"LES HEURES SOMBRES"

La maison se posera au milieu de l'herbe comme un objet, sans rien déranger.

LE CORBUSIER

In June 1928 Pierre Savoye, co-founder of the insurance company Gras Savoye, visits Le Corbusier, in his Parisian studio, to entrust a weekend residence, to receive friends and take a break with family, in a field of 7-hectare in Poissy.

The Villa Savoye, spontaneously named by its owners as “Les Heures claires” (The clear hours), is built between 1929 and 1931. As early as 1930, Eugénie Savoye, Pierre’s wife, begins a correspondence with his architect, which will last until 1937, where she communicates all its construction defects.

G.E. Kidder Smith 'Villa Savoye' (1959)

The first letter dates from March 24, 1930, where Madame Savoye already complains that the terrace, garage and cellar are flooded and that the infernal noise of rain on the skylight in her bathroom does not let her sleep. In another letter dated September 6, 1937, she writes: "It's raining in the lobby, it's raining on the ramp, and the garage wall is absolutely soaked. What's more, it's still raining in my bathroom, which is flooding every time that there is rain."

Le Corbusier goes so far as to tell her that, as a client, she should consider architects as friends of their house and not their enemies. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1938 the owners stop living there. But it is not until May 1940 that they definitively abandone it. Shortly afterwards it is confiscated by the Nazis for its strategic location. From there they can watch the entire Seine Valley and the Ford factory in Paris.

René Burri 'The Villa Savoye' (1959)

It is not until two years after the end of World War II that the Savoye family regains their ownership. Widowed and impoverished, Madame Savoye turns her land into a farm by transforming the house into a barn and, consequently, accelerating its decline.

Perhaps for this reason, in 1958 it is expropriated again. This time by the Poissy City Council which reserves 6 of its 7 hectares for the construction of a new school and ends up transforming the Villa into a Maison des jeunes et de la culture, although at first it was planned to be demolished.

The Villa Savoye, Destruction Through Neglect (1966) MoMA

Then the alarm goes off and a whole series of campaigns and mobilizations begin, on an international scale, to save Villa Savoye. As a result of this pressure, the building passes into the hands of the French Republic. And in 1965, a few months after Le Corbusier's death, André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, classifies it as a historical monument.

But as Arthur Drexler, director of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, denounces: the harm is already done. Even restored, the Villa Savoye, due to this amputation, can never again be seen as an object, without anything altering it.

BERLIN NOTES (LV)

René Burri 'Along the Berlin Wall' (1961)

Yet despite its physical absence here and elsewhere in Berlin, the dividing wall maintains a vivid presence. Indirectly visible through its historical traces in the otherwise puzzling layout of certain streets and buildings, it can also be seen in the differing visual cultures of East and West: not only in the different styles of architecture and levels of building maintenance, but in the different styles of interior design, like the East Berlin taste for oilcloth table coverings, artificial flowers, and regimented white lace curtains. To the frequent dismay of motorists and public transport commuters, the wall is still strongly felt through the chaos of continuing traffic changes (for example, detours due to road or building construction, disrupted service and altered routes for bus, U-bahn, and S-bahn lines) that its sudden disappearance has engendered after over a generation of walled Berlin life. The enormous, frenetic mass of continuing construction that has overwhelmed Potsdamer Platz paradoxically reasserts the wall it has effaced, by being not only a constructed obstacle of monumental scale but an international tourist attraction as Europe's largest building site. In short, the now absent wall dividing East and West remains in many ways the structuring principle of this unified city, just as the divided cities of East and West Berlin were defined essentially by their contrasting absent parts.

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 'The Urban Aesthetics of Absence' (1997)