Villa Savoye, the house that leaked for thirty years

Pierre and Eugénie Savoye wanted a weekend house in Poissy, northwest of Paris. In 1928 they hired Le Corbusier, who saw a chance to build his five points of architecture into a single white object standing on thin columns in a field.

The result is the building every architecture student draws. Slender pilotis lift the volume off the ground so a car can sweep underneath. A ramp climbs through the center instead of a stair, so you experience the house as a slow walk. Long horizontal windows cut the facade. The roof is a garden. The ground floor is shaped by the turning radius of the family automobile, which tells you everything about what the twentieth century believed.

The Savoyes moved in during 1931 and the trouble started at once. Madame Savoye wrote that the roof of the guest room leaked so badly the ceiling had to be redone. Then the skylight leaked. Then the bathroom flooded. Her son developed a chest illness that the family blamed on damp in the house. Her letters grew colder over several years until she stated flatly that the house was uninhabitable and she wanted it fixed.

Repairs were made, more leaks arrived, and then the war ended the argument. German troops occupied the villa. American troops occupied it after them. Hay was stored in the salon. By the 1950s the town of Poissy owned the site and planned to demolish it for a school.

An international campaign of architects, including a letter from Le Corbusier himself, stopped the bulldozers. France declared it a historic monument in 1965, the year he died. It was the first time the country protected a building by a living architect.

Restored now and open to visitors, it is dry at last, and empty, which is somehow the way it always wanted to be photographed.