The Dom-ino Technology Tamed Le Corbusier's Machines

The Dom-ino

Beginning in 1921, in his magazine "L'Esprit Nouveau" and later in his book"Vers une Architecture" or "Toward an Architecture" the French-Swissarchitect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, orLe Corbusier as he called himself, wrote what amounted to brilliant pieces of propaganda for what he called "a new architecture."

 

"A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood that rolls on toward its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools, adapted to this new epoch, animated by a new spirit. The problem of the house is the problem of the epoch."

 

We must create the mass-production spirit for the mass-produced house. Le Corbusier was beginning here to conjure a new architecture. One that would respond to the challenges imposed by modern industrialization, the mass production of houses using standardized building parts, building components. But at the same time, he wanted to reconcile these challenges with the great architecture of the past.

Which for him, meant the classical architecture of Greece and Rome. The new architecture, Le Corbusier said, would be "a machine for living."Years earlier, in 1914, he had conceived what he called the Dom-ino house. The name is constructed from the Latin word "Domus" for house and innovation.

 

The Dom-ino is really more of a diagram than a building. You can see it's really a superstructure. Le Corbusier called it a chassis onto which any number of variations of houses could be outfitted.

 

It's a diagram that is not yet bound by room layout or any kind of decorative trim. Actually, it doesn't even have an enclosure yet. The walls, the elevations, are not on. It's all plan and all section. Nevertheless, the Dom-ino would be understood as a kind of primitive hut of the modern.

As I say, the Dom-ino is all plan and section-- no elevation or surfaces, no wrapper.

 

It's proper to understand it really as an emblem, as much as a building--a diagram of a new technological and constructional paradigm of mass production, standardization, repetition, and so forth. It's really a prototype of the potential of the new technology of reinforced concrete, glass, and steel.

 

But this diagram, with its sort of concentrated energy of slab, column, circulation, and base, contains a lot of implications that Le Corbusier will explore for the next several decades in his houses. So let's look at the Dom-ino in some detail. The diagram comprises three horizontal slabs.

 

The first-floor slab is on six box-like footings that raise it slightly above the ground. And then the columns, that seem to go through the slabs, hold up the next two slabs. It's really initially to be read as a constructional integer, constructional unit, that would be the basis for any building.

 

Let's look at it in more detail. The columns are set back from the long side of the slab. And yet they're very, very close to the short sides of the slab. This makes a clear differentiation between front and side. We should remember this because it'll become very important when we see how Le Corbusier Develops that.

 

The columns also mark off equal bays. There's a kind of rhythm. There's a rigor. There's a mathematical underpinning to the spacing of the columns, and there's actually a proportional relationship between the bays.

 

The footings emphasize the building's relation to the ground. It's neither buried in the ground nor is it yet suspended from the ground. It's just pulled up so that there's a distinction between the slab and the earth. The Dom-ino is an example of what Le Corbusier called an "object-type" or a typal object or an object type.

 

In his early sketches and essay, Le Corbusier celebrates the grain silos in North America, these big cylindrical storage containers--along with automobiles, ocean liners, and other accessories of the machine age that were seen as the materialization of pure form.

 

It was in part the volume of these object types that was important for him. But also the fact that they had been refined over time.That they had become pure forms, or these figural volumes, through an evolution of use and production.

 

In his paintings too, ordinary objects of daily life, like glasses and plates, or pipe and bottles, guitars and pianos, these appear to him intensely interesting. First and foremost because of their simple shape, their contour.

 

But he thought that volumes viewed in the light, even simple everyday objects that were volumetric figures viewed in the light, could trigger deep fundamental sensations and effects. As an example of what he regarded as this universal reach of the concept of object-type, Le Corbusier made this comparison. On the left top, you see the Greek temple at Paestum. On the right is the Parthenon.

 

He understood the Greek temple as a kind of object-type that had, over centuries, been evolved and refined. But out of a basic rule, had become more and more perfect. Below the Greek temple, you see two automobiles. On the left is the Humbert Cabriolet; this is around 1907. On the right is the Delage Grand-Sport of 1921.

 

He compared the Greek temple with the modern automobile, with the machine, to say that they are both object-type, that they are refined over time. But also to make the point that, in both cases, one has to start with the standard of a strict diagram of the object in order to move forward toward perfection.

 

The lesson is that the ancient temple and the modern automobile are object-type that can be refined over time. But you have to start with a standard, a kind of inaugural diagram, in order to achieve that perfection.

 

 

 

Villa La Roche - Jeanneret

The Maison Dom-ino would become an object-type for LeCorbusier, an inaugural diagram that would allow him to develop a number of houses in and around Paris.

 

Looking at a few of the villas of Le Corbusier will allow us to further articulate the interaction of new technology with the historical continuity of the discipline of architecture. The first of these we'll look at is the Villa La Roche - Jeanneret.

 

There was a planned development in an area of Paris that made the site very attractive because the plan was that a number of houses would be built on the same site. Le Corbusier was acting on behalf of the clients to negotiate an acquisition of a property, in which he could build two houses for two families-- a kind of twins that would be bridged by a common gallery.

 

In the end, he was not able to obtain the pair of lots he wanted that would make a symmetrical entry. So he ended up, rather than designing a U-shape scheme, he ended up with an L-shape, with an extended wing on the right side of the street.

 

And what would have been the bridge, or what would have been this cross-wing, now became a gallery, raised up off the ground on columns, what he called pilotis, and whose elevation he treated as a terminus of the cul-de-sac. You approach the building toward this curved surface, and then you turn 90 degrees to the right to enter the La Roche house into a three-story hallway, a prism, that has an area nearly equal to all the other major living spaces Combined.

 

So visitors come into this big entry hallway, then they mount a stairway at the far corner of the hall. Coming up the stairway, at the very top, is a balcony.

 

And you're immediate, as you reach the top of the stair, you're oriented back to the space of the entry hall, to the open space of the entry hall, from where you have just come, as well as to other apertures, windows, and passages that punctuate through the walls of the entry hall.

 

From there, you can choose a number of different paths that take you to further moments of stasis. You come to the top of the stair, you pause.

 

You move along a different path, and you pause again, either at a balcony, or aperture or in a window.

 

You can also move into the main gallery, with its curved front, which is on the primary floor-- that is, the first floor above the ground, since it's been raised on pilotis. Now, this gallery was intended for the display of paintings that had been collected by La Roche, the owner.

 

It's a two-story space, as I say, raised one story off the ground. On the main floor, there's a ramp rising slowly along the curve of the gallery's long wall. This is the same wall that is the elevation of the entry court. At the bottom of that ramp is another balcony that, this time, punches through the exterior wall to take you to the outside.

 

From that balcony, you can survey the whole project-- the elevation that would be to your left, as well as the curved wall, as well as the entry court itself.

 

Now, walking up the ramp, we get a cinematic experience of the gallery. It's like one long, uninterrupted shot of the abstract geometry and structure of that space.

 

And then, finally, when we reach the top of that, yet another balcony flanked by two long, horizontal windows that afford a view out on both sides, now, of the building.

 

Every view of the geometry and the compositional features of the house must be taken in as a result of movement, of movement through the spaces and movement through walls, through surfaces, and around figures and walls.

 

The motion is choreographed with extreme care in a narrative of pure form. The house is perceived as a geometrical construction by walking through and around the main space in a process of rotation through the space.

 

Then there are moments of pause in this movement that are usually designated, either by a balcony at a handrail, at which you come to rest, or perhaps by an aperture or a window, where you come and register your body and measure it in that aperture that creates these moments of stasis.

 

At these moments of stasis, one looks across the space, usually at walls or other surfaces, in a frontal way. So the moments of stasis establish a perception of frontality.

 

This dialectic of rotation and frontality, or movement and stasis, is one of the themes that are definitive for the villas. Now, there are two kinds of what we might even think of as knowledge or as information that's produced by this dialectic.

 

Frontality is normally perceived at a distance, at a prospect. It might be something that you can, but usually, you're looking at it in a kind of perspective that produces pictorial space.

 

Now, pictorial space is a space that is very like that in Le Corbusier's painting, is space that cannot be entered or circulated through. It's rather viewed from a distance, assigned a frontality, and gives the order to that front sensation.

 

Now, against this, Corbusier stages a different kind of experience. And it produces a different kind of knowledge, or a different kind of information, that one can only have by being close up to things, close to the wall, close to the aperture, at the sill of the window, at the handrail of the balcony.

 

So it's close up, and it requires movement and rotation through and around space. So again, the dialectic of frontality and rotation combine to produce a kind of spatial and formal knowledge, combine to produce architectural information in the architectural imaginary, combine to produce a concept of the architecture.

 

Well, at Villa La Roche, Le Corbusier was able to explore some of the properties of the Dom-ino diagram, as the use of the reinforced concrete system, the horizontal slabs, which allow the free arrangement of program and circulation, the non-load-bearing wall, the relationship of the earth, where he explored raising some of the rooms on pilotis.

 

He wasn't able to fully explore all of the Dom-ino systems. What he found, however, in addition to that, was a way of supplementing the system with a kind of formal vocabulary for architecture. He discovered that the object-type in his paintings-- the bottles, the plates, the contours of the guitar, the everyday objects that he thought provided such an effect and such deep sensation when experienced visually-- he made analogs of those object-types in the architecture.

 

The balconies, the apertures, the curvilinear surfaces-- these became an architectural vocabulary that was analogous to the object-type in the paintings and supplemented the object-type of the Dom-ino system itself.

 

 

Villa Garches

 

The Villa Stein-de-Monzie, usually called simply by its location, Garches, is a very different kind translation of the Dom-ino system into a suburban house. And here, we can see all the features of Dom-ino: the column grid and its supporting horizontal slabs, its relationship to the earth, the separation of the structural columns from the interior walls that allows a free arrangement of the plan, the implication now fulfilled of a non-load-bearing wall in front of the slab on the long side.

And the fact that it's a non-load-bearing wall being indexed by windows that go across the entire width of the facade, what Le Corbusier would call ribbon windows or elongated windows.

And then, there's even a balcony that projects in front of the wall plane that, in a way, further develops, or fulfills, this implication of pulling the columns back from that slightly cantilevered slab, that in front of that slab, one is free to put a kind of wrapper, or a facade, of different types.

 

We will see again this idea of an itinerary of movement and stasis, of frontality and rotation. This time, however, that itinerary begins well beyond the house, at the entrance to the entire site, that is marked by a little concierge building with a find of the skeletal canopy, or skeletal gate, through which you first enter, and where were initially fixed by the frontality of this rectangular facade in the distance.

 

 

But we're fixed just off-center so that already the idea of frontality and an implied need for rotation is introduced. From that vantage, we can start to perceive, even if it's unconsciously, what Le Corbusier called "regulating lines" of the facades.

 

For example, there are diagonals that go from the top corner to the opposite bottom corner, and then other lines that are developed off that diagonal, that are either parallel or perpendicular, to that diagonal. And these give the facade a sensation of very strict order. But at the same time, it allows enormous variations of openings, and punctures, and balconies, in the wall.

 

The wall envelope defines that all-important volumetric quality that Le Corbusier sees as defining object-type. The column grid at Garches is not the square column grid of the Dom-ino plan.

 

It's rather a kind of geometric grid that has a rhythm of base sizes, A, B, A, B, A. Or the proportion of the bases is 2 to 1, 2 to 1, and 2. The English historian and critic, Colin Rowe, compared this patterned geometric grid with Palladio'sVilla Malcontenta, which we saw earlier in this course.

 

Within that column grid, and free of the structuring function of that column grid, are these curvilinear stairwells, and rooms with curved partitions, that are very, very similar to the object-type of Purist paintings.

 

And many critics have actually seen the villa as something like a three-dimensional Purist painting. Le Corbusier himself saw these curved shapes inside the column grids what he called "compressed organs" of the house. And indeed, often the curves will indicate spaces of intense bodily performance, for example like a stairwell. Coming back to the front facade, the main entrance to the villa is fitted with a big, cantilevered awning.

 

Located symmetrically to the main entrance is another smaller service entrance. But above the service entrance is placed a balcony. So there's a kind of symmetry, or better, there's a kind of balance to the two entries around the center of the facade.

 

But it's not an exact repetition. It's not an exact symmetry. The two large, elongated windows register the fact that it is a non-load-bearing wall. And the balcony that punctures through the surface at the very top, again, starts a kind of plasticity.

 

It starts a kind of layering of the wall that will be carried out on the interior of the house. The first floor accommodates a large entry hall, as well as a garage and various service spaces.

 

When we enter the entry hall, we come into contact then with the freestanding columns, or what Le Corbusier called the freestanding pilotis.

 

And here because the columns are freestanding apart from the wall, they operate almost like a little framing device that creates a moment of stasis, after the long movement through the side, and through the front door into the entry.

 

At that moment of stasis, we confront a curved wall, symmetrically placed within that frame, as well as a diagonal wall just to the left. And the spatial forces of the curved wall and the diagonal wall almost compel us to turn to the right to find the main stair that will take us up to the primary second floor.

 

The second floor has the main living spaces, the dining room, and the kitchen. Given the elongated windows, we might expect that the second floor would comprise a very large living space that would run parallel to the front wall, or parallel to the garden wall.

 

In fact, Le Corbusier has divided it up in exactly the opposite way. The vertical surfaces that divide the space are perpendicular to the two long outside walls. The curvilinear wall of the dining room at once makes an enclosing space for the dining room, that has a view out the back to the garden.

 

But the curve also sets up an axis, which defines the center of the living room on the opposite side. At the front of the living room, is a gallery, from which we can move out onto a sheltered terrace, which can be seen from the living room and the dining room, but not accessed. Once again, we have now a more complicated version of rotation and frontality.

 

The whole weight, or energy, of the main floor plan, seems to be on the periphery. There seems to be an energetic swirling of space around that central living room. And that swirling of space, which creates now a rotation, almost virtual rotation, that parallels our bodily rotation through the spaces.

 

Against that are these vertical surfaces, often given a kind of figuration, because of a certain kind of curve, or a certain kind of opening, that creates moments of stasis, within that peripheral swirl.

 

The third floor accommodates the bedrooms. And then, finally, on the top floor, there's an enormous terrace with a sauna. And here, we can really get the sense of what Le Corbusier meant when he talked about compressed organs. The sauna is a very intense bodily space.

 

It's where the hot, wet air, and what, for Corbusier, was an important hygienic function of the sauna, would be performed. And he gives the sauna a little lozenge-ish shape, again like a little organ placed on top of the roof terrace, which itself then would provide dry air and sunlight, again for hygienic function.

The top terrace has often reminded commentators of not just the hygienic health functions that Corbusierwanted to be performed there, but also of an ocean liner, the deck of an ocean liner.

 

Where beyond the function of, sort of a healthy space that's provided, it was also an industrial space, a new kind of space, on top of an ocean liner, which along with automobiles and airplanes, were the object-type that Corbusier Thought represented modern industry and modern spirit.

 

 

The Five Points of a New Architecture

 

After Le Corbusier had been able to develop and refine some of the attributes of the Dom-ino system in the actual villas, he was ready to issue what, for him, was the first programmatic manifesto of the "new architecture."He called it "The Five Points of a New Architecture."

 

For polemical reasons, he suggested that "The Five Points of the New Architecture" would be a universally applicable language of the new architecture. and that it was the logical outcome and the correct use of both available technologies of construction, as the concrete frame, and, at the same time, a vocabulary that provided what he called the "spiritual needs," to supplement those technical needs.

 

The manifesto "The Five Points of the New Architecture" was promotional. It was intended to familiarize a lay public, an international public, with the ideas underlying this new architecture.

 

The five points, or principles, are at once technical and architectural. And they are the pilotis, the roof garden, the free plan, the ribbon window, and the free facade.

 

The pilotis are the columns that derive from the columns in the Dom-ino system that support the horizontal slabs and that raise the building above the ground. By the time he's developed the pilotis in the villas, he's more and more interested in using the pilotis to lift the building up off the ground.

 

The piloti, in that way, is a reversal of either of a classical podium, which anchors the building to the earth. But it's also the reversal of traditional domestic basements that were regarded by Le Corbusier as dank and unhealthy.

 

At the same time, the pilotis accept the European convention of the "piano nobile," the noble floor, the main floor. The main floor is one floor above the ground. And then also the pilotis has implications for the sectional distribution of occupation, even at the urban scale.

 

Corbusier imagined that, out of the house, is an idea of raising the spaces of occupation above one floor. And leaving the ground open for recreation, circulation, transportation, collectively Available.

 

That understood, urbanistically, this would actually imply a new, more democratic space. An opening, availability of the surface of the earth for spontaneous and varied uses.

 

In the same way, raising the building on pilotis replaces the basement. The roof terrace, or the garden on the roof, replaces the pitched roof and the attic with an open-air room.

 

Reinforced concrete made each floor plate structurally homogeneous. So that the top floor plate, the roof, was just as strong as the floors. No single feature of Le Corbusier's work better summarizes his conviction about the healing quality of the house itself than the roof garden.

 

On the roof garden, there were regenerative inspiring forces and powers of this hygienic exposure of the body to the sun. The roof terrace recalls pre-industrial life, which was lived more outside, and for Le Corbusier would then be more healthy.

 

But it also suggests the hygienic pleasures of relaxation and traveling on the ocean liner, itself one of modernism's object-types. By freeing the columnar structure from the interior partitions which enclose the program, Le Corbusier created the free plan.

 

The free plan is opposed by Corbusier to what he calls the "paralyzed plan." The paralyzed plan is a plan of rooms: each one discrete from the other, created by walls that are themselves load bearing. Load-bearing walls mean that the rooms have to be of a certain size and a certain shape.

 

They have to be entered through doors and punctured by small windows. The free plan allows a much more open arrangement and size of space and interpenetration of spaces one into the other.

 

The separation of space and structure, or structure and the partitions that enclose space also enabled an articulation of a vocabulary of formal plastic relationships. These, what are called earlier, "pictorial elements" that animated visually as well as spatially the open free plan.

 

This is the moment when the technical conditions of the Dom-ino diagram, which change a building's structural solution and constructional methods, actually have an effect that is ultimately not about technology at all but rather about new possibilities of space, new possibilities of form, that now can be explored sculpturally, architecturally, as well as programmatically.

 

The fourth of the five points is the ribbon window or elongated window. The ribbon window is, in a way, a corollary of the free facade. It's a window that can be cut into a wall because the wall is not load-bearing.

But it also, as a device, negates the particular window, the framing window, which is about one individual positioning himself in a vertical rectangle.

 

The ribbon window is a collective window. It's not an individual window, and it's also not a window that stabilizes at one point Perspective.

 

It's rather a window that produces a panorama. It's almost like a cinematic version of a window, rather than a painterly version of a window. We can think of the ribbon window as being an analog of a tracking shot in a movie.

 

Le Corbusier insisted that, though it was developed for domestic use, it could become a standardized, mechanized, mass-produced element for all types of buildings.

 

Finally, the fifth point, the free facade. The free facade establishes the compositional pictorial availability of the surface wall-- even as it also allows the thinness of that wall to be more membrane-like: a kind of thinner wrapper that encloses the building and emphasizes the volumetric qualities that were so important for Le Corbusier over the static compression structural qualities.

 

The wall becomes a light membrane that allows the window to be extended without interruption. But it also allows other kinds of openings to be much more varied and to be composed geometrically and visually, rather than being determined constructionally or structurally.

Villa Savoye

One can almost say that the choreographed movement through space punctuated by moments of pause, this itinerary of rotation and frontality that we've been discussing, itself constitutes another point of the new architecture.

Le Corbusier will later give this principle a name. He calls it the "architectural promenade."You enter: the architectural spectacle at once offers itself to the eye:

 

you follow an itinerary and the perspectives develop with great variety; developing a play of light on the walls or making pools of shadow. Large windows open up views of the exterior where the architectural unity is-asserted."Here, reborn for our modern eye, are historic architectural discoveries: the pilotis, the long windows, the roof garden, the glass facade."

 

Le Corbusier is describing the Villa Savoye at Poissy.While at the Villa La Roche, the spatial articulations of the interior were conceived in relation to an exterior that was still itself plastic and still could move around and be varied. Now at the Villa Savoye, the villa has become a total object, through which the will of the epoch could be affirmed.

 

 

The signs of Purist composition that we saw in the prospects of frontality at La Roche, and through the kind of energetic swirling at Garches, here take on a more material consistency. At the same time, the prismatic envelope of Garchesis re-asserted to contain the equally variability of surfaces at La Roche. The architectural solutions of this elementary ribbon window, of the enclosed terrace, become a kind of insistence of this total object.

 

And at the same time, while we have this kind of functional minimalism of the interior, almost like railway sleeping cars, like ship cabins, like airplane cockpits. At the same time, there is an architectural solution that shows its real concern to be the relation of people to these new conditions.

 

The Villa Savoye is the epitome of the functional stratification of the section. Of raising the pilotis, freeing the ground plane for movement, transportation, recreation, for vegetation. The house above is completely ordered and controlled, while the earth below is free and available for collective occupation,

for collective use. And now for the first time at the Villa Savoyeis a coupling of object-type, of which the Villa Savoye is only one.

 

For example, the automobile, itself a paradigm of the object-type, now comes into the site and moves under the building through the pilots to interact spatially and functionally with the house itself. At the lower level, than the entrance level, the curved surface of the industrialized glass which defines the volume of the entry halls itself determined by the curving radius, the turning radius of the automobile.

 

Here, two object types come together and interact. As you penetrate that glass wall and enter the entry hall, you see first on the one side a ramp that leads you up to the piano nobile, up to the main floor.

 

Adjacent to the ramp is a sink, assembled together with one of the pilotis, a very large industrial ramp, and a table attached to the piloti. There's a kind of assemblage of object-type. The sink itself is a mass-produced, highly refined, functional vessel for cleansing that stands as almost like it's one of the object-types of his Purist paintings.

 

And the sink is juxtaposed, like in an assemblage, with this industrial lamp, which, at first, seems out of scale. It doesn't seem domestic at first. But it kind of gets domesticated in its assemblage by its interaction with the small table, with the piloti, and with the sink.

 

But the combination of sink and ramp, as unusual as that is, it's not just two industrial types coming together. The place that you find the combination of sink and ramp is at the entry to a religious building, like a mosque, or a synagogue, or a church, where you first cleanse yourself and then enter, slowly, and ascend to a sacred space.

 

The juxtaposition of these various object types creates a kind of metonymic relationship, or an assemblage, that makes connectivity that extends the domain of the house itself out into the industrial world.

 

The "architectural promenade" begins at the moment of stasis where the sink and the ramp have come together at the entry. Remember the name architectural promenade is the name Le Corbusier gave to this itinerary of movement, rotation, and frontality through a building.

 

In the case of the Savoye, the ramp becomes the instrument of that architectural promenade. And it operates in two ways. First of all, it operates as a path, or as a vertical space that cuts through the horizontal slabs.

 

In the Dom-ino system, the horizontal slabs are determinate, and you move through those through a stairway or other circulations. But the ramp cuts through those horizontal slabs and establishes a vertical slice of space that unites the slabs in a different way than the stair.

 

Now, it is the case that even at the Villa Savoye, there's also a stair that provides a parallel, but different, kind of vertical circulation through the horizontal slabs.

 

And that combination of ramp and stair-- they're actually very, very close to one another and they connect with each other as you move through. That's also an important apparatus of the architectural promenade.

 

So as you get on the ramp and go through, and then turn around and come back, still inside the house, but at the top of the second part of the ramp, you reach a moment where the stair has also come up and made a landing. So the ramp and the stair connect at that point.

 

At that landing, you have a choice. Either you go into the main living space of the house, or you move through the glass curtain wall outside into a very large terrace. That living space and the terrace interact in a very porous and transparent way.

 

There's almost no distinction between the space of the living room and the space of the terrace.And indeed, in good weather, you can slide the glass doors open and it would become the same space.

 

The ramp then moves from an interior ramp into an exterior ramp that looks out onto the terrace. It again loops back on itself one more time. And you get to the top of the ramp, which is at the highest point of a second roof terrace where Le Corbusier put a warped kind of curvilinear surface, punctured by a single aperture that frames a view out into the distant fields and woods beyond.

 

So you've moved through an environment of industrialized glass, of industrialized lamps, of automobiles, into a more refined space. But still a kind of minimalist space of white walls, out onto a terrace, and then moving up into an area that you get glimpses now of the natural landscape, and then finally to the final moment of pause at this aperture where the landscape opens up. In Villa La Roche and Villa Garches, there is this itinerary of rotation and frontality.

 

There, the rotation is initiated by the surfaces of the walls themselves, by balconies puncturing through the walls, by apertures in the walls, by a curvilinear surface that comes and confronts us and makes a kind of pressure on the space.

 

So the wall surfaces control that or ply that rotation. In the Villa Savoye, the ramp becomes the armature that more immediately and strictly controls that rotation. But it still opens up variability.

 

Now it's not just the variability of the walking through the space, but it's a variability, a vision, that is constantly framed by the interaction of the ramp as an armature with the vertical walls and apertures as framing devices.

 

And as you move through the house, moments, not so much strictly frontal but now framed in a more variable way, moments are framed and pauses are caused because of the ramp itself and its interaction with other parts of the house.

 

The ramp is the primary device that Le Corbusieruses to connect different parts of the house, setting up these interactions with different parts of the house. The ramp diagrams potentials for occupation. But the ramp is also a device for connecting with conditions outside the house.

 

What Le Corbusier would consider the eternal goods, like access to the earth, access to the sky, open-air for physical health. All these are made possible by what he called a "machine for living."A machine, this object type, the house itself, that diagrams potentials for occupation.

 

The diagram, which is the house, constructs a world. But it's not a world--just an immediate world-- it also is a world yet to come. The machine for living constructs a real-world that is yet to come.A new type of reality.

 

A reality that will find its ultimate fulfillment in the future. In 1930, Le Corbusier pondered over the house she had built over the previous decade. And he singled out what he called compositions, which are the sort of different ways that the houses had responded to the initial Dom-ino diagram.

 

He contrasted what he called the somewhat facile, picturesque, and hectic genre of the Villa La Roche, to the very difficult design of the prism of Garches, which then led, he said, to the spiritual satisfaction which came at Villa Savoye.

 

The very easy, practical, combinable type, which was the synthesis of the genre that had begun with the Dom-ino.It was the machine for living in the new world.