other surprising technical features in this room. This door, for example, is of steel and glass, and the handles were originally designed by Le Corbusier for the Voisin Automobile Company.
The partition walls are very thin. Only a thin coat of plaster set flush with the metal door surrounds covers the concrete membrane. The business of architecture is to establish emotional relationships by means of... raw materials.
Let's look at how Le Corbusier used glass, steel and concrete to create emotional relationships. These are powerful images, but the real subtlety lies in the way he combines them in sculptural and spatial relationships. In the spiral staircase, he uses thin black painted handrails to trace the lines of energy in space.
The spatial movements suggested here introduce an important theme in the aesthetic of the house, the conflict between horizontal and vertical forms. In this sketch, Le Corbusier exaggerates the gentleness of the slope of the ramp and shows the spiral staircase as a vertical squiggle penetrating the horizontal forms of the house. Around the axis of the vertical black handrail, the staircase really seems to screw itself up into the house with great dynamic force.
It's in the hall, at ground level, that the vertical elements are most visible in the interior, the ramp and the staircase and the freestanding piloti. The verticality of this pilotti is counteracted by a horizontal concrete table slab. And then there are the closely spaced vertical glazing bars of the hall window. The vertical thrust of the spiral staircase is balanced by the more gradual slope of the ramp. A ramp, in fact, consists of an architectural paradox.
It's an unbroken extension to the surface of the ground floor plane, which is also continuous with the upper floor plane as well. No break in surface marks the ascent. At the first floor landing, the horizontal-vertical conflict goes on, the staircase winding upwards while the ramp slopes up in the open air outside. On the exterior, we can still trace the vertical forces rising up through the house, penetrating the horizontals.
Though the overwhelming weight of the horizontal forces of the superstructure contrive to hold these rising forces down. The long windows are the key to the horizontal elements in the composition. Triangular window lighting the ramp fits snugly into this frame.
So far, we've been concentrating on the aesthetic and functional aspects of the house. But what was it like for Madame Savoie to live in? This is how the sitting room was kept up while Madame Savoy lived there, with pockets of furniture in the middle of the rather empty space.
The house was conceived as a summer villa, and much of the time was to be spent on the terrace. It's been said that despite these architectural attractions, Madame Savoy spent a lot of her time in one of the more humble rooms in the house, the kitchen. It's extremely functional. There's a built-in chopping board surrounded by tiled surfaces.
The door at the end opens onto the kitchen terrace. Along the left, the aluminium sliding doors open onto cupboards which can be reached from the other side as well, where there is a narrow service area connecting with the sitting room. The twin tiled sinks were starkly efficient. note of austerity, mixed with a certain flamboyance, is to be found unexpectedly in Madame Savoy's own suite of rooms. This is the view she would have had of her bathroom from her bed.
On the left are the usual concrete fittings. cupboards, masking off a tiled area with a sunken bath in turquoise mosaic chips and a postured mosaic slab for drying off or relaxing on. A curtain could be drawn across for privacy.
It must have been a most uncomfortable shape for taking a bath. Contrasting with the rather bizarre luxury of this bath is the starkness of the splendid French porcelain ware. The lighting of this internal room is typically inventive.
As well as this fitting, there is a hidden strip light behind the beam with 25 light bulbs which can be switched on at night, while above there is an unexpected skylight. Madame Savoy's suite forms another promenade processing round two sides of the terrace. From the entrance to her suite, we go into a dark area, screened on the left by the concrete fitment, which divides off the bathroom, and then out into the brightly lit bedroom with its long window.
Notice the recessed piloti, leaving the long window unbroken, except for these narrow partition walls. Then into her boudoir, which in turn opens onto the covered area on the terrace. Finally, this window looks back onto the salon where we started. At the beginning of the programme, we asked two questions of this house.
What did Corbusier mean by the machine à habiter? And what is this house like to live in? I've tried to show that in the planning, in his use of materials, and in something of these... Corbusier had the machine in mind.
As to what the house is like to live in, well, I think we've shown you enough of it for you to make up your own minds for yourselves. Of course, the house as it is now is unlived in, it's empty. But perhaps that isn't such a bad thing, because when it comes down to it, this house is a monument, a monument to a set of ideas that Corbusier had about what a house should be. Visitors are disturbed by the great variety and freedom of architectural forms brought about by modern techniques.
I hope you won't hold it against me for taking such liberties in front of your eyes. I've been able to take these liberties because I've won them, captured from the heart of modern life. Poetry and lyricism, achieved by modern techniques.
Thank you.