100 years of Le Corbusier: what does he mean to today’s architects?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
He designed it as a village inside a single building. And the apartments are still sought-after.
https://hiddenarchitecture.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/n8... https://hiddenarchitecture.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/E-...
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.
Edit: spell
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"
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.
I like the layout type “mas” in Provence.
Something like this horror?
https://www.insider.com/turkey-abandoned-disney-castles-vill...
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
Another perspective: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/may/19/why-are...
One is reminded of BMI.
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.
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.
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.
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.