The Modernists’ aesthetic passion was so strong that it frequently overshadowed practical considerations. The Villa Savoye appeared to be a practical machine, but it was actually an artistic mistake. The bare walls were handcrafted by artists using expensive imported Swiss mortar; they were as delicate as pieces of lace and as intent on evoking emotions as the jewel-encrusted naves of a CounterReformation Church. By Modernism’s own criteria, the villa’s roof was as, if not more ruinously, dishonest.
Despite initial objections from the Savoyes, Le Corbusier maintained – ostensibly on technical and economic grounds – that a roof was better to a pitched one. He told his clients that it would be cheaper to construct, easier to maintain, and cooler in the summer. Madame Savoye would be able to do her gymnastic exercises on it without being troubled by moist vapours originating from the ground floor. However, only a week after the family moved in, the roof sprung a leak over Roger’s bedroom, allowing in so much water that the kid developed a chest infection, which evolved into pneumonia, necessitating a year of recuperation in a sanatorium in Chamonix.
In September 1936, six years after the villa’s official completion, Madame Savoye expressed her dissatisfaction with the flat roof’s performance in a letter: ‘It’s raining in the hall, on the ramp, and the wall of the garage is entirely drenched. Furthermore, it is still raining in my bathroom, which floods during bad weather because water enters via the skylight. Le Corbusier promised that the problem would be solved right away, then used the opportunity to remind his client of how well his fat-roofed design had been received by architectural critics around the world: ‘You should place a book on the table in the downstairs hall and ask all your visitors to inscribe their names and addresses in it.
You’ll see how many autographs you’ll acquire. However, the rheumatic Savoye family found little comfort in this call to philography. ‘After many demands on my behalf, you have finally realized that this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable,’ said Madame Savoye in the autumn of 1937. ‘Your responsibility is at stake, and I have no reason to foot the bill. Please make it habitable immediately. I genuinely hope that I will not have to pursue legal action. Only the outbreak of World War II, and the Savoye family’s subsequent light from Paris, prevented Le Corbusier from having to account in court for the design of his largely uninhabitable, if astonishingly beautiful, machine-for-living.
If Modernist architects constructed with beauty in mind, why did they primarily justify their work in mechanical terms? Fear appears to have been at the heart of their discretion. The end of trust in a universal standard of beauty had created an environment in which no single style could be immune to criticism. Adherents of Gothic or Tyrolean architecture raised objections to the appearance of Modernist houses, which could not be dismissed without accusations of arrogance and highhandedness.
In aesthetics, like in democratic politics, a final arbiter had become elusive. Hence the appeal of a scientific language to ward off adversaries and persuade the doubters. Even the God of the Old Testament, confronted with the unruly behavior of the tribes of Israel, had to sometimes fire a bit of desert bush to awe his audience into worship.
Technology would be the Modernists’ “burning bush.” To speak of technology in regard to one’s home was to appeal to the most powerful force in society, responsible for penicillin, telephones, and airplanes, while Christianity’s influence waned and Classical culture was ignored. Science, it appears, would determine the roof pitch.