There’s a villa on the outskirts of Paris.
Perched on a grassy lawn and tucked away from the Rue de Villiers, stands a work of modern architecture, and one of my greatest teachers–the Villa Savoye.
A bright white French home that shaped me in ways I can only pretend to describe.
The discovery of this 1931 Le Corbusier masterpiece came to me in the pages of my first-ever freshman architecture class. I can close my eyes and still see the book’s yellow jacket. Its muted pages. Its curated collection of classic designs.
This was the book. This was the building. This was my introduction to meaning.
The kind of meaning that can be said aloud, but doesn’t need to be. The meaning born from a true work of art.
Art. A concept too elevated for my undeveloped 18 year old mind to appreciate. A pretentious notion reserved for the hippies and design school snobs sneering out at a world they pretend to see differently.
That was until I became a design school snob.
I’ve never walked the halls of the Villa Savoye. I’ve never strolled up the stairs to greet the treeline through its ribbon windows. I’ve never paved my path along the walls of its rooftop garden, forced to confront the clouds overhead. But somewhere in the pages of that old yellow book. Somewhere in the space of the sentences and the confusion of the cross-sections. Somewhere in there. I found meaning. Somewhere in there. It clicked.
“Oh…”
“I get it.” I said to myself as I drank in the images of the Villa’s reinforced concrete facade. “I actually see what he was going for here...it’s…it’s pretty cool.”
An artist's art breaking through. Tapping the untapped mind of an arrogant undergrad determined to cling to his cynicism.
The Villa Savoye isn’t the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen. It’s not the most elegant, audacious, or inspiring…but it might just be my favorite.
It’s a bit of concrete, glass, and steel that opened my eyes to a world of interpretation. A world that didn’t have to be what it was on the surface. A world filled with meaning, and metaphors, and magnificent stories. All unspoken. At times unseen. In the eye of the beholder.
A meaning that emerges, because we say it does.