STRUCTURAL DESIGN FOR ARCHITECTURE

Reinforced concrete structures

The planning freedom which such a
structural system offered the architect was
summarised by Le Corbusier in his well-known
'Five points towards a new architecture'^1 of
1926 and exploited by him in the designs for
the houses which he built in the 1920s, cul-
minating in the Villa Savoye of 1929 (Fig. 4.6).
Most of these buildings did not in fact have
the two-way-spanning ribless slab of the
Domino House but were based on
beam/column frame arrangements with one-
way-spanning slabs. The planning freedom

1 The renowned 'five points' were first declared in

Almanack de I'Architecture moderne, Paris, 1926. The most

significant of them were: separation of structure and

skin, freedom in the plan and freedom in the treatment

of the facade.

Fig. 4.6 Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 1929. Le Corbusier,

architect. The technology of the reinforced concrete frame-

work contributed significantly to the visual language devel-

oped by Le Corbusier in the 1920s. [Photo: Andrew

Gilmour]

offered by the use of a concrete framework was

nevertheless fully exploited.

The origins of the visual vocabulary which

was evolved by Le Corbusier in the 1920s have

been well documented elsewhere.^2 Among

these was the idea that Modern architecture

should be tectonic (in other words that the

structure should influence the architecture)

and that it should symbolise rationalism. It is

2 For example, Curtis, W. J. R. Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms,

Oxford, 1986. 103