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Comment by bouvin | Hacker News Reader

I am a huge fan of Le Corbusier – here's a page about Cité Frugès de Pessac (the text may be in French, but the pictures are not!) [1]. For anyone entertaining thoughts about functionalist architecture only being boxes, I turn your attention to the beautiful Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp [2].

[1] https://www.pessac.fr/a-decouvrir/tourisme-patrimoine/cite-f...

[2] http://www.alluringworld.com/notre-dame-du-haut/

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May I ask why? He always struck me as someone a bit disconnected from how humans actually work. Stewart Brand has a show about all the changes people had to make his buildings livable.

* edit: I hadn’t read the article! It’s awesome

I suppose that I have always found his designs very beautiful. (I also happen to enjoy the aesthetics of (good) brutalist architecture).

The show was made after his book.

The book is on archive.org https://archive.org/details/howbuildingslear00bran_0/page/n5...

His videos are on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst/videos

>May I ask why? He always struck me as someone a bit disconnected from how humans actually work

While it's popular to dump on Corbusier today, especially with the hindsight of history and what we know about urban planning now (and I mostly agree with it), you have to look through the lens of what he was working with at the time. City centers were areas of blight, not hip places with third wave coffee shops on them. Waterfronts were dilapidated docks, not pleasant beaches with views of the sea.

On the flip side, cars were new, shiny, and free of any of the negative connotation we see in them today (traffic, pollution, noise). Any infrastructure built to support them was fresh and efficient.

It's no surprise that you'd have some people going all in on the latter. In hindsight, it turns out to be unfortunate that viewpoint won so thoroughly in the US.

>For anyone entertaining thoughts about functionalist architecture only being boxes, I turn your attention to the beautiful Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp [2].

It's hideous.

Notre Dame du Haut looks nice, but it's also the worst looking religious building I've seen in France aside from a few other "modern churches".

I was like "this isn't so bad" but then I got to the photo of all the mis-matched bizarre windows on one side, like someone totally screwed up editing a house in The Sims. Yikes. It looks like the architectural version of painting yourself into a corner and just giving up and letting that part be screwed up, rather than rethinking the whole thing to fix it.

The... steeple, I think it's meant to be? Also kinda looks like a mistake, rather than something done on purpose.

The inside's OK but I concur with it still being one of the uglier "nice" churches I've ever seen. Overall looks like it'd be better as, I dunno, part of a monastery or something? Maybe Tony Stark's vacation home or something, from the better angles.

"My son could paint that" vibes.

Hacker News art criticism at its best.

Shrug

Absent context I'd definitely take the mismatched-windows exterior shot as the result of something like the Internet-famous time that amateur (in Spain, I think?) tried to restore a painting of Jesus.

[EDIT] My point is, if someone told me some other parts of the building were a mistake, much less something like the Sistine Chapel, I'd be like "no way". That particular view of the building? Someone told me it was a mistake, I'd be like "haha, yeah, clearly, hope they fix it so it doesn't keep dragging down the rest of the building"

It's not really bad, but the average church is very beautiful.

Yeah, absolutely, I liked several of the photos quite a bit. They didn't really say "church" to me, mostly—maybe a really cool library?—but part of it's just that most "nice" churches are really pretty, so the competition's stiff. Given some of the reactions in posts, I actually expected it to be a lot worse than it was.

The exterior of the Notre Dame du Haut is simplistic, not beautiful (although the slope of the roof is nice). The interior design is striking in its layout, but overall both are ugly due to the materials used.

This building looks like a first draft of the final design, and really does not deserve to be used for religious purposes.

>This building looks like a first draft

The crazy thing is that Le Corbusier spent months on the design of the south wall. It wasn't a rushed project at all; this was late career Le Corbusier at the height of his creative vision.

To me the south wall looks externally like a knock-off computer with a bunch of random ports, but that may just be personal idiosyncrasies.

I assume that these projects took time and effort, but the finished results look to me like a half-baked render, like someone just forgot to finish the job.

I'm not a fan of much of Le Corbusier's works, if any.

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