Villa Sarabhai

In November 1951 Manorama Sarabhai, a young widow and heir to one of the city's most important dynasties, commissioned the villa; she wanted a house expressing Western modernism. The brief had to let her live with her two sons while staying flexible in use, and to open the house onto the lush park of the family estate.

Le Corbusier was left with one regret: the pool was not built to his plans. At the foot of the slide, he wrote, "the solicitude of an anxious mother" had reduced it to a basin for cooling the air. The Sarabhai family, who still own the house, look after it.

Le Corbusier picked the site so that the winds would pass through the house and so that it could barely be made out among the surrounding trees. It is divided into three parts: two apartments were created for the children, one on the ground floor and one upstairs, which a concrete slide links to the pool. The Catalan-vault principle, already used for the Jaoul houses in Neuilly, is taken up here: raw concrete and brick walls form a planted roof terrace and, inside, a shaded zone open to the garden on both sides. The walls carrying the vaults are pierced by openings of different sizes, giving a continuous spatial composition.

Private spaces are set apart from the reception rooms by small courtyards of the kind traditional in Indian architecture, used for ventilation. The house is only lightly partitioned: wooden blinds divide it, and heavy wooden doors close the garden-side rooms during the hottest hours, while concrete sunscreens add to the protection from the sun. Red, blue, yellow and grey colour the domestic spaces, balanced by the austerity of the outer walls in raw concrete, left bare or whitened. The black Madras stone floor follows the Modulor's dimensions; Le Corbusier calls it "optimum paving".

A private house, lived in by its owners.