Despite Mme Savoye and her son’s resistance to handing over the building, it was forcibly appropriated by the city, who altered it to become a short term youth center and who had an eventual plan to tear down the home and build a school in its place. Child-proofing the villa involved closing off certain areas with doors, blocking windows, and repainting the building, a process which effectively destroyed Le Corbusier’s original vision. While the city had been encroaching upon the space since 1951, in 1958, the legal process for acquiring the grounds began, and in early 1959, Mme Savoye informed Le Corbusier of the city of Poissy’s plan.
Immediately, Le Corbusier sprang to action, contacting Sigfried Giedion, a prominent architecture critic at the time, and José Luis Sert, a fellow architect and city planner. Giedion and Sert in turn contacted France’s Minister of Culture André Malraux. The two then went on to organize a campaign that resulted in a torrent of telegrams to the Minister from modern architects in the United States and Great Britain. Le Corbusier also contacted UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, requesting support for preservation of his work.  
The campaign to save Villa Savoye exploded, garnering support from Time Magazine, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and a lengthy list of important, respected individuals from all around the world. The result was the tentative establishment of Fondation Le Corbusier, the appointment of Le Corbusier as Chief Architect of Civil Buildings, which was a position necessary to work around red tape that would otherwise have prevented Le Corbusier from having control over the restoration and maintenance of Villa Savoye, and the listing of Villa Savoye as the first twentieth century work with historical protection in France.  
In 1962, Le Corbusier recorded his plans for changes to the building. While he wished the structure to remain unchanged, he wanted a new color scheme, changes to the lighting, public facilities on the ground flood, and finally waterproofing.  
A year later, Jean Dubuisson, the Chief Architect of Civil Buildings, National Galleries and Museums, was granted the job of working under Le Corbusier’s guidance as the architect who would restore Villa Savoye. Le Corbusier rightly felt he was running out of time and became frustrated with the younger architect’s failure to begin work on the building immediately and with his lack of communication. In 1965, Le Corbusier passed away and would not see the restoration completed.
Following Dubuisson’s eventual restoration, the building would become a museum that is still open to the public today, and interestingly, the school that almost led to the destruction of Corbusier’s most famous work was still later built nearby and acquired his nickname: Lycée Le Corbusier.
A first glance, the building looks incredibly simple. It’s just a white box on sticks.  However, while the building certainly had its structural flaws, it’s Villa Savoye’s apparent simplicity that makes it so impressive because it captures little more than only what Le Corbusier felt where the essentials of modern architecture.  
