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| Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye |
Throughout history, but
particularly during the twentieth century, architects have been seduced by
powerful visual images which have been reinterpreted (or misapplied) in building types quite divorced in function and scale from the seminal work which
provided the image in the first place.
Therefore, the visual imagery of Le
Corbusier’s Villa Savoye ,
a weekend house in Poissy for a wealthy bourgeois Parisian family, has been
freely applied to such diverse buildings as a scientific research establishment or a parish church.
Moreover, by way of emphasizing the inherent longevity of such images, these
reinterpretations post-date the original by as much as four decades.
EXPRESSION
v SUPPRESSION
However, be it for symbolic or
contextual reasons, or even to satisfy the designer’s stylistic predilections,
expression of the external skin of the building may override any considerations
for plan, structure and construction. In extremism such attitudes lead us to historical revivalism
where the ‘facade’ literally disguises all potential for tectonic display.
whilst this may be one intriguing manifestation of a pluralist world,
nevertheless, because of an obsession with limited stylistic concerns, such a
course inevitably leads to an architectural cul de sac.
It was Lubetkin who remarked that
one of the most difficult tasks facing the architect was giving a building ‘a
hat and a pair of boots’. In the event he followed the Corbusian example
of allowing the building to ‘hover’ over
the site on free-standing columns, thereby offering a transitional void between
the building and the site; at roof level, a carefully organized repetitive
facade was terminated by an eruption of plastic formal incident which
effectively finished off the building with a silhouette akin to abstract
sculpture.
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| classical language of architecture |
The classical language of
architecture had offered a whole range of devices for establishing a
satisfactory transition between the building and the ground, and, indeed, for
terminating the facade at roof level; such were the roles of the rusticated
base and entablature respectively and architects have since reinterpreted these
devices in various ways. Whilst various alternatives to the classical base or
podium have been evolved as plinths firmly to wed the building to its site, it
is the role of the roof in determining how a building looks which has most
taxed architects’ visual imaginations.
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