On Making "Sunbath -Villa Savoye, 1931"
Seen from above, the house stops being a house and becomes a diagram of a life.
This is the roof garden the fifth of Corbusier's five points, and the one I think he loved most, because it is the least rational. Everything below is grid and column and glass, discipline stacked on discipline. But up here, the geometry breaks open. A curved wall shelters a sunbath. A ramp cuts diagonally through the plan like a river refusing to follow the property lines. Colored tiles red, yellow, blue sit on the terrace floor like a Mondrian painting laid flat, waiting to be walked on rather than looked at.
I wanted to draw this as a plan, not a perspective, because a plan is the most honest thing an architect can leave behind. It is the building with its skin removed pure intention. And what this intention reveals is almost tender: after all the manifestos about machines and mass production, Corbusier still designed a private, curving, sun-warmed room in the sky, open only to weather and thought.