"The house will stand in the midst of the fields like an object, without disturbing anything around it."

Le Corbusier

 

 

INTRODUCTION

This lovely building built by Le Corbusier in the 1920's and 1930's in Poissy, France, was adapted by Lego for its Architecture series and released in 2012. A rather beautiful model of 660 pieces and quite faithful to the original. Fortunately for me, an EBAY seller offered at a fair price a used but complete set of this expensive and much-sought-after discontinued model. I snapped it up.

CUSTOMIZATION

I made a few changes to the model. Photographs of the Villa Savoye strike me with the contrast between the white building, full of windows, on stilts and the setting of a large field of green with lush trees in the background. The main alterations I decided on were to:

• Enlarge the base to create a field of green grass
• Add some trees as a backdrop
• Substitute gray tiles to eliminate most of the studs showing in the walkways around the building
• Eliminate all the white studs on the roof
• Create more convincing plants in the garden areas of the roof

LIGHTING

The Villa Savoye has windows on all sides and facing the open areas on the roof. I ended up using the following Brickstuff materials:

• 7 Pico LED’s
• 1 LED light strip
• Extension cables, adapters, sticky pads, and the 3xAA battery pack.

I knew that transparent bricks would have to be substituted for solid ones in several locations to allow light to shine out the many windows.

THE BUILD

I created a 32 x 32 stud base with larger areas of green on all four sides. Gray studded bricks were replaced with gray tiles for the walkways. A channel was left between the base layers for the extension cables going to the adapter and the battery pack.

Transparent bricks were inserted in the rear wall and inside the rear window extension.

 

 

Little platforms were built on three sides of the central pillar onto which Pico lights and transparent round tiles were added. You can see one of the adapters from which extends an extra Pico wire and an extension cable to go up to the next floor.

On the second level, I left an opening (on the left side of the photo below) for wires coming up from below. Notice also the black transparent bricks used at several places to unblock light.

Four Pico lights and one LED light strip were installed onto this upper level. I particularly wanted one of the Pico LED’s to illuminate the gray open area on the roof. 

In order to create a stud-less roof design, I had to add one layer of bricks on all four walls before covering everything with white tiles. Adding this layer required adjusting the height of some of the roof structures so that everything balanced out. Not happy with the original Lego version of greenery in the open area of the roof, I created green plants from nanoblocks and glued them into upside-down Lego tiles (which made nice “planters”).

This model wouldn’t be right without some sort of attractive trees in the background. I happened upon a video from DownUnder Bricks here.

 

Below are photographs of the finished model, both unlit and lit.  You can see the rest of the images at my gallery here.