Modern Architecture: Five Points and the Free Plan

For centuries, walls did double duty: they divided rooms and held up the building. Thick load-bearing walls meant fixed window placement and floor plans that stacked the same way on every level, since moving a wall could bring down the floor above. Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture, developed around 1927, broke that link. Thin reinforced concrete columns called pilotis take over the structural job, lifting the building off the ground and carrying the loads down to isolated footings instead of continuous walls.

Once a skeleton carries the weight, everything else becomes optional rather than structural. The free plan lets interior walls land anywhere on any floor, since none of them are holding up the ceiling. The free facade lets the exterior wall become a thin non-load-bearing skin, which is why ribbon windows can run uninterrupted across an entire wall instead of being squeezed between structural piers. The roof, freed from pitched forms needed to shed weight onto walls, becomes flat and usable as a garden. Villa Savoye shows all five points working together: pilotis lift the house, a ramp spirals through the open plan across three levels, ribbon windows wrap the box, and a garden sits on the roof.

Frank Lloyd Wright pushed the same logic outward instead of upward. At Fallingwater, 1939, reinforced concrete cantilevers extend the free plan into the free facade's cousin: terraces that hang over Bear Run with no columns under their tips, the load carried back into a stone core. The same idea, structure moved inward or hidden, later lets skyscraper walls become nothing but hung glass, since an internal steel frame does all the carrying.