Perhaps the Villa Savoye website tagline is the most concise explanation. Villa Savoye is a modernist manifesto. It’s the culmination of over a decade of works and theory, brought to life as a single, compact space. The building’s design is still impressive to think about today and its style is echoed throughout present-day works.
The building doesn’t have an intended front or back and is open and visually interesting from every side. This is one feature of the promenade architecturale, o r the architectural walk, a concept that aims to consider the viewing experience as a visitor traverses through, up to, and around the space. The ground floor glass walls are interesting and appear fragile and, paired with evenly spaced, thin, white columns, they sit under a larger, rectangular slab of concrete. While one might think this arrangement would make the building look unsteady, it instead makes the top floor look weightless and as though it’s floating.  
The five points of architecture mentioned earlier start with those thin, stilt-like pillars, which are called pilotis. Le Corbusier identified pilotis as the first of the five elements of modern architecture. Pilotis are inspired by peristyles, the porches formed by the iconic pillars used in Greek and Roman architecture. These concrete columns have come to take on many variations, both visually and functionally, in later architecture. They support the upper floor and remove the need for load-bearing walls, which in turn allows for two more of those important modern architecture elements: the free design of the interior and the free design of the facade.  
The free design of the interior was important to modern architects because it allowed them the freedom to design the floor plan however they’d like without the constraints of interior load-bearing walls dividing up what could otherwise be an open space. Pilotis c an be seen echoed throughout the interior of Villa Savoye because they now fill the role of what would have been walls.  
The free design of the facade is a similar idea. Along with removing the constraints of structural support from the interior walls, pilotis removed that burden from the exterior walls as well. Ground floor walls made of glass windows, like those seen at Villa Savoye’s base, were a manifestation of these new possibilities.
A horizontal line of side by side windows divides the second story concrete walls across their middles. These windows are another of Le Corbusier’s five elements of modern architecture: ribbon windows. They were designed with sunlight in mind and allow natural light to flood the second floor. They also line up with the horizon and give an interesting and beautifully framed view of the outdoors.
Atop the concrete slab sits the last of Le Corbusier’s five elements of modern architecture. A roof garden, or in this case, a terrace filled with plants, creates an outdoor space upon the flat roof. Roof gardens were especially important to Le Corbusier’s beliefs because he felt that these gardens helped to replace the greenery taken up by the building. A solarium rises out of one end of the roof and consists of two halves of a cylinder placed at opposite edges of the building and joined with a wall. The solarium controls a visitor’s views of the outdoors as well as the sunlight they receive when they’re in the garden. From there, a ramp leads back down to the second floor, which is open in the center, and acts as a lower level of the terrace. Huge windows separate this terrace from the interior, but it’s visually very open.
