This document provides information about two modernist houses: Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier and Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. It describes Villa Savoye as embodying Le Corbusier's "Five Points" principles of using pilotis, a flat roof, free facade, free plan, and horizontal windows. Farnsworth House is described as a minimalist glass pavilion consisting of a floating roof and floors suspended above the ground on steel columns, blurring the boundary between interior and exterior. Both houses are presented as pioneering modern architectural designs that abstracted and opened up the traditional house form.

1. Domino/ Open
House

2. The use of the frame and skin as a modern building system and theoretical
mandala.
The materialization of ideas.
To put together materials and elements in an
architectural ordering system.
Abstract
System

3. Keywords
order
Material
Frame
Weathering
Skeleton
Skin
Pilotis
Domino House

4. Villa Savoye,
Poissy, 1928-31,
Le Corbusier

5. • Le Corbusier was born on Oct. 6, 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds,
Switzerland. He settled in Paris in 1917. He received formal training
under the architects Auguste Perret in Paris and Peter Behrens in
Berlin. He died on Aug. 27, 1965.
Model for Villa Radeuse

6. Villa Savoye
Vila Savoye, entrance
Savoye, Poissy, 1928-31, view from south-west.
Vila Savoye, axonometric sketch showing
Relationship of roof terrace to sun and the
Processional character of the automobile
Approach.

7. Vila Savoye, salon on first floor looking
Towards roof terrace
Vila Savoye, view from roof terrace to
Salon and ramp.
Vila Savoye, view across terrace
To ramp.
Vila Savoye, section showing salon, terrace and bodoir
At first level

8. Study of symmetrical scheme for Villa
Savoye, Sept 1928
Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-31
Still Life with Numerous Object, 1923.
Development sketches for Villa Savoye, Sept 1928

9. • Le Corbusier's five points called for the
use of
• (1) pilotis (columns that raise a building
above the ground);
• (2) flat roofs with gardens;
• (3) the free plan (independence of the
structural frame from the internal walls);
(4) the free facade (no structural
limitation on window placement); and
• (5) a continuous horizontal window (one
aspect of the free facade).

10. Breaking the box, opening up the walls.
Another way to see windows.
Mies van der Rohe 1889-1969, Born in Germany, practised in Berlin and
emigrated to the USA in 1937 to head the Illinois Institute of Technology
in Chicago until 1959.
Abstract
Opening up

11. Keywords
Structure
Material
Walls
Framings
Edges
Planes
Openings
Open House

12. Farnsworth House,
Plano, Illinois, 1946-
50,
Mies van der Rohe

13. ‘Architecture is the will of the age
conceived in spatial terms’
Mies van der Rohe
~
TRUTH
‘Truth is the significance of fact’
Thomas Aquinas

14. ‘Architecture is the
will of the age
conceived in spatial
terms’
Mies van der Rohe
~
TRUTH
‘Truth is the significance
of fact’
Thomas Aquinas

15. Farnsworth House,1946-50
A small week-end retreat, designed for a doctor,
Edith Farnsworth. Located on land near Fox river in
Plano, Illinois.
The glass pavilion that brings the building of Mies’s
IIT to the domestic scale.
Continues his experiments in the abstraction of
the plane
Consisting in a minimalist rectangular box
enclosed by a floating roof slab
3 floating slabs – a terrace slab, and behind it floor
and roof slabs – are all lifted from the ground. The
welding of the supports to the sides of the slabs, as
though the magnetism kept the frame whole,
enhances the floating quality of the spreading slabs.
Smaller slabs, although seemingly floated, serve as
stairs, from the ground to the terrace and from the
terrace to the entrance porch of the rectangular
glass-box living area.

16. Farnsworth House,1946-50
Floor slab suspended 1.5m above ground
because the Fox river occasionally
flooded the site, sits as a simple white
frame in the landscape, as elegant an
expression of skin-and-bones architecture
as could be imagined.
Roof and floor slabs – both supported by
8 exterior steel H-cloumns.
Integrated into the natural landscape,
blurring the distinction between inside
and outside.
The walls were of large panes of glass.
End result – poetic lightness and sense
of open, flowing space.
However – point of argument for the
owner – the transparency of the house –
poor climatic control?

17. Farnsworth House,1946-50
The glass walls can be screened with white
curtains when privacy is desired, but the play
of light as it reflects off the glass and the
immediacy of the natural surroundings
viewed through the walls are more effective
unscreened.
Thus, it is an expression of an architectural
ideal rather than a model for everyday family
living; it carries the concept of the Tugendhat
House to their logical conclusion, losing in the
process a certain degree of practicality.
Whatever the complaints about Mies’s
reductivism, the formal results are
elegant, almost timeless. In fact, the
Farnsworth House can be interpreted as a
classical temple, its stylobate or base slid
forward to create an arrival of sequence.

18. Farnsworth House,1946-50
Interior – a single space, subdivided by a kitchen-bathroom-fireplace service core and a
set of closets that formed a partition for the sleeping area.

19. Farnsworth House,1946-50

20. Required Reading
“Five Points Towards a
New Architecture”
Le Corbusier 1964

21. End!