Resumen de Le Corbusier and the mysterious “résidence du président d’un collège”
At the very end of his travel to United States, Le Corbusier conceived and designed a modern villa that he latelyinserted in the third volume of his Oeuvre Complete with the title ‘Résidence du président d’un college près Chicago’ and fewwords below describing it. He interpreted a simple request for suggestions by Joseph Brewer, the president of the OlivetCollege, Michigan, into an actual commission for a new house that responded to the kind of works he expected from hisAmerican admirers. He possibly designed it in a few hours’ time from Kalamazoo to Chicago but the autograph hand-draftedplans and bird’s-eye perspective view in the Oeuvre Complete congruently describe a well-thought project showing a numberof affinities with his most celebrated European houses. The villa can be considered as an aware modular assemblage of partsthat he had previously designed or even built, tied together by a long and suggestive promenade architecturale, to offer the“timid” American people a sort of full scale model to introduce them to his vision of modern life.By analyzing Le Corbusier’s sketches and conjecturing both dimensions and missing elements from previous designs, a threedimensional digital model has been elaborated to virtually visit the résidence and understand its fictive and educationalvalue.
