Le Corbusier And Ex-Urban Wright

Both the Villa Savoye and Falling Water are perfect examples of architects expressing themselves through their work. These two houses exhibit their designer’s ideas and ideals throughout many different aspects of their design.

When Le Corbusier built the Villa Savoye in 1929 he did so with a set of ideas and design principles that had been exhibited in other structures such as Villa Meyer and the villa at Garches. These houses can be described as “abstract cubes of space in which various geometric elements are freely disposed in as in a Purist painting.” (Jencks, Charles: Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture; pp85) All of these houses depended on Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture: “(1) the pilotis, or columns, elevating the mass off the ground, (2) the free plan, achieved through the separation of the load-bearing columns from the walls subdividing the space, (3) the free façade, the corollary of the free plane in the vertical plane, (4) the long horizontal sliding window or fenetre en longeur, and finally (5

Frank Lloyd Wright ‘s “Falling Water” does an exemplary job in expressing Wright’s ideas and ideals as an architect. Cantilevered concrete trays rooted to the boulders lining the waterfall form the house. The house appears to be floating, unsupported, above the waterfall. The core of the house, which also contains the chimney, seems to rise directly from the rock it sits on. Wright used local stone, roughly laid, to give the house a very natural look. This reinforced Wright’s ideas of nature in design and organic architecture. The house also contained steel grid-windows and concrete cantilevers supporting his ideas of the relevance of machine production to architecture. (Curtis, William) Although the fireplace does not have the dominant central emphasis that many of Wright’s previous designs have held, it still exhibits Wright’s idea of the hearth being the center of a home. The concrete cantilevers extend outward from the central fireplace and chimney core giving the fireplace its central emphasis and also giving the house its seemingly endless expansion. “The effects of dappled light, surrounding foliage, and tumbling water, and the feeling of horizontal expansion in all directions, gave an exact image of Wright’s well-known maxims concerning the integration of architecture and nature.” (Curtis, William) The many widows and the open interior spaces let nature permeate throughout the entire house. “Its interior evokes the atmosphere of a furnished cave rather than that of a hou

Some topics in this essay:
Le Corbusier’s, Le Corbusier, Curtis William, Lloyd Wright, Villa Savoye, Modern Architecture, Kenneth Frampton, Falling Water, Villa Meyer, Frampton Kenneth, le corbusier, le corbusier’s, villa savoye, roof garden, corbusier’s ideas, curtis william, free plan, le corbusier’s ideas, wright’s ideas, free façade, columns separate walls, modern architecture, curtis william jr, “falling water” exemplary, supposedly ground covered,