 |
The centennial year celebrations for Le Corbusier included two very different shows in Paris: Beaubourg's blockbuster stressed architectural process, while the Hotel de Sully focused on Corbu's analogical way of thinking.
In 1987, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Le Corbusier seemed at last reconciled with the world at large-a world he so often antagonized during his lifetime. The Le Corbusier Foundation recorded no less than 44 Corbu shows throughout the world last year.' Besides the two shows in Paris that I want to discuss here, there were five other exhibitions in French-speaking countries alone. Among those many celebrations some were modest, some were more ambitious (such as "Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century," at the Hayward Gallery, London, Mar. 5-June 7, 1987), but none was more comprehensive than "L'Aventure Le Corbusier," held at the Centre Pompidou from Oct. 3, 1987 to Jan. 3, 1988. Being almost last in this series of homages to the architect, the Paris show needed a special angle. Had it been simply another blockbuster, it would have left barely a trace. This was not the case. On the contrary, it was a show that for the first time taught countless viewers how to look at architecture, perhaps more successfully than any previous architectural exhibition at Beaubourg.
Yet the Beaubourg show did have all the ingredients of a blockbuster-and its success with the public was phenomenal. First of all, it was enormous. To my knowledge, it was the largest exhibition ewer devoted to an architect. It took up the entire fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou-over 26,000 square feet, or more than half a football field. Then there was the bold intrusion of key objects meant to strike the public's imagination and to function as "markers"; these gave a certain rhythm and direction to the show. Many of these objects were exceptionally well chosen: for example, the spectacular 1928 Voisin (Le Corbusier's favorite automobile) that was visible even before one entered the show, or the exact replica of one of the apartments of the "Unite d'habitation" in Marseilles (1945-52), with a recorded interview with Le Corbusier about the building playing in the background. Some of the other markers were less effective, such as the life-sized solid-wood model of the "voiture maximum," 1928, a car that Le Corbusier designed, but never executed (and which unfortunately in this reconstruction was given a Westermann-like polyurethaned finish, in total contradiction to Le Corbusier's original idea).
The third blockbuster characteristic of this show was its encyclopedism. Visitors were invited to view a comprehensive whole which they could explore in two different ways: either as hurried tourists (in which case the very clear layout allowed the show to be "read" rapidly), or as conscientious students (and then, at least two visits were necessary). Visitors who opted for this second route had to work hard, but at least, upon leaving the exhibition, they could boast of having more or less mastered certain basic aspects of Le Corbusier's immense architectural output. Presumably it was these two different levels of reception that accounted for the exhibition's vast public appeal.
At first I wondered why the show's catalogue did not follow at all the didactic development of the exhibition. I soon realized, however, that the catalogue is as comprehensive as the show, though in a totally different manner. Entitled Le Corbusier, une encyclopedie, it is an excellent tool, compiled by Le Corbusier specialists from a variety of countries under the direction of Jacques Lucan. Each specialist was in charge of one or several alphabetical entries, and almost every building, biographical episode and subject having to do with Le Corbusier is presented here, some in great detail, others in a few sentences. While the show followed a more or less chronological plan, the alphabetical ordering of the catalogue imposes a different, if equally expansive, schema. Both seem to say, "Here you have a panoramic view of Le Corbusier's world. In this vast ensemble, there are problems and privileged objects. It is up to you to choose your area of preference. We are simply giving you the tools necessary to explore it in detail."
This, at least, was the impression the visitor to the exhibition had at first glance. But such encyclopedism also entails certain risks for the curators, since it necessitates dealing with the trouble spots or low points in Le Corbusier's vast work. Without dwelling on his political naivete and instability-which so often served as a pretext for his detractors not to take him seriously and which Jean-Louis Cohen analyzes very well n the catalogue)-one could point to his dreary plastic work which is saturated with kitsch, and which I feel could have been omitted from the exhibition entirely. A particularly dreadful introduction to this "kitschiness" stood at the entrance to the show-a hideous bronze-colored plastic enlargement of a model for Monument of the Open Hand. This work, along with seven or eight polychrome sculptures shown later in the exhibition, confirmed that, as great an architect as Le Corbusier was, he was an abominable sculptor.
He was also a very mediocre painter. I will admit that, historically, Le Corbusier's brief Purist period is somewhat interesting because of its influence on his architecture. (In fact, the two Purist rooms in the exhibition showed this nicely.) But I am not at all certain that the pre-Purist sketches of bohemian life he made when he first arrived in Paris (in the style of colored Pascins) or the bulk of his post-Purist paintings were worthy of being exhumed. Le Corbusier's architectural ideas hardly need to be set off in this way to stand out as the most important since Palladio's. I would even say that his ideas suffer as a result, and that the incrustations and frescoes he felt obliged to inflict upon us in his last buildings are like annoying warts from which we instinctively avert our gaze. The only real advantage of including these "art works" in this dense exhibition (in addition to the sculptures already mentioned, there were 260 drawings and studies for paintings, 45 paintings, 10 collages and 5 tapestries) was, paradoxically, that they offered little oases of repose. Since there wasn't much to contemplate in them, one could give one's eyes a B rest before attacking the architectural drawings, models and explanatory panels that followed. Bruno Reichlin, director of the School of Architecture of the University of Geneva and a respected Le Corbusier scholar, was one of the show's two organizers. (The other, Francois Burkhard, is the director of Beaubourg's Centre de Creation Industrielle.) Reichlin was apparently responsible for the exhibition's most important directions, including its main theme (which echoes a phrase of Le Corbusier's): "The useful is not the beautiful." In other words, this show claims that Le Corbusier was not a functionalist-contrary to what his postmodern detractors might say. For Reichlin, the functionalist reading of Le Corbusier's work is a drastic diminution of what he regards as one of the most ambitious intellectual undertakings of the century. It was this intellectual complexity, as well as the formal rigor of Le Corbusier's work, that Reichlin attempted to convey. Toward this end, the exhibition employed certain museological devices Reichlin had used previously in a wonderful exhibition he organized in Lugano in 1980 ("Le Corbusier: La Ricerca paziente"). The means that he chose were both simple and, at the same time, demanding for the viewer, as they were designed to show the actual processes of architectural work (this was in perfect keeping with Le Corbusier's truly modernist self-referential strategies). In order to do this, it was necessary to show the entire development of each architectural project, from the first thought that occurred in response to a commission to the final resolution of the problem to be solved, all the while offering an interpretation of the various changes that took place during the actual progress of the work.
Despite the major obstacle represented by the high degree of abstraction of architectural plans, Reichlin refused to resort to the use of luxurious photographs that architectural exhibitions so often shower us with. Such photographs only portray one aspect of the final result-most often biased. The exhibition's theme"The useful is not the beautiful"-paraphrases Le Corbusier and suggests that perhaps he was less of a functionalist than his postmodernist detractors seem to think.
Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater," for example, show the house towering above a waterfall, when in reality it is nestled in a hole.) Instead, Reichlin's approach was characterized by a respect for his audience, a kind of gamble that the viewer is capable of understanding the evolution of a project through detail. With each of Le Corbusier's works, Reichlin ingeniously combined statements about the concept of the project (sometimes simply a letter from the client), original plans and drawings, models of the various stages and sometimes of particular details (made especially for the show), explanatory diagrams, models of the final project and photographs of the buildings at the time of their construction (if in fact they were constructed, which, as we know, was rare).
Le Corbusier was not fond of presentation models, and this explains why the exhibition contained (relatively) few original models. There were only 15 original models in all, some of them rather shabby. A few were magnificent, however, particularly the huge, solid-wood model of his Chandigarh complex, 1953-61 (the model measures 7'3/a by 1031/2 by 811/2 inches). Still, it was clear that Le Corbusier's indifference to models did not stem from an inability to think of his architecture in spatial terms. On the contrary, one could say that his grasp of space was perfect, in the same way that one says that certain musicians have "perfect pitch." He could immediately transpose into volume the least little sketch that his hand committed to paper. Indeed, Le Corbusier's preferred medium was the freehand sketch, the rapid outline which armies of assistants were then left to interpret and to execute cleanly and crisply under his punctilious eye.
Reichlin leads us to understand that Le Corbusier was much more interested in the process of the work than in its final product. (Although the "product" is paramount, since it is the building as we eventually see it.) And, for the nonspecialized viewer who might be intimidated by plans, there is no better way to show the evolution of an architectural idea and the importance of thinking in architectural terms (or, as Le Corbusier himself said, of "architecturing") than a series of models. Thus the curator had almost to ignore Le Corbusier's indifference to models and, in a sense, go beyond it. Most likely there has never before been such an abundance of architectural models created for a one-person show. In all, there were more than 60 models, often two or three of a single building. And never before were models used with such pedagogical efficiency. More than half were devoted to highlighting a key moment in the evolution of a project or a significant detail in the final structure.
The way the exhibition was laid out was very clear: perpendicular to the huge longitudinal space that constitutes a Beaubourg floor, very thick freestanding walls were placed every 12 feet. Both sides of each of these long walls presented a study on a single theme (e.g., "Le Corbusier and De Stijl," "Le Corbusier and Constructivism," "Urban Theories"). At either end of each of these spans were one or more models corresponding to that particular theme and forming a kind of street, parallel to the length of the museum. This regular grid, designed by the architect Vittorio Gregotti, was interrupted by four boxlike rooms that divided the exhibition into three chronological segments. Room 1 was devoted to the reconstitution of architectural spaces (not always very convincing) and to Le Corbusier's furniture. Room 2 was smaller and focused on the origins of Purism. Room 3, much larger, was devoted to later, more "mature" Purism (and included a collection of very prosaic objects which served as Le Corbusier's inspiration for the paintings). Room 4 was divided into three sections: section one contained a life-sized replica of a unit of the Unite d'habitation, and the second section contained documents and models related to this project (among them was a derogatory press clip about Levittown saved by Le Corbusier-a playful gibe at Venturi before the fact!-and an extraordinary original model that clarified Le Corbusier's favorite metaphor for this building: the apartment house as bottle rack, every unit set individually into a structural grid). The third section of this room was filled with abominable sculptures and paintings from Le Corbusier's late period.
The first third of the show-between Room 1 and Room 2-was devoted to Le Corbusier's early years and his education (up to Purism). It held many surprises for nonspecialists, among them the facts that the future king of architectural "nudism" had admired the architectural ornaments of Florence and Ravenna, as well as Louis XV furniture; that he had spent his youth drawing decorative watchcases; and that he had an impassioned interest in Nietzsche and Renan. These things are not common knowledge. But for anyone who is familiar with the writings of Paul Turner (The Education of Le Corbusier, Boston, Garland, 1977) or M.P.M. Sekler (The Early Drawings of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Boston, Garland, 1977), this section of the exhibition was the least enlightening. For, although at this early stage Le Corbusier had constructed a few villas in his hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds, he was not yet "Le Corbusier." (Hence one did not find here the demonstrations of architectural process that appeared later in the show.) Not only did he not yet use his pseudonym, but all this "prehistory" does not even appear in his Oeuvre complete, which he himself supervised after 1929. However, a few traits brought to light in this part of the show are worth mentioning. In particular, the show demonstrated Le Corbusier's very precocious interest in framing; in his drawings he often used the traditional device of the vedute to let us peep at some architectural feature of the landscape. He was also fascinated by the play of parallaxes, and his drawings often represented buildings obliquely or partly hidden by elements in the foreground so as to emphasize the transience of perception. And finally Le Corbusier's continual concern for the relations between architecture and its site was demonstrated in his numerous travel sketches, as well as in the drawings for the Villa Schwob, which, from the outside, changes its aspect radically according to point of view, and, from the inside, has apertures that frame the landscape.
This introductory section also brought out Le Corbusier's debt to Auguste Perret, in whose firm he once worked, and an astute comparison was made (by means of models) between Perret's famous rue Franklin building of 1902 and Le Corbusier's later Domino system. Also stressed were Le Corbusier's omnivorous self-education (there was a presentation of the books he read in his youth, from Ruskin to Owen Jones, and a delineation of his youthful travels) and his seeming provinciality when he first arrived in Paris in 1908 (though he was already a seasoned traveler, having made extensive trips throughout the Orient and Germany).
Between Room 2 and Room 3 a very lively presentation was made of Le Corbusier's activities as a writer, editor and entrepreneur during the 1920s (including models, publications, documents related to L'Espril Nouveau or to his own works, and patents of all sorts, particularly for sliding windows). After this interlude in the exhibition, one entered the vast complexities of the architecture of Le Corbusier at mid-career. Visitors were first presented with three dossiers that are vital to an understanding of his mature period. The first dossier dealt with urbanism (and included documentation on Pessac, the small "city" of workers' housing that Le Corbusier built near Bordeaux in 1925, and drawings for the 1929 Buenos Aires conferences). The second dossier presented Le Corbusier's notion of the "technical" as the foundation for the "lyrical" (given as examples were the double glass wall of the Salvation Army building in Paris, 1929-33, and the "exact respiration"-a sort of forerunner to modern central air conditioningof the Centrosoyuz in Moscow, 1929-33; in both cases, a new technical device was the starting point for Le Corbusier's invention of an unusual form).
The third dossier focused on what the curators aptly termed Le Corbusier's "project strategies," that is, the analogical mode of thought he used. Some of these analogies were mechanical, but others were more complex. For example, the Unite d'habitation in Marseilles, 1947-52, was conceived as the cross section of a transatlantic liner, and the roof of the Ronchamp Chapel (1950-55) was modeled on a crab shell. To emphasize this last analogy, a large crab was on display in the exhibition, serving as a quasiSurrealist presence against Gregotti's immaculate white walls. The famous manifesto "Five Points of Architecture" (emphasizing the free plan) was interpreted as one of these analogical "project strategies," a system that allowed Le Corbusier to overcome production crises over a period of at least ten years.
The framework of Le Corbusier's work having thus been established, the exhibition proceeded to offer its first concrete architectural proofs of these ideas: the regular alternation of elements in the gridlike structure of the Villa Savoye (1928-32) until Le Corbusier pierced it with the ramp that splits the staircase and offers another kinesthetic perception of the building; the successive transformations of the Villa de Mandrot (1930-32) by means of a simple displacement of modular units; the radical alteration of the Villa La Roche (1924) after Le Corbusier discovered the De Stijl exhibition in Paris (walls, floors and window panels were changed so as to form continuous axes from their intersection); his "antithetical rhetoric" in the "Little House on the Lake" in Corseaux, 1924 (there, the house opens onto the lake by a single, 11-meterlong window, but in the garden the view of the lake is blocked by a wall and revealed only through a small opening); the "elegant solution" of the project for the Villa Baizeau, 1928-30, at Carthage (in which both the Domino and Citrohan systems are used, one being nested inside or overlapped with the other) ;2 and so on.
A considerable change of scale occurred with the big projects for the League of Nations headquarters (Geneva) of 1927, an international competition for which Le Corbusier's entry was disqualified (for a trivial reason: it was stenciled rather than inked). This disqualification prompted a scandal that led to the establishment of the CLAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), and with this building a new imperative came into being: a building must serve as a carrier of a political message (here pacifism) and as an optimistic image of a new age. The same idea was expanded in the Mundaneum Project (1929), also planned for Geneva, a utopian dream of a vast cultural and international center commissioned by the pacifist leader Paul Otlet, but never built.
If the League of Nations project and the Mundaneum remained on paper, Le Corbusier was more successful with the Centrosoyuz, an office building in Moscow for which he won the international competition, and which was built, with many construction difficulties, between 1930 and 1936. Going to Russia in 1928 to discuss these plans, Le Corbusier was hailed as a pioneer by the Constructivist avant-garde and by the government. In turn, he marveled at the communal way of life he was discovering, and he returned again in 1930 to present his urban theories. Impressed by the political status given to architecture in Russia, Le Corbusier later decided to overlook the painful fact that he was not allowed to visit the building site of the Centrosoyuz and agreed to participate in the invitational competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1931-32. There the giganticism of Le Corbusier's plan was particularly striking, a fact which was emphasized in the exhibition by the proximity of models of the four projects (the League of Nations, the Mundaneum, the Centrosoyuz, and the Palace of the Soviets) at the same scale. The Palace of the Soviets could have almost contained the three other buildings.
Next, at Beaubourg, in order to offset any idea of a "revolutionary Le Corbusier" that his newfound interest in the Soviet experience might imply, a wall was devoted to his relations with the traditional French bourgeoisie, using the typologies of the private townhouse (transferred from horizontal to vertical in the famous project for the Immeuble-villa) and the artist's studio. In addition, Le Corbusier's interest in vernacular architecture and regional materials was demonstrated by the unrealized Errazuriz house (1930). Other dossiers demonstrated his fascination with religious architecture and, conversely, the "secularization of the interior" that Le Corbusier carried out, struggling against the bourgeois idea of the interior as "a casket for the private man" (as Walter Benjamin would say).
Corbusier's disinterest in models was not due to an inability to think of architecture in spatial terms. On the contrary, his grasp of space was perfect, like musicians who have "perfect pitch."
One proof of the exhibition's ingenuity was the masterful way in which it made the viewer accept a part of Le Corbusier's theory that is the most academic and dated: his theory concerning the use of proportional grids (without even getting into the mystico-organic mess that constituted his Modulor system). An extraordinary didactic model (made for the show) of the facade of the hosiery factory that Le Corbusier built in Saint-Die in 1946-51 (a consolation prize after his project to rebuild the city was rejected) showed how the contrapuntal system of the three plastic elements (the spacing of the reinforced concrete supporting structure, the concrete grid of the brise-soleil and the latticework of the glass expanses of the openings) was based on a harmony of proportions.
Finally, the last part of the exhibition was clearly focused on the problems of urbanism that preoccupied Le Corbusier more and more at the end of his career. It started with a dossier on the Unite d'habitation in Marseilles. Then it continued, in a flashback, with a section examining Le Corbusier's early interest in urban planning (as early as 1915, there is an unfinished manuscript on the question of, and a project for, the garden city). There followed investigations of the great urban "solutions" Le Corbusier proposed for Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Algiers and Saint-Die, between 1925 and 1945; and dossiers on Chandigarh and the Venice hospital (unfortunately the exhibition did not explain why this building-meant to be an entire city unto itself and which would have been one of the most beautiful works of Le Corbusier's late periodwas never constructed). The last wall, facing Beaubourg's glass facade, was devoted to Le Corbusier's relation to Paris as the backdrop for his architecture. There was no better place to show what Manfredo Tafuri would call the "function of the city as memory" in Le Corbusier's work. One understood then that his infamous Voisin Plan of 1925 (which proposed to level most of Paris, except for such historical monuments as the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, and replace it with a grid of skyscrapers) was more a theoretical model than an actual proposal. And if the exhibition devoted a good deal of attention to the Surrealist roof terrace of the Beistegui apartment (1930-31), whose enclosing walls deliberately blocked off views of the Parisian skyline, it was merely to show that Le Corbusier could find other means than destructive ones to enhance his ideas about the urban context as history. In fact, the organizers were particularly astute in having chosen to show a project dealing with Montmartre, which could be seen in the distance from the project's very spot in the museum.
Perhaps some would complain about the gaps in the exhibition (for example, the admirable Jaoul House, 1954-56, was missing), but in my opinion this would be unfair. Never before has architectural thought been exhibited with such brio, both in the details of its process and in its global vision. And, as far as I know, the visitor to an architectural exhibition has never been treated with such respect.
B y contrast, the scope of "Le Corbusier: Le passe ä reaction poetique" (Dec. 9, 1987Mar. 6, 1988), organized by Pierre Saddy and Claude Malecot for the National Fund for Historic Monuments at the Hotel de Sully, was much more modest. It was more like a stroll through an artist's work-where one might chance upon some delightful finds-than a systematic exhibition. Its point of departure was the idea of the "objet ä reaction poetique" that Le Corbusier developed rather late (in 1960), in order to justify his lifelong passion for organic forms such as shells, pebbles, bones and pieces of driftwood.
What if one were to consider that the analogical workings of Le Corbusier's thought had been entirely dominated by the "reaction poetique"? In other words, was Le Corbusier motivated by a certain amazement with the "readymade"whether from the past or from the products of industry, natural objects or primitive art? When the curators pose these seemingly naive questions, the resulting answers actually manage to revitalize the traditional discussion of Le Corbusier's sources and influences. And whereas at Beaubourg the entire section dealing with Le Corbusier's education fell flat and seemed somehow alien to what followed it, the first part of the exhibition at the Hotel de Sully was totally fascinating.
I can only briefly outline here some of the analogies that pervade Le Corbusier's discourse and which lie behind his project strategies: the "primitive temple" that Reinhold von Lichtenberg imagined in 1909, and which is reproduced in L'Esprit Nouveau, is a kind of camping tent that Le Corbusier had in mind when he designed his Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the Paris World's Fair in 1937; the Chaldean pyramids reproduced by Charles Chipiez and Georges Perrot in their Histoire de fart daps l'antiquite (1884-1903), which Le Corbusier often consulted, reappear in the project for the Mundaneum; the asymmetry of the Acropolis and the irregularity of the support structure of the Parthenon obsessed Le Corbusier all his life, as did the imbalance in the plans for the houses at Pompeii; the pools of light in the Serapeum of the Villa Hadriana, drawn in 1911 but not published with the pages from the same report in L'Esprit Nouveau, resurface in the openings in the chapel at Ronchamp and the convent at La Tourette; the Charterhouse of Ema, which Le Corbusier visited in 1907 and 1911, was at the origin of his research in the area of worker housing and his "cellular" idea in the Immeuble-villa of 1922; and so on.
In addition to these "quotes," which are always indirect, the exhibition proved that Le Corbusier was a very careful "copier." At the Musee de Sculpture Comparee (founded by Viollet-le-Duc in order to provide architects with a historical culture other than the one propounded by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts), he was constantly drawing Romanesque sculpture; at the Musee de Cluny, he copied tapestries and miniatures. For his book project on the "Construction of Cities," in 1915, he copied plates from a number of 18thand 19th-century books in the Bibliotheque Nationale. We learn that the cliches describing Le Corbusier as a great believer in the tabula rasa are nothing but caricature. It is also surprising to see that he was truly taken by the cathedrals at Chartres and Rouen (and even NotreDame in Paris), since he always maintained that the Gothic cathedral was plastically "inferior."
Le Corbusier was self-taught. His attitude towards the past was cannibalistic., but not historicist. In fact, it is precisely because of his lack of historical knowledge that he was able to be amazed by anything that was not, as he called it, "Great Art."
This theme fueled the second section of the exhibition, devoted to "primitive" arts and to folklore. The catalogue quotes from a dazzling short text by Le Corbusier, published in L'Esprit Nouveau in 1924, in which he talks about "his" museums and what he found useful in each. In addition to Cluny and the Musee de Sculpture Comparee, there was the Musee Guimet (for its Khmer art and Japanese statues), the Pavillon de Marsan (for its Persian rugs), the Museum of Natural History (for its "shells, birds, large prehistoric skeletons…. The first introduction to the mechanics of things"), the ethnographic museums of Trocadero and Berlin (for Mexican, African and Peruvian art), the British Museum (for art from Benin), the Ethnographic Museum of Belgrade (for popular art), the South Kensington Museum in London (for textiles from India), the ethnographic museum in Florence (for Etruscan art), the National Museum of Athens (for the Atrides) and the Museum of Naples and Pompeii (for ancient decorative art). The exhibition meticulously enumerated these various arts and analyzed Le Corbusier's relation to each, showing drawings and objects he brought back from his many voyages and "primitive" art objects he bought from antique dealers.
The exhibition entitled "Primitive Arts in the Home" (1935), organized by Louis Carre in Le Corbusier's studio, was better represented here than at Beaubourg, where there was a rather clumsy attempt at duplicating it. Among the natural "objets ä reaction poetique" from that exhibition there was the famous Moscophore, an ancient Greek sculpture whose plaster cast had been "polychromed" by Le Corbusier. (An entire subdivision of the 1935 exhibition was devoted to the theme "Praxiteles bores me.") In addition, one learned that Le Corbusier himself had organized, at the Grand Palais in 1940, an exhibition with the very colonial title "Les Arts de la France d'Outremer" (or "The Arts of France Overseas"), devoted to African and Oceanic arts.
In keeping with Le Corbusier's fascination for the exotic, a final dossier was devoted to the Turkish house, which had amazed him during his trip to the Orient (1911) and which one finds reflected in the Villa Schwob.
The last section of this exhibition was the least original, and the most confusing. The idea was to apply the notion of the "objet ä reaction poetique" to modern objects. Unfortunately, although it was amusing to see the drawings Le Corbusier had made from his ship cabin or from the baggage area of an airplane he was taking to India, or to know more about his relation to the work of Gaudi, Appia, Eiffel and the acoustical engineer Gustave Lyon (who was a consultant for the League of Nations project and the Centrosoyuz), nothing new was really learned about Le Corbusier's themes. Nevertheless, this part of the exhibition held many small surprises, such as photographs of Le Corbusier's favorite Parisian buildings; clothes that were made from his sketches for "clothing for the woman of today," commissioned by Harper's Bazaar; or the letters of Henry Focillon comparing the Unite d'habitalion to the phalansteries influenced by Saint-
Simon's thought.
The Hotel de Sully exhibition attempted to give Le Corbusier's admirers some background about his unorthodox education, and to show (at least in the first section) how it influenced some of his most innovative architectural decisions. With its limited purview, this small show was a refreshing antidote to the mammoth show at Beaubourg. It deserved better from the critics than the total silence with which it was received.
1. Of the many Le Corbusier exhibitions presented during the centennial year, I mention just a few: "L'Esprit Nouveau: Le Corbusier et l'industrie, 1920-25," organized by Stanislaus von Moos for the Museum for Gestaltung, Zurich (where it was shown Mar. 28-May 10, 1987); the show was later seen at the BauhausArchiv, Berlin, May 23-June 21, 1987; the Musee de la Ville, Strasbourg, July 11-Sept. 13, 1987; and the Centre Culturelle Suisse, Paris, Sept. 19-Oct. 31, 1987; and "Le Corbusier A Geneve" (May 5-30, 1987), which took place in the famous Immeuble Clarte itself. (These two exhibitions were accompanied by excellent catalogues.) Then, "De Ledoux A Le Corbusier" (Summer 1987), which attempted to present the famous thesis of Emil Kaufmann in the most famous building by Ledoux at Arc-en-Senans; "Corbu vu par" at the French Institute of Architecture in Paris (Fall 1987), in which 40 contemporary architects were asked to choose a drawing or project of Le Corbusier's and comment on it pictorially; and "Le Corbusier et la Mediterranee" at the Centre de la Vieille Charite in Marseilles (June 27Sept. 27, 1987), whose hideously produced catalogue all but obliterates the scholarly rigor of the essays in it. (In addition to exhibition catalogues, publishers around the world seemed to have pounced on the Year of Le Corbusier with all sorts of new books and reprints. Since it is impossible to comment on everything in this rather discouraging plethora, I will simply mention two that seemed to me to be the best of the lot: Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier et la mystique de l'URSS, Brussels, Mardaga, 1987, a book that is worthy of an English translation, and Le Corbusier's own Aircraft, a small book about planes, previously published only in English in 1935 and now available from Adam Biro, Paris, with the French text as an appendix.)
2. Citrohan, devised by Le Corbusier in 1920, is defined by a parallelepiped closed on its two longest sides and opened on the shortest, with a gallery on the mezzanine that opens onto a space twice as high. The Domino system is a piling structure completely independent from the functions it is given in the blueprints (the plan is "free" and the supporting walls have been abolished). The Villa Bezeult pivots the Citrohan structure, opening it out on its longest sides, and crosses it with a Domino structure. The result is an unexpected, chiasmuslike rhythm that Reichlin describes very well in the catalogue.
3. Incidentally, as Danielle Pauly notes in the Beaubourg catalogue, the Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau (1925) had already placed certain "natural found objects" next to the famous Purist standard objects. Also, natural objects and forms are found in Le Corbusier's paintings as early as 1927.
|
