The Villa Savoye That Never Was
Part of my duties as teaching assistant is to demonstrate the process of doing a digital reconstruction. I'll save you the boredom and cut to the chase. Villa Savoye is perhaps one of the most impressive buildings ever built and certainly one of Le Corbusier's best. During the course of designing the building many different schemes were proposed but due to budget constraints the constructed house was more modest than had been expected. For the purposes of this exercise I've used a picture I took at the Villa last week and modified it to represent what one of the possible schemes would have looked like.
Which one is actually built? The top image is the original and the bottom is my reconstruction of what the Savoye may have looked like had there been enough money to add another level of bedrooms. In this more elaborate scheme the upper level of the open-air roof garden is actually the master bedroom. While the clients may have enjoyed this lavish rooftop suite, had it been built that way we would have lost the now famous picture frame window that one sees in the as-built photograph (top). This aperture in the free form wall on the roof doesn't look very special from the ground, but from the rooftop it acts as a poignant frame on axis with the ramp that one takes to reach the rooftop.
--Posted 02/05/04 02:45AM