In Paris, the deep design shift that occurred during the interwar years when Modernism superseded Art Deco has long kept architecture historians scribbling. But two events in Paris — a recent week of performances in Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye and “Moderne Maharajah,” a show at the Museum of Decorative Arts through January — open up our understanding of a period we thought we knew cold. Each of the two events sees design through a polarizing cultural lens.

The Villa Savoye, on the outskirts of the city, was recently the stage for a troupe of eight dancers performing a revue inspired by a presumed romance between the celebrated architect and the African-American- dance sensation Josephine Baker, who knew each other, to much speculation. The weekend house, designed by Corbusier — a white, pristine box with strip windows and a rooftop garden — embodied his mantra, “the house is a machine for living in.”

In this revue , part of “Modern Living,” an ongoing series of dances performed in historical modernist houses, Baker challenged Corbusier as the house’s dominant voice: “My ass is a machine for dancing,” declared the sexually liberated dancer of the 1920s and ’30s. The American artists and choreographers of “Modern Living,” Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, produced an hourlong show in which this mixed-race pair displaces France’s conventional bourgeois couple from the master bedroom.