Le Corbusier – ‘Architecture Is’ #2

 

In anticipation of a presentation I am giving to an Architectural group next week I have drawn a series on Architecture. I am also highlighting the architect who gave us the quote.

 

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier is an interesting architect for the 21st century to consider. His work often is disparaged as machine-like and soulless or as boring and mundane. But often those estimations are given with some ignorance of the radical nature of his contribution during his era.

Citizen Kane 

I remember my daughter going through the AFI top 100 films of all time when she was younger. She wanted to watch as many as she could. Number #1 on the list was ‘Citizen Kane’ by Orson Welles.  We looked forward to it with anticipation for weeks.  When we finally saw it we were very disappointed. There was no way we thought it was the best movie of all time.

But when we found out a bit more about the movie and how it was made, we came to understand why at the time, and for a long time after, it was considered the greatest.  It was because it broke so much new ground in story telling, cinematography, lighting, plot, acting, etc. It just broke the mold in so many ways.  But guess what? It was so amazing that it got copied incessantly over the next 50 years. So much so that when we look at it now we see a lot of very typical techniques and methods that don’t surprise us at all. They have been repeated ad nauseum and we have been jaded.  But if you look at the movie with having never seen all the decades of watered down repetition, then you see it’s singular status as a great movie.

 

What Was New is No Longer

That is how it is with the work of Le Corbusier. We have seen so much of what he did watered down into the typical boring building block of a building. It’s starkness and emptiness is copied but without the incredible innovation of material and philosophy that Le Corbusier had at the time.  

All this is not to say I love all his work. I think much of it is boring and dead and philosophically dated. But the essence of his vision is an amazing one, even if the execution tended to be more stolid and ugly.

 

Some Examples

Villa Savoye – 1928 – Poissy-sur-Seine, France

 

 

 

He had 5 points to his new architectural aesthetic that were all embodied in this home. As a result it became one of the most recognizable buildings in the ‘International Style’ and influenced thousands of buildings to come.

 

• Support of ground-level columns to allow continuity of the garden beneath.
• Functional roof serving as a garden and terrace.
• Free floor plan with few load-bearing walls.
• Long horizontal windows.
• Freely-designed facades.

 

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The Curutchet House – 1949 – La Plata, Argentina

 

If you want an idea of how radical Le Corbusier was, just look at the home next to the one he built.  That was the norm of the era and he created this rectangular skeleton of a building that brought in a lot of light in a very odd shaped lot.

 

 

 

You can see here how it went back from the front at what is almost a 45º angle.  A unique solution, no doubt.

 

 

I saw an episode of a TV show called ‘Extreme Builds’ last week. They built the house while keeping a tree that happened to be right in the middle of one of the bedrooms.  Here Le Corbusier did the same many decades before.

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Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut – 1950 – Ronchamp, France

 

 

Le Corbusier developed a much more fluid and organic building when he was commissioned to do a religious chapel. It’s innovative construction techniques allow the roof to look like it’s floating when it is actually held up by support columns.
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Unité d’Habitation – 1947 – Marseille, France

 

 

 

 

Le Corbusier built 4 versions of this same apartment building throughout Europe. It’s use of rough concrete (Beton Brut) brought on the phenomenon known as Brutalist Architecture.

 

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Centre Le Corbusier  (Heidi Weber Museum) – 1963

 

This building was built by Le Corbusier to highlight his architectural work and his archives.

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Le Corbusier also was involved in the design of the United Nations headquarters in New York. I did not include it because he was not the predominant architect on the project. He did have substantial say in the overall layout of the buildings in the allotted space.

If you are interested in not just the history of Architecture, but the history of social engineering and how architecture played a role in those efforts during the 20th century Le Corbusier is one of the essential designers you need to be familiar with. He is well worth investigating not just for his buildings but for his wide-spread influence in so many fields of creative and commercial endeavors.

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Here are the other Architects and historians I’ve written about so far:

• Julia Morgan
• Le Corbusier
• Mies van der Rohe
• Spiro Kostof

 

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Here is a poster of all four architecture drawings available via Zazzle.

 

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