DOMESTICATED AVANT GARDE

Architecture professors the world over encourage their students traveling to France to make a field trip to the radical residential building completed in 1931, La Villa Savoye in Poissy, outside of Paris. This photo was shot by a young visiting architect with a good eye for composition, Rachel Grisso White, on one such outing when she was still a student at the University of Oklahoma. The work of the avant-garde and modernist French architect known as Le Corbusier, the house was commissioned by Mr and Mme Pierre Savoye as a secondary residence. The concrete building's boxy and airy design had a profound impact on twentieth-century architecture. 

Vocabulary

une sortie éducative:  a field trip
un concepteur, une conceptrice:  a designer

Traveling Tip
If coming this way, make a day of it and do as we did by combining a visit to La Villa Savoye in Poissy with a stroll along the house-boat retirement village on the banks of the Seine in Conflans-Ste-Honorine, and a tour of Alexandre Dumas' gem of neo-Renaissance architecture, the Château de Monte-Cristo, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Three very distinctive living styles.


©2013 P.B. Lecron