Five Points

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Le Corbusier designed a series of houses before he developed his 'Five Points of Architecture' in 1926. They were all based on his Dom-ino housing scheme developed in the autumn of 1914 as a quick and inexpensive means of rebuilding devastated towns and villages. He described it as follows:

"So we designed a structural system, a frame, completely independent of the functions of the plan of the house: this frame simply supports the flooring and the staircase…"

This was the pioneering moment in the use of reinforced concrete, the one which from the outset was designed in the broadest perspective of architecture and town-planning. From his repeated efforts to introduce the standardized house and standardized house features, he arrived at his most famous 'Five Points of Architecture':

  1. pilotis raising the house from the ground - to introduce more light and to free the ground space for parking or a garden>
  2. a roof garden for private exterior space
  3. the free plan, facilitated by the skeleton structure, allowing independent interior partitions
  4. ribbon windows to improve lighting
  5. the free facade, free in the structural sense from the basic skeleton

By using this theory, he endeavored to open up the house, to create new possibilities for connections between its interior and exterior and within the interior itself. His Five Points concept is most purely demonstrated in Villa Savoye, poissy, Seine-et-Oise, France, 1929-30.

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