Episode 1 - The Villa Savoye

"Attempting to stand outside of time, the house neither aged nor weathered: it merely cracked and deteriorated"

Welcome to the first episode of the new series "Talking Modernism".  In this episode we'll be exploring what exactly modernism is through one of its iconic buildings, the Villa Savoye.

Useful links, in case you want to investigate further:

• Photo study of Villa Savoye
• Wikpedia on Le Corbusier
• Wikipedia on "Towards a New Architecture"
• Malcolm Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History

Email feedback and suggestions to talkingmodernism@gmail.com

Photo credit Rory Hyde - https://www.flickr.com/photos/roryrory/2520028487, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92939219

Transcript

Welcome to this, the first podcast in a new series “Talking Modernism”. I’m your host Michael Hauptman. In this series I’m going to discuss different aspects of modernism and share some interesting information on what is a fascinating movment and period of history. And perhaps even help us better understand the world we live in today.

In this first episode, I’ll try and explain what I understand modernism to be, and I’ll do that by talking about a very famous house, the Villa Savoye.

If you already know a bit about modernist architecture, you’re no doubt familiar with the Villa Savoye. The Villa Savoye -I beeive the French pronounce it the Villa Savwai – is a home on the outskirts of Paris built in 1929 by the visionary Swiss architect known as Le Courbuisier - for his clients, Pierre and Eugénie Savoye, a wealthy insurance family. The house is still standing, restored and open to the public, and I was fortunate enough to visit it a few years ago. The house originally stood in the open countryside, a weekend retreat, but the Paris suburbs have now crept up and surrounded it. But they’ve still retained the patch of flat green lawn that the house stands on, surrounded by trees that block off the modern world, so when you vist you get a sense of what it must hve been like back in the day, standing in splendid isolation.

And it was, and is, spendid. Words really don’t do it justice, I’ve provided a link to some pictures on the podcast’s website. The house is a white rectangular box, built on two levels, with the upper level supported in thin columns. It was smaller than I expected. A similar sensation to when you see one of your favourte film actors in the flesh. On top of the plain white box is an ornate rooftop pavillion with curved walls, a little bit like a cubist deconstruction of a dome. 

Inside ,the living and dining rooms are combined in a large open plan space, commonplace today but revolutionary then. Indeed if you didn’t know its history the whole house wouldn;t necessaily seem that extraordinary, resembling as it does the tens of thousands of white rectangular box houses that have been built for rich clients since the Villa Savoy.e But in its simplicity and balanced proportions, visiting the house today you do get the sense that you are seeing the prototype for the flood of copies it inspired. 

As well as leading the way in style and layout, the Villa Savoye also stood apart in its pioneering construction method and use of materials. Its walls are striking, built of reinforced concrete. There are long ribbon windows with bigp anes and minimal framing. Its often hard to separate the story of modernism from the revolution in technology that occurred at the time. The 1920s and 30s are sometimes called “the machine age”. Consider for instance, the progress of the motor car. In 1886, 42 years before when the Villa Savoye was built, Carl Benz patented the first motor car. To give you a point of comparison, 42 years ago from today was roughly when the first IBM PCs came on the market. In 1908, twenty years later, the first model T Ford was built. In 1918, a mere thirty years after Carl Benz’s first investion, 664 thousand Model T Fords were built and they cost $500 US, about $10 thousand in todays money. But though mass production and assembly line techniques , by 1926, forty years after Carl Benz and three years prior when the Villa Savoye was built, 2 million Model T Fords were made. And the cost had dropped from $500 to $364 each, or $4 thousand in todays money. Cars were becoming ubiquotous, certainly for wealthy people like the Pierre and Eugénie Savoye, and the the Villa Savoye was designed to accommodate the turning circle of a car passing under the elevated main floor. 

And for Le , cars, indeed machines in general, were a fetish. He was polar opposite of William Morris and Augistus Pugin, who’s reaction to the Indiustrial Revolution in the mid-1800s, was to revive manual workmanship via the Arts & Crafts movement. Courbusier published a book in 1923 summariesing his radical new theories and it was called “Towards a New Archietcture”. The book combined pictures of ancient greek temples and modern aeroplanes and ocean liners, as both embodying aspects of design, one aesthict and the other efficient, that he sought to express in buildings like the Villa Savoye. His ideas were hugey popular, indeed “Towards a aNew Archietcture” has been widely called the most influential architectual text of the twentieth century.

The Villa Savoye divided opinion, but was was a rockstar in its day, and helped make Courbusier the leading architect of his age. It was a centrepiece of a 1932 exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art which named this new type of architecture, with its straight lines, open plan layout, lack of ornamenation and curtain walls with ribbon windows as the “International Style”. Early commentators likened the Villa Savoy to a landmark Renaissance house the Villa Rotunda built in 1595 by the famed architect Palladio, from where we get the adjective Palladian. Even today it inspires eloquent praise: here is an article from The Architecture Review magazine written in 2012: 

“Villa Savoye displays a limited range of materials, the same or very similar used inside and out, emphasising continuities of space and behaviour. Imitating the smooth surfaces and forms of ocean liners, which similarly float free from context, these materials conceal the true nature of construction. With its plain surfaces and generous spaces, the house ‘hangs back’ from its inhabitants in a way that is liberating yet defies intimate engagement with its materiality. Attempting to stand outside time, the house neither aged nor weathered: it merely cracked and deteriorated.”

“Attempting to stand outside of time ...” That, in a nutshell, was the aspiration of modernism. Modernism is a term we apply to a very broad church of ideas, but the innovators like Courbousier who we today call modernists, the avante garde as they were then called, did share a passionate belief: a belief that they were living in a time outside the run of Western history, with its traditions stretching back from the middle ages and the Holy Roman Empire up until the late Victorian age, perhaps even up to the Edwardian age and the start of First World War. 

And one strand of modernism, perhaps the dominant strand, saw this as a time of exhilarating opportunity. They saw that this new age had the potential, though advances in technology, through a new spiritual awakening in society, or a combination of the two, to become the dawn of a new utopia, a golden age. Citizens would be housed better than they had every been in buildings like the Villa Savoye, informed and entertained better than they every had through the new mediums of film and radio. 

Radio – these is another example of how fast new technologies were changing the world. The first wireless voice transmission was made is 1900. Radio stations as we understand them first started in the United States in 1920. By 1929 in Australia, for instance, 20% of households had a radio.

People would enjoy better health through continued breakthroughs in health, sanitation and medicine. For centuries, a persons life expectancy had remained unchanged. A Briton born in 1770 had an average life expectancy of 35 years, and though data is a bit patchy, it was probably similar a couple of hundred years before that. By 1870, one hundred years later, life expectancy had increased by a scant 7 years to 42 years. But thanks to rapid advances in sanitation and medicine – including compulsory vaccination - by 1910, 40, years later , life expectancy had shot up to 52, an increase of 10 years! And by 1930, 20 years later, increased again to 60 years.

They would live more liberated lives, free of the repressions and role expectations of traditional society, each free to realise their potentials an express their invivuality. And they could express their indiviuality through the new movements that sprung from the revolution in art at the early part of the century. In painting and sculpture, cubism, expressionism and all the several other “isms”. There were similar movements In literature, theatre, dance, and even opera.

But the reality of the Villa Savoye was that whilst it was lovely to look at, it was a pain to live in. For a start, the building cost almost twice its budget. It was difficult to heat. A stiff breeze made the skylight howl. And it leaked like a sieve. In 1935 Eugenie Savoye wrote to Le Courbousier:

“It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight. The gardener’s walls are also wet through” 

The ramp that the unfortunate Madame Savoye refers to leads to the rooftop pavillion. Now I personally don’t think the house needs a rooftop pavillion as it already has a large open courtyard on the first level. So if I was the client I would have avoided building the leaking ramp in the first place. But sun bathing was a popular fad in the 1920s, and Eugenie Savoye and indeed Le Courbousier were keen adherents and they were determined that the Villa Savoye would have lots of places to lie in the open air. And the history of even something as commonplace as sunbathing really helps improve our understanding of modernism at this time. Sunbathing, as in purposely lying in the sun to get a tan, only started in the 1920s. For centuries previously, a sun tan was not a sign of privilege, of something epopel aspired to have. It was the lowly farm labourer who was tanned, and the well off cultivated the pale look, as a study of western portraits before the twentieth century will quickly remind us. But as industrialisation took hold, poor peole moved to the towns and cities to work in factories and shops and became pale, indeed so sun-deprived that in Europe they developed ricketts. It was the well off who spent time recreating outdoors. The growth in popularity of women’s tennis after world war 1 gave the fashionable world a number of tanned athletic role models, in particular the French woman Suzann Lenglen who played Wimbledon in a sleeveless dress in 1919. Apparently Coco Channel, tho appeared in public in the south of France tanned after a Mediterranean cruise, kicked off sun bathing as a stand-alone pastime rather than an incidental activity in the early 1920s, and it quickly became fashionable throughout high society. 

Sunbathing was also seen to have health benefits. Swiss sanatoriums offering “heliotherapy” for conditions like tuberculosis and lupus, kicked along by the discovery in 1918 of the role sunlight plays in vitamin D production. Le Courbusier was slightly obsessed with the supposed health benefits of sunbathing and made rooftop gardens one of the five essential features of his architecture. Indeed he was obsessed with hygiene in general, and part of the inspiration for the design for the Villa Savoy, with its large windows and white colouring, may have been from sanatorium design. Now of course attitudes to tanning have changed somewhat, especially in Australia with concerns about skin cancer, with tanning salons banned and where we are encouraged instead to slip on a shirt slop on suncreen and slap on a hat, according to the jingle that all Australians know by heart.

In many aspects of modernism, especially the material ones like buildings and technology, we can see an early version of the world we live in today. Features like the open plan living room in the Villa Savoye have persisted through the decades and become part on contemporary life. But when we look at the attitudes and concerns of people at the time, the phrase “the past is a different country, they do things different there” springs very much to mind. Sun bathing is perhaps the least extreme of these old attitude, enthusiasms and concerns that seem strange to us today, and I hope to spend a few podcasts in this series exploring them.

Beacuse of the leaks and all the other practical problems with the design, the owners were in litigation with their architect from when the house was completed until 1939. And why did the lawsuits stop in 1939? Because Pierre and Eugénie Savoye, both Jewish, fled the occupation of France by the Nazis, who were yet another, monstorous, manifestation of modernism. In the middle of the 1800s most countries in Europe were governed by variations of consitutional monarchies – even France re-established an emporer in 1852. Politics then underwent radical change just like architecture, industry and all the other aspects of society. Some of the changes led to liberal socialist democracies like Australia, but some led to soviet communism, Italian facism and German Nazism. And you can draw a line between some of the strange attitudes and concerns I mentioned earlier and the growth of extremist polictical thought. Again, its an area I’d like to explore in future podcasts.

So a discussion of the Villa Savoye has touched on many aspects of modernism, not just archicture. And I’ll be taking a similar approach in future podcasts: using a object or event as a starting point to investigate a particular aspect, or range of aspects, of modernism. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I’ll seek to emulate the podcast series Revisionist History by the great Malcom Gladwell, which has as its aim to “seek to investigate the overlooked and misunderstood” I too will look to explain the overlooked and misunderstood, at least as it relates to modernism.

And why do I bother, and why should you, the listener, bother? Modernism is a movement which despite it’s up-to-date name, dates to a century or so ago. Since modernism we’ve had post-modernism and even perhaps post-post modernism. 

I reckon the are a couple of good strong reasons why we should bother. First of, modernism is still fascinating history and fascinating style. People seem to love art deco, the Great Gatsby , that Netflix series Berlin Babylon, and indeed the Villa Savoye. Its certainly a passion of mine and I look forward to the opportunity to share stories of this fascinating, dramatic, idealistic and tragic movement.

I also believe that a study the modernist movement and period can give us useful insights into issues confronying us today. And certainly the modernist period had the types of events and situations that would seem familiar to us today. A worldwide pandemic, though from Spanish Influenza not Covid .19 A threat to liberal democracies from totalitarian regeimes. The emerging threat of war betweenteh great powers. An intellectual avante garde at odds with conventional thinking, though not about climate change. As Mark Twain is supposed to have said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. 

And because the past is, indeed, past, its events now fixed and static, its a hell of a lot easier to understand than the constantly evolving events of today – just one damn thing after another, as a wise person once wrote. I think spending some time reflecting on the relative certainties of an age not too far remved from our own, but where the consequences of actions and decisions now revealed and understood, will help us better make sense of our own confused times. Its interesting to me that the phrase “Art Deco” was only poularised, or possibly even invented, in the 1960s. Back in the day people did not have a phrase that captured the design movement of the 1920s and 30s, it relied on later historians to provide a name to the movement. The same way it will be future historians who will provide the defnitive name of the period we are living in now. Some things are best understood in retrospect.

So that then is my goal for this series. I aim to publish about ten 30 minute podcasts over the next twenty weeks looking at modernism. The next one will look at the story of the modern fitted kitchen, the Bauhaus movement and a fascinating life of pioneering architect, feminist and communist spy Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Hope to speak to you again then.

(c) Michael Hauptman 2021