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Introduction
ALEXANDER TZONIS
ARCHITECTURE HAS TRADITIONALLY RECEIVED less attention than literature
or art as a shaper of culture. Moreover, the end product, the building,
has attracted greater interest than the creative process forming it. As
a result, architectural drawings, the most revealing documents of this
process, have tended to be seen as poor relations to the poet's notes
or the sculptor's sketches, and architectural archives as secondary in
comparison with the manuscript and drawing collections of libraries and
museums.
This situation has changed dramatically over the last two generations.
Major documentation centres of architecture have emerged around the world
to house architects' archives, and the number of scholars devoted to the
study of architectural thinking as a process has been mounting. From there,
the idea of publishing architectural archives in their entirety was a
natural step.
The publication of the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris
was the result of a growing demand by users of the archives and mounting
difficulties in terms of their accessibility. It was also the outcome
of the enviable success, in 1978, of another Garland publication, the
sixty-three volumes of the James Joyce Archive. Why shouldn't an architect
who was a contemporary of Joyce, and a person of equivalent cultural status,
have the same treatment?
Just eight years later, in 1986, the thirty-two volumes of the Le Corbusier
Archive, the largest publication of architectural drawings ever undertaken,
are reaching all parts of the world. The publication contains all the
presentation and working drawings owned by the Foundation. It also includes
all the conceptual drawings and diagrams, even of those projects which
never materialised; these, like drafts of a novel or incomplete sketches
of a painting, help us reconstruct the context out of which an individual
finished product emerged. Such fragments can be invaluable in understanding
the life work of the architect and -as in the case of the novelist, the
poet, the painter -in seeing it as a total project. They allow us to comprehend
more deeply the world within which the work has evolved.
Soon, the Louis Kahn Archive and the MoMA Mies van der Rohe Archive will
also be available. Many other similar projects are being contemplated.
One hopes that the proliferation of this kind of material will make architectural
thinking more accessible to a wider public; make it easier to see buildings
in a less mystified, petrified manner; and assist the improvement of architectural
quality.
The drawings and the introductory essays by Tim Benton, Daniele Pauly,
Kenneth Frampton and Peter Serenyi which are included here represent only
a small part of the whole publication. The selection has been made especially
for Architectural Design with the aim of highlighting certain themes in
Le Corbusier's work and demonstrating the syncretist and critical nature
of his contribution. The short introductory essay which follows tries
also to prepare the ground for these topics. A T
Syncretism and the
Critical Outlook in Le Corbusier's Work
ALEXANDER TZONIS & LIANE LEFAIVRE
AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BEGINS TO DRAW to a close, Le Corbusier emerges
more and more clearly as the key figure of the Modern Movement in architecture.
This prominence is due less to his adherence to a unique position than
to his capacity to create an image of modern architecture through synthesising
the planning concepts and programmatic visions of many disparate groups
and figures. Although Le Corbusier's work radiates the same revolutionary
fervour and aura of polemics that one finds in Sant'Elia, Van Doesburg,
El Lissitsky and Buckminster Fuller, he did not share their monistic and
reductive tendency. On the contrary, like Stravinsky and Picasso in their
respective fields, his approach was syncretic, that is to say, uniquely
polyphonic, universal and inclusive, and like the composer and painter,
he is both praised and condemned in the name of the modernity which he
appears to represent.
Le Corbusier's syncretic approach affected the manner of his professional
practice. His atelier served as a receptor for young architects who brought
to it their inquisitive energy and capacity for resolving problems. At
the same time, Le Corbusier was well known for dispensing with the services
of his most productive personnel. These 'attritions' came about as much
from the tensions which arose between different members of the team as
from Le Corbusier's own fears that his studio was becoming stultified
and parochial. Before others could attempt to challenge his position,
he would dispute it himself by adopting a new approach reflecting the
changing spectrum of modern perception. Thus while Ronchamp was his response
to the Neo-expressionism and Neo-monumentalism of the early 1950s, the
Philips Pavilion was his answer to the Neo-technological aspirations of
the late 1950s. Towards the close of his life, his Venice Hospital project
reiterated the hopes and aspirations of the younger generation of the
1960s, that is to say, it manifested the ideas of the Team X Group who,
in response to a growing demand for a low-profile architecture capable
of being integrated into the existing urban fabric, had openly criticised
the ClAM principle of the 'functionalist' city. Many erstwhile collaborators
of Le Corbusier contributed to this intergenerational debate within ClAM;
figures such as Candilis, Soltan, Xenakis and Woods, to mention only a
few of the prominent members of the atelier at 35 rue de Sevres during
the decade which followed the Second World War. The concept of the Venice
Hospital was in fact closely linked to Shadrach Woods' 1963 project for
the development of the razed Romerberg district in the centre of Frankfurt.
Le Corbusier's fear that he would lose touch with the active pursuits
of the younger generation did not arise out of a vain desire to remain
up-to-date but came instead out of a deep need to achieve a convincing
level of synthesis in his work. Le Corbusier could not remain content
with the reassuring company of a closed circle of faithful disciples.
Although he favoured small avant-garde groups, little reviews and 'cafe-loci',
he also promoted large international assemblies where the heterogeneous
contributors would be compelled to confront one another and where he himself
would be forced to question the value of his own position. Le Corbusier
was able to derive the raw material for his compositions from these occasions.
They provided him with the necessary opportunity to emerge as the great
synthesiser. Aside from this, he was constantly travelling, restlessly
discussing his projects wherever he went. While all of this might be regarded
as nothing more than the typical behaviour of an ambitious architect in
search of potential clients, there was more to it than that. On each of
these trips, he always advanced his own ideas, but he also listened, observed,
took note and acquired elements of knowledge with which to enrich his
overall system. The material he brought back from his visits to New York,
South America, Moscow, Northern Mrica and India stacked up on his desk
like the latest finds in a field under critical examination. These elements
were soon incorporated into his changing and ever-expanding compendium
of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. And yet, important as
such external stimuli undoubtedly were, they do not finally account for
Le Corbusier's unique capability of synthesising aspects drawn from conflicting
tendencies. Integral to his thought and character was an intrinsic method
for conceiving and composing assemblages.
The first idea that the term 'assemblage' brings to mind is, of course,
the collage, that is to say, that specific form of artistic expression
which emerged with the Cubists at the beginning of the century. The technique
of Cubist collage combined heterogeneous materials in a single composition.
The choice of materials was determined fundamentally by formal rather
than iconographic concerns. This technique generated colour, texture,
rhythmic pattern, diverse scale effects, etc. And yet, while Le Corbusier's
assemblages did derive in part from Cubist compositions, his intentions
were functional and metaphoric; they were not devices which arose out
of purely formal or visual considerations. Thus the project, the preparatory
drawings and the justifying diagrams reveal different aspects of the same
comprehensive search for a complex object. This multi-levelled synthesis
was demonstrably different from the much simpler design strategies adopted
by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, to mention only two of
Le Corbusier's contemporaries.
However, Le Corbusier's lifelong effort to achieve a complex synthesis
should not be confused with mere eclecticism. In an eclectic work where
pieces are taken out of different cultural contexts, the designer is usually
motivated by a sense of nostalgia. The pieces are combined, one might
say, out of the impossibility of recapturing a given past and out of narcissistic
resignation in the face of this sense of loss. In his use of the work
of other designers, Le Corbusier was not historicist in the same way as,
say, Pound, Cavafy, or Eliot, who were in the habit of citing or referring
to historical pieces, partly as a means of implying the incapacity of
our epoch to construct a coherent culture of its own. By contrast, Le
Corbusier plundered history and the works of his contemporaries in order
to grasp, control and transform the given modern reality. He searched
constantly for those elements with which one would have to construct the
appropriate modern instrument.
At first glance it seems that Le Corbusier was only an ingenious problem-solver
whose syncretic products emerged out of analogical thinking. An architect
thinks analogically when he adduces a design by introducing into it elements
which are derived from existing objects on the assumption that the new
product and the prior object share certain functional or structural characteristics.
In this way a new synthesis emerges out of pieces brought together through
analogy. Under these conditions the new work seems to be a partial combination
of these objects, a synthesis of their characteristics, a species of bricolage.
Le Corbusier's analogical method led, however, to more intriguing results
largely because his syncretic approach attained a more totally deconstructed
and synthesised result. From this point of view, Le Corbusier can be likened
to the Renaissance architects who, through analogical inference, wove
together large, well-tempered theoretical constructions using ideas from
movements as disparate as Vitruvianism, Neo-Platonism, Euclideanism and
Neo-Ciceronianism tied with fragments of biblical exegesis and flotsam
drawn from the antique masonic tradition. In a similar way Le Corbusier
brought together a phenomenal number of tendencies drawn from the avant-garde
movements of his time; from De Stijl, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism,
Expressionism, and from the technological advances exhibited by American
industrial organisation and by early Soviet social experiments. In his
use of analogical inference, Le Corbusier was far removed from the problem-solver.
Instead, his synthetic approach led to a critical and programmatic outlook.
To understand this better, we must refer to another contemporary method
of analogical 'assemblage', namely, that of Dadaism, for Le Corbusier's
work shares many of its characteristics.
Both Le Corbusier and the Dadaists created assemblages by removing objects
from the context of their ordinary use and bringing them together in new
forms of association. By forcing the objects to coexist in unprecedented
contiguities, Le Corbusier, like the Dadaists, generated what have been
called 'thing-signs', objects which carry new meanings, or complex statements
which have a strong impact on the thought and emotions of the viewer.
This potential of objects to interact semantically was already observed
by the Romantics. The poet Novalis outlined the process very clearly when
he wrote: 'When completely unrelated things are brought together, by being
in one place, at one time, or by some curious similarity, peculiar combinations
and strange associations arise -and the thing brings to mind everything,
[it] becomes the symbol of many things, and is itself signified and evoked
by many things'.
Through the procedures of collision and collusion, Le Corbusier's assemblages
produced not only new solutions but also new knowledge. A deeper understanding
emerged about the objects which were combined together not only with regard
to the form of analogy, but also with respect to the context from which
the objects had been drawn. This was because each of the collected parts
was seen through a different frame of reference provided by other conjunctions
which were also present in the same composite. Thus distinctly different
world views were merged and confronted with one another. Everyday routines
were destroyed and common-sense practices, ordinarily taken for granted,
were turned into extraordinary reflexive experiences. They compelled one
to think about the objects rather than merely operate through them. In
this way the user became conscious of larger entities and issues, such
as the contemporary state of the human habitat and deeper questions underlying
the problem of the habitat itself - such human dilemmas as deprivation
and/or class opposition arising out of the act of dwelling in the modern
world.
Like the Dada artists, Le Corbusier emerges through his analogies as an
epistemologist and a moralist. And yet, unlike the Dadaists, his analogies
are not nihilistic, paranoiac and destructive. They are optimistic, positive
and constructive. For this reason they may be seen as legitimising new
ways of living, or as giving authority to the new institutions of modern
living -to working and leisure, as well as to the processes of socialisation
and learning. They may thus be interpreted as operating in the manner
of architectural analogies of the late Renaissance. These analogies permitted
the new authority of the absolute prince to be perceived as a legitimate
power by transferring to their domain - as represented by the palazzo
and city -architectural elements taken from the buildings of antiquity.
In this way they transferred the authority of the ancient world to the
new condition. This transference implied that a common right to govern
obtained between the old and the new authority since a common attribute
could be found between these respective centres of power. Le Corbusier's
analogical approach worked in a similar way, that is to say, it inserted
elements taken from traditional living patterns into modern compositions
which were destined to serve the new institutions. In this way they irrefutably
legitimised the new way of life.
But this account gives only a reductive or partial view of Le Corbusier's
achievement. His work when seen as a whole manifests his intention to
underscore the distressing aspects of contemporary life, instead of simply
masking its darker aspects. At one and the same time it was both critical
and programmatic. It was optimistic and positive in the sense that it
verified a collective aspiration to overcome our loss of involvement with
the physical world. As the manifestation of an apparently general desire
it attempted to overcome the dissolution of the community, the fragmentation
of experience, and the dreariness of work. It sought to put joie de vivre
back into contemporary experience; it tried to overcome the eclipse of
the pleasure of seeing, walking, breathing; it attempted to slow the slaughter
of the innocent in everyday life. To this end, pilotis and roofscapes
served as a critical commentary on the present untenable conflict between
culture and nature, and the irreconcilability of the public and private
in the modern world. These critical allusions helped to inform the programmatic
requirements of the future; they helped to establish new norms for the
architects and the public.
When a building performs as a cultural object, as an icon, both critical
and programmatic functions have to be fulfilled. As an icon, therefore,
a building cannot simply be a graphic object; it cannot merely masquerade
as an image to be looked at. In order for its full meaning to be appreciated,
a building must be used; it must be consummated, so to speak, if it is
to enter into the culture as a place-icon. A building is inevitably subject
to many inter- pretations depending on the frame through which it is perceived.
In theory these differing frames of reference can be applied one at a
time or they can be superimposed, progressively affecting perception.
In practice, however, they often compete and clash with one another, thereby
engendering misfunctions, discomforts and incongruities. Le Corbusier
welcomed these incongruities as a tragic testament with a cathartic potential.
He saw no problem in the lack of comfort that often arose from such conflicts.
An altogether different situation came into being, however, when his designs
became disseminated throughout the world.
While Le Corbusier was often to be envied for his 'success', he was also
frequently censured for his 'failure'. Above all he was taken to task
for the poor quality of the environment that his imitators produced. These
judgments as to his success or failure are ultimately irrelevant to an
appreciation of his work. His elaborate projects were never intended as
solutions to be duplicated. The mere re-enactment of his designs usually
emphasised their disfunctional aspects while obscuring the critical and
programmatic qualities inherent in his work as a whole.
Seen from this point of view, the work of Le Corbusier remains an unfinished
project. His lasting contribution is to have put together a comprehensive
modern framework for thinking and for posing the questions out of which
many answers to contemporary problems can eventually emerge.
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