hckrnws
100 years of Le Corbusier: what does he mean to today’s architects?
by PaulHoule
Hated him in architecture school. Was assigned the incomprehensible Towards a New Architecture as a first year. Had an argument w/ my professor over The Modular, his 'based on human' measuring system. It's a failure if you present a new system of measurement, but then concede that it doesn't work and you actually need two systems and it's all arbitrary anyway. It really turned me off architecture school. But there was one project of his that I always return to. La Maison Jaoul. It's a beautiful work in brick, tile, wood and concrete. Lots of texture and color that is often missing in the rest of his work. It has some big flaws. small spaces, not enough interest in it's environment, but if you think Corb is only white boxes, it's worth a look. This video is pretty raw, but it gives the best views of the entire house. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJAQTFLdPN0 Also, La Tourette is a cow. complete with an udder. Got to give props for that one.
I also had an argument with my prof over The Modular. Luckily one of the TA's did his undergrad in math.*
The Crow was the Ted Talk of self-promoting architects and the largest failure of the original Modernists; IMO not much to consider in his body of work other than Villa Savoye and the diametrically opposite Ronchamp.
*Note, if you aren't familiar with his new replacement for math, "The modular" can not divide, it's only a half-baked anthropomorphic proportion system and results in a bazillion ugly literal edge cases when actually used.
Modern architecture and urban design are such a disaster. If any single person is responsible its probably him. Overly intellectual approaches that are striking on paper, sometimes also striking when realized, but not livable and don't age well.
The article question is even a little telling of the sentiment held by modern architects and architecture, "What do modern architects think of architecture", rather than "What do The People think of modern architecture?". They're a bunch of oversocialized, overacademized, overintellectual pseuds in this elite little club, all getting high on each other's supply. They and their enablers should be charged with crimes for their creative abominations and the insults they've flung against Beauty and Truth.
There should be an isolated island somewhere in a remote ocean where all architects would be forced to live and work.
Once they have lived inside each others creations for a decade they would vote on them.
Only then would the archetypes be communicated to the rest of unsuspecting world.
French urban planners didn't accept his plans and individual building owners got to choose his design or not.
If you think there's any single person to blame, it's whoever blindly applied his ideas where it didn't belong.
I believe we're better off with a variety of ideas, it's then up to each city to make the best of it.
Modern architecture desperately wanted to become as respected and admired as the revolutuon in visual arts.
Which it achieved.
But its role in society is far more important than art. Its the permanent backdrop in which we experience life. Its the shape of the petri dish on which our colony grows.
Architects should be more psychologists, social scientists and economists than visual artists.
If you too think most modern architecture and art is ugly, you might enjoy:
Roger Scruton - Why Beauty Matters (2009)
I'm not a fan of Le Corbusier or van der Rohe—too cold and sterile—but I am fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, R.M. Schindler, John Lautner, and Ray Kappe.
I also enjoy a wide section of modern architecture and art - As a visual impression and experience in a museum.
Where modern arcitecture fails for me is in creating a comfortable, pleasant and practical environment for people to live in.
Le Corbusier famously thought of houses as machines to live in. Maybe that metaphor is wrong to start with.
I had a negative opinion of Le Corbusier because he is associated with failed high-rise public housing projects and the kind of disasters that happen in a Ballard novel but when I saw things he designed I liked a lot of them.
He only really excelled at creating inhumane structures that only serve to impress the intelligentsia. It's not like you'd ever want to live in his austere glass boxes.
> It's not like you'd ever want to live in his austere glass boxes.
I have had the pleasure (or misfortune?) of working for a number of years in buildings designed by Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, and Norman Foster.
Was the Le Corbusier building I worked in clearly of its time? Yes. But also strangely it was the least clinical of all three. It had a surprising amount of warmth. I can't speak to his residential work, but it was clear that great thought had been given into how people use the building. Unlike when I worked in the Gehry building, where no thought had been given at all.
And if anything, it was the opposite of what you say - Le Corbusier thinks a lot about glass, and is surprisingly restrained in its use (compared to, say, Foster). I remember the concrete stairwells with their frosted glass bricks well.
I'm not saying that we should aspire to build more Le Corbusier-like buildings, but my experience of his buildings was the total opposite of inhuman.
They are not glass boxes though? If anything he inspired Brutalism with its blocks and swoops of concrete.
Maybe you’re thinking of Mies van der Rohe? His rectangular glass façades feel a lot more omnipresent in today’s architecture than Le Corbusier.
My take is that people are frequently sad to see brutalist buildings go (they are honest, show their bones, frequently use materials that somewhat match up with the environment) but many people hate those glass and steel modernist buildings, not least the people who live and work in them because of poor lighting and thermal properties. I’m left with the feeling that modernist buildings were meant to impress somebody else.
That is because Mies van der Rohe designed modern architecture in a more appealing way than Le Corbusier - Le Corbusier was a brutalist, while van der Rohe was not.
I had the chance to visit „La Cite Radieuse“ in Marseille. All these years later it is still more stylish and … dare I say it … comfortable than all the apartment high-rises surrounding it.
He designed it as a village inside a single building. And the apartments are still sought-after.
I tend to think that Habitat 67 is more successful in all regards.
Check out "les étoiles d'ivry" from Jean Renaudie then, you might like it. Habitat 67, but triangles. And a lot more green.
https://hiddenarchitecture.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/n8... https://hiddenarchitecture.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/E-...
Unfortunately that's what modern architecture has largely devolved into: inhumane austere glass boxes devoid of any individuality or character. And robbing places of their local character and tradition: Copenhagen looks exactly like London exactly like Shanghai exactly like Rio exactly like Melbourne...
> He only really excelled at creating inhumane structures that only serve to impress the intelligentsia. It's not like you'd ever want to live in his austere glass boxes
I read your comment while perched on a stool next to my kitchen island. The city stares at me in the background while I glance back at the city from time to time.
I used to live in one of the "austere glass boxes" you speak of that is pictured on the cover of Douglas Coupland's City of Glass. I live a couple blocks down the street now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Glass_(Coupland_book)
The metaphorical stones of others can not shatter this beauty.
He certainly helped push the high rise isolated developments, mostly turning into the utterly despised high rise projects in Europe and America.
The place most built in the spirit of Le Corbusier is Brasília, Brasil. Lived my latter teens there. It was ok, I prefer Rio de Janeiro and Montevideo.
Edit: spell
You'd count yourself lucky if Le Corbusier designed a glass box for you. More often he'd design a concrete box with small windows.
It seems obvious now, but it was different. And not worse than most contemporary architecture either. But it would be nice to return to a more human, beautiful and sustainable style, true.
Agree. I can't stand the coldness of brutalist architecture, it's dystopian. It's disagreeable in summer, let alone on a grey winter day.
I appreciate its novelty at the time, and its nostalgia now. It was used in a lot of public buildings in the 1970's because it tended to be more economical than Ivy League looking brick buildings with white trim. I appreciate that its design had something to say, even if that thing wasn't clear or useful. Now public buildings look like boring brick boxes with maybe a curved wall or some other "accent".
I think of the federal building in Manchester, NH which looks like something the lizardman aliens would have built in “V” or might make you think the government faked the 9/11 attacks.
Boring beats ugly, IME. A certain amount of ambition is welcome, and a certain amount of failure is an inevitable cost of that, but textured concrete should have been consigned to the history books a long time ago.
Honestly, I liked the brutalist behemoths more than the tilt-ups with fake italian villa crown molding, arches, and weird curves.
At least the buildings usually convey one specific message instead of a mish-mash of "I'm a big cheap commercial building but I wish I was this other thing instead"
With our resources of today, we could be building fantasy castles all over the place.
But in reality, an underwhelming remake of a 30 years old video game gets thousands of paid visual artists' hours, whereas most buildings get 0 by the look of them.
Fantasy castle are tacky as fuck. For having grew up near a lot of actual castles, I like stones house but keep it functional.
I like the layout type “mas” in Provence.
> With our resources of today, we could be building fantasy castles all over the place.
Something like this horror?
https://www.insider.com/turkey-abandoned-disney-castles-vill...
Why are these all the same? What I was talking about - video games getting unique sprites and artwork for every unit, buildings are cloned.
The lesson for me, as a software engineer / software architect, is that a dogmatic architecture can be inspiring, possibly showing possibilities beyond just simply grounded practical approaches can't easily, but also can be impractical and terrible. Believing that one has complete information and the complete control over everything is hubris. But big thinking can inspire also.
I think the UI offers a simpler parallel. Don't be different for its own sake; people value familiarity in function and form.
My favorite is not a building but a furniture: the "LC4" lounge chair. Technically not by Le Corbusier but by someone working for him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaise_Longue_(Le_Corbusier)
There are many replicas and also "continuation" ones (IIUC modern ones but sold by those having the rights to the model). It's really comfy.
The "LC3" is seen in many films and places really (but to me not very practical):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Confort#/media/File:Loun...
So Le Corbusier for furnitures: sure... For buildings: I don't dig the style, way too brutalist too my taste.
I was gonna say I think about furniture and not architecture when seeing his name
Corbs assistant in his later work, Iannis Xenakis, was a pretty interesting guy. He was responsible for a substantial portion of La Tourette for example.
He was an architect, engineer, musician and mathematician, but i think he is mostly remembered as a composer. His quasi philosophical treatise on mathematical composition of music actually has the full code of one of his music programs (in Fortran). It is a really interesting read.
The buildings are nice, but the urban design is absolutely awful. Saw an exhibit about him in NYC, I think at MOMA, a few years back, and it was all these monumental buildings separated by gigantic plots of land with multi-level highways between them, absolute madness, totally anti-human. The exhibit I saw included models related related to Plan Voisin [1].
> If you take his idea of raising buildings on pilotis to allow the garden to extend beneath the residence, this is obvious nonsense because you can’t have a garden without rainfall and sunlight.
I feel like this is textbook Corbusier. He designed for buildings and cities that looked beautiful from the scale of the architect, standing miles above them looking down. Actual humans on a human scale do not want cities like this.
To be fair to him, I believe he was reacting to the dense cities of the time which were centers of disease and destitution, filled with pollution and sewage. Cities now are much cleaner and more livable, especially those that DON'T follow his model of an ideal city.
"‘It is the best thing ever, I think,’ says Frank Gehry of Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame du Haut.
That's one of Le Corbusier's stranger buildings, but it's very Frank Gehry. Gehry, of course, did that Dr. Seuss knockoff at MIT.[1] Le Corbusier is better known for his very rectangular buildings. Innovative at the time, they're now seen as brutalism. Especially as the finishes wear down and those big flat surfaces dull.
Unlike Mies van der Rohe, the maximalist of simple forms, Le Corbusier liked to add decorative curved features here and there. Today, those look silly.
Today, with enough computer power, really silly looking large buildings are possible. See Shanghai.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ray_and_Maria_Stata_Cente...
.JPG){kind=link}
Absolutely hideous structures. Not the sort of the place the vast majority of the human race would want to live.
Comment was deleted :(
Some terrible comments in this thread, from quite good opinons in the article.
Corbusier's got plenty of flaws, particularly on the urban side. But calling him a bad architect and hating on his buildings is like saying Ken Thompson is a terrible programmer because you dont want to use Plan 9 as your OS or Go as your programming language.
His influence has been largely detrimental to the quality-of-life of countless people, and Paris gives thanks every day that his plans for it were never fully realized. In a sense, he's partially at fault for every person who suffered or died violently in American high-rise projects, if we are to give architecture the social influence it claims.
Another perspective: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/may/19/why-are...
One is reminded of BMI.
Like I say its akin to blaming Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever for every problem you have with computers today.
He was there as they were and found ways to move things forward. Have we gotten better since? Of course. Did they also make some claims that seem silly in retrospect? You betcha
You want to live in a world of pantomime villains its your choice but reality and history is much more nuanced. This article actually gives a very good summary of that if you care to get through it
When you say his influence is detrimental I think you need to understand who else might have been more influential if Corbusier didnt exist. The answer is not some proto-Jane Jacobs itd be someone like Gideon, Häring or Moser. People who equally didnt understand urban life (its taken us a century since to progress even as meagrely as we have) but also wouldnt have been able to articulate where modern construction and cities were moving to like Corbusier did.
Well, I did say "partially."
I think we're all operating under a dysfunctional paradigm, Great Man or whatever. You say he wasn't that bad, I say he was worse, you say, "Don't complain about Vandal Savage because they have Hitler on ice,"[1] but fundamentally, the question remains: why did we turn over so much of urban design theory over to any singular kook at all?
I question the premise; urban life was well-understood, but dealing with rapid post-war (re)builds and hordes of personal vehicles, not so much. It was a choice, to consider either. And we let him/them choose, and let the choices filter down to those who'd marry them with weird and destructive and uncompassionate social ideals (and, often, a profit motive).
So, I continue to hold that we had the means and knowledge to ignore him and build better neighborhoods, but we listened to him and suffered, instead.
Very few of the people praising Corbusier actually choose to live between his concrete slabs when given the opportunity.
After such a large part of the population is complaining about the state of modern architecture, I have no idea why the industry keeps going down the same pseudo-intellectual routes.
If you read the article this is precisely what many of the architects they interviewed say.
Mea culpa, I did get emotional after the first paragraphs.
It's a valid point.
I mean yes I was a bit terse, but really? your initial "hot take" so to speak aligns with where modern architecture has got to: He was revolutionary, he was iconoclastic, he was also a bit bombastic and he didn't live to understand the consequences of some of his theories which are a-social and demand cars more than the 15 minute city goals we now look for.
I really value some of his stuff. At a distance even the towers can be impressive, and people still love the Marseille complex, and his church.
A point made in the article is that not everything he did was on mega-scale. It wasn't all Brasilia and Chandigarh. He helped launch modernism and I live in a unit with floor to ceiling glass wall-windows, and a flow from the outside into my living spaces. Bits of his design sensibilities, Gropius, Mies Van Der Rohe are in that.
Before you launch of into yet another banal tirade about how Le Corbusier was terrible, Google Chandigarh.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code