The Modern Interior

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A view of the interior looking out on to the ramp of the Villa Savoye, designed by Le
Corbusier, Poissy, 1928–31.
The highly rarefied and individualistic climate of De Stijl was
further developed through work undertaken at the Bauhaus in Germany,
and by the Purists in France. Not all of those later experiments proved
as inhabitable as the Schroeder house, however. 12 Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye, for example, built between 1928 and 1931, was never really a
‘home’. It remained an exercise in space, light, texture and colour and was
among the most coherent and uncompromising of interior spatial compositions
of the Modern Movement. Its most striking characteristic was
its sense of internal dynamism, created by what Le Corbusier called the
‘architectural promenade’ that dominated the occupant’s experience of