LE CORBUSIER: AN ATLAS OF MODERN LANDSCAPES SPANS THE ENTIRE
RANGE OF LE CORBUSIER’S ARTISTIC OUTPUT AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
June 15, 2013 - September 23, 2013
LE CORBUSIER: AN ATLAS OF
MODERN LANDSCAPES SPANS THE ENTIRE
RANGE OF LE CORBUSIER’S
ARTISTIC OUTPUT AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
June 15, 2013 - September
23, 2013
Corbusier: An Atlas of
Modern Landscapes, the largest exhibition ever produced in New York of the
protean and influential oeuvre of Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret,
French, b. Switzerland, 1887–1965), encompasses his work as an architect,
interior designer, artist, city planner, writer, and photographer, and is on
view from June 15 through September 23, 2013. This major exhibition draws on
MoMA’s own collection, and extensively on exclusive loans from the Paris-based
Le Corbusier Foundation. Following a path from his youth in the Swiss Jura
mountains to his death on the shores of the French Riviera, the exhibition
focuses on four types of landscapes, observed or conceived at different scales,
and documented in all the genres. Le Corbusier pursued during six decades: the
landscape of found objects; the domestic landscape; the architectural landscape
of the modern city; and the vast territories he planned. MoMA is the only U.S.
venue for the exhibition, which will travel to Fundació " la Caixa "
in Barcelona (January 28–May 11, 2014), and to Fundació " la Caixa "
in Madrid ( June 11–October 13, 2014 ). It is organized by guest curator
Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History
of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with Barry Bergdoll,
The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA.
Le Corbusier: An Atlas of
Modern Landscapes reveals the ways in which Le Corbusier
observed and imagined
landscapes throughout his career, using all the artistic mediums and techniques
at his disposal, from early watercolors of Italy, Greece, and Turkey, to
sketches of India, and from photographs of his formative journeys to
architectural models of his large-scale projects. Bringing together around 320
objects, all of these dimensions of Le Corbusier’s artistic process, including
major paintings and four reconstructed interiors, are presented in MoMA’s first
comprehensive exhibition of his work. Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern
Landscapes is divided into five sections, and begins with one of four
room-sized interiors built especially for the exhibition. Featuring original
furniture, the interiors vividly present Le Corbusier’s concepts for domestic
landscapes, and the notion of houses operating as machines to view landscapes.
The first interior on view is the Cabanon of Le Corbusier from
Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (1951–52), installed in the area outside the Tisch
galleries. A cabin built on the coast of the gulf of Monte Carlo as a summer
haven for Le Corbusier himself, the Cabanon’s interior dimensions are based on
those of the Modulor, a system of harmonic proportions Le Corbusier had created
in the 1940s. The Cabanaon features rustic elements—bark-covered exterior
planks and furniture—crafted by the carpenter Charles Barberis.
FROM THE JURA MOUNTAINS
TO THE WIDE WORLD
The first section within
the galleries is devoted to Le Corbusier’s early life, in his hometown of La
Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Under the direction of his teacher, Charles
L’Eplattenier, Le Corbusier learned to draw, exploring the landscape of the
Jura mountains, before focusing on architecture and completing his first house
at the age of 20. Over the next five years Le Corbusier discovered the horizons
of Europe. In 1907 he made an initial study trip to Italy, followed by a visit
to Vienna. In 1908–09 he worked in the Paris studio of the Perret brothers,
pioneers in the use of reinforced concrete. He then travelled to Germany in
order to study urbanism, working in
Berlin in the studio of
Peter Behrens, and in 1911 journeyed to Greece and Istanbul via the Balkans.
These travels around Europe are represented in the exhibition with an
extraordinary selection of watercolors and pencil drawings. Sketchbooks, both
large and small, reveal through hundreds of drawings the time spent observing
landscapes of cities and the countryside.
Upon returning to La
Chaux-de-Fonds in 1912, Le Corbusier began teaching architecture and interior
design. He also built several houses in which he drew upon the experiences of
his travels, such as the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also known as the Maison
Blanche, which he designed for his parents. Blueprints from his time in La
Chaux-de-Fonds and a room-sized interior of the Maison Blanche (1912) with the
original furniture are both on view. Based on a collection of shapes observed
during his journeys, the house was a break from the regional style of the area
and Le Corbusier’s first work as an independent architect.
THE CONQUEST OF PARIS
The second section
focuses on Le Corbusier’s time in Paris, whose sites and monuments he drew
tirelessly. In addition to his prolific writing at this time, Le Corbusier
painted assiduously, arranging on the canvas objects of daily life as if they
were forming landscapes. Among these are La Cheminée (1918), his
first painting, Still Life (1920), Guitare verticale – premiere
version (1920), and Nature morte du Pavillon de l’Esprit nouveau (1924).
In 1922 he opened an
architecture studio with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967). They would
work together until 1940, as he conducted two sets of projects in parallel. On
the one hand, he developed theoretical schemes, such as the “Citrohan” house
(1920), the “immeublevillas” (villa apartments), the “Ville contemporaine”
(Contemporary City) (1922), and the “Plan Voisin” for Paris (1925), each of
which is represented in the exhibition through drawings. On the other, Le
Corbusier built villas for the elite of the French capital, in which he
experimented with his provocative ideas for a new architecture made possible by
reinforced concrete. These are
represented in the
exhibition through models and drawings. The third room-sized interior on view
is from one such villa, the Pavilion for the Villa Church in Ville d’Avray
(1927–29), a project for an American couple, Henry and Barbara Church. Working
with a pre-existing neoclassical structure, Le Corbusier transformed it into a
music pavilion with a library in which a rectangular window delimited the view
of the surrounding garden as if it were a painting. Surrounded by a largeframe,
the window provided the backdrop for an interior landscape where furniture
designed in
1928 by Charlotte
Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret was used in a domestic setting for
the first time.
RESPONDING TO LANSCAPE
FROM AFRICA TO THE AMERICAS
The third section focuses
on the late 1920s, when Le Corbusier abandoned the prismatic forms he used in
his houses of that decade and developed an architecture that was more attentive
to landscape, echoing transformations in his painting style, which is
represented here by a number of canvases. He greatly expanded the geographic
range of his endeavors while continuing to work on his projects for Paris.
His first European
success came in 1928 during a triumphant visit to Moscow, where he received the
commission for a ministry building, the Centrosoyuz, completed in 1936 (though
he was defeated in the competition for the Palace of the Soviets in 1932, the
original model of which—from MoMA’s own collection—is on view). Le Corbusier’s
accomplishments reverberated around the globe due to the success of his books,
which in turn increased the impact of his buildings. His encounters with new
landscapes transformed his way of thinking. In 1929 his successful lecture tour
of South America led him to develop plans for Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and
São Paulo. However, the enthusiastic welcome of local elites did not guarantee
the success of his projects. Le Corbusier sought in vain for 12 years to carry
out his provocative plan for Algiers, shown in the exhibition through numerous
drawings, sketches, and an original 1945 model of the skyscraper he designed
for Algiers. Among the diverse techniques used by Le Corbusier to persuade the
public of the truth of his analyses and projects, lectures played a prominent
role. It was in front of the audience that he developed directly, drawing on
long sheets of paper, his main ideas and proposals; some of these
monumental drawings are on view in the section.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1321
You may visit my blog to
see Moma's past exhibitions news Japanese Contellation, Conception of
Space,and Le Corbusier: Atlas of Modern Landscapes to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2016/04/a-japanese-constellation-toyo-ito-sanaa.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/09/conception-of-space-at-museum-of-modern.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/08/cut-n-paste-from-architectural.html
PHILIPS PAVILION BRUSSELS 1958
PHILIPS PAVILION BRUSSELS 1958
URBAN PLAN FOR RIO DE JANEIRO 1929
PLANS FOR ALGIERS AND BARCELONA AND 'VERTICAL GARDEN CITY' 1927
PLAN OBUS - ALGIERS 1932
CHAPELLE NOTRE – DAME DU HAUT, RONCHAMP 1950 – 1955
CHAPELLE
NOTRE-DAME DU HAUT RONCHAMP 1950-1955
Top to
bottom: Elevation of the East Facade (Inverted), Elevation of the
Southwest
Facade Corner, and Transverse North-South Section with Campanile.
Pencil,
Colored Pencil, and Pastel on Vellum.
Dimensions:
58.4 x 55.2 cm
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris.
© 2013
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC
FROM INTERNATIONAL TO TERRITORY: THE PROJECT OF AN ATLAS BY BARRY BERGDOLL
Le Corbusier was introduced to New York audiences in Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, the inaugural architecture exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, in 1932. In this exhibition he was identified as a leading proponent of the International Style; indeed, he would soon be one of the rare architects to have built on three continents before the advent of commercial intercontinental jet service. By 1932 he had already designed or built projects in France, Switzerland, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Tunisia, and his influence had been in the ascendant in South America since his 1929 trip to Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. This influence only deepened with his role in designing the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro (1936) and with the construction of the house for Dr. Curutchet in La Plata, Argentina (1949–54). The conquest of two more continents followed. In 1952, with the vast project at Chandigarh, he began a new and profound engagement with a landscape unlike any he had experienced to date, and he was subsequently able to draw on his decades-long studies of exhibition space in designs for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (1954–59). And in 1962, thirty years after Le Corbusier’s introduction to American audiences at MoMA, he saw the opening of his first and only building in North America, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Only Australia and Antarctica were never on the itineraries of this globe-traversing architect, although the former has not been beyond the reach of his influence.1
Yet already in 1932, in The International Style, the popular book published at the same time as MoMA’s exhibition, there were unmistakable hints that his buildings did not always conform fully to Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s definition of the new style, nor to its suggestion of a universalist architectural aesthetic, unvaried by site or locale. If the Villas Stein–de Monzie (1926–28) and Savoye (1928–31) seemed near-perfect embodiments of Hitchcock and Johnson’s three points of the International Style, as well as of Le Corbusier’s Five Points, the load-bearing rough masonry walls of the Villa de Mandrot (1929–31) at Le Pradet were clearly earthbound, related to the Mediterranean vernacular of nearby farm buildings on the southern coast of France. And the roof terrace of the apart[1]ment for Charles de Beistegui (1929–31), off the Champs-Élysées, was a confirmation of Le Corbusier’s claim that “the outside is always an inside,” as well as an evocative composi[1]tion of built and planted forms set in a very calculated and unexpected relationship with mon[1]uments on the horizon, including the Arc de Triomphe at the head of Paris’s grandest axis. Neither at ground nor sky level did Le Corbusier create an architecture divorced from its ndscape, even if his practice and views had moved quite far from the mnemonic abstrac[1]tions of nature and the integrated site plans of his early adherence to the style sapin (fir tree style) of his native La Chaux-de-Fonds.2
To organize a new generation of research, analysis, and interpretation of Le Corbusier’s practice using the metaphor and, in part, the form of an atlas, as we have done here, is not, however, to return to the notion of an international practice, either in the sense of the International Style—pitted polemically as it was against the growing attractions of region[1]alism in the arts in Depression-era America—or in the sense of the last twenty years of globalizing practices, in particular of so-called starchitects, whose signature branded forms are intended to be recognized no matter where they are set down. Rather it is to acknowl[1]edge a profound relationship between practice and place in Le Corbusier’s life and work, one that entails nothing less than his concept of vision, of the way he looked at the world on journeys first by traditional means, across the Balkans to Greece and Turkey, and then in the airplanes that for him were as much an extension of his retina as a means of convey[1]ance. Airplanes were an integral part of the way he conceived of his buildings as instruments for crafting both optical and bodily relationships to landscapes; the notion of the landscape encompassed everything from the physical occupation of an interior to the projected occupa[1]tion of an exterior framed by any number of devices, from the fenêtre en longueur (ribbon window) to cuts through walls or hedges that frame a larger exterior, a distant view, or dis[1]tant horizon into something easily apprehended by the eye and the mind.
And while these techniques remain integral to a set of compositional strategies that Le Corbusier developed over decades, they were not invariable in his adaptation of them to specific places and specific cultures. What is revealed in this atlas—which is as much a sur[1]vey of the last twenty years of revisionist thinking, by scholars who have devoted themselves to retracing the contours of Le Corbusier’s practice in different venues—is the extent to which Le Corbusier’s travels and artistic practice were not to be dissociated. From the time of his voyage d’Orient in 1911 to his discovery of the landscapes and cultures of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad, which are vastly different one from another and would be the venues for a substantial portion of his post–World War II built production, Le Corbusier was engaged not with the ways in which things are similar around the world but rather with the ways in which they are distinct, with layers of culture that resonate even in worlds in mutation from the forces of modernization. Having abandoned the “pack donkey’s way,” by rejecting the nostalgia clinging to the city-design philosophy of Camillo Sitte that had so infatuated him as an young architect, Le Corbusier would find his greatest opportunity for building in the Punjab, where the donkey was one of the prime instruments of construction. His view of the landscape and of architecture’s place in it could not but be affected.
This atlas confirms, then, a major realignment currently underway in the study of the masters of modern architecture, both in the interwar and postwar years, one in which place, cultural specificity, and attention to landscape have displaced the idea of modern universals. Already by 1952 Hitchcock felt some misgiving about the polemical oversimplification of the International Style, and he admitted that the concept could not accommodate the shifts in Le Corbusier’s subsequent evolution; a few years after the Museum hosted a summit, in 1948, on the issue of what was happening to modern architecture, he wrote in a reflection on the twentieth anniversary of the 1932 show, “No one has done more than Le Corbusier ever since to extend and loosen the sanctions of the International Style.”3 But even here Hitchcock remained within the logic of the taxonomic definition of style inherited from nine[1]teenth-century architectural history, which would remain his intellectual frame for his entire career, and within the logic of the architectural object as a largely autonomous work of spa[1]tial art. Indeed, what is striking about the floor plans provided for every building reproduced in The International Style, which in countless editions has served several generations of twentieth-century readers and architecture students, is not only that all are redrawn and sim[1]plified for greater clarity but also that they are systematically isolated from their sites.
A decade ago, to explore a substantial revision of our understanding of the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another of the great so-called form-givers of modern archi[1]tecture, Terence Riley and I organized Mies in Berlin, an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, which contextualized the work of his Berlin years, from 1905 to 1933, in its German setting.4 This meant not simply considering the architect in the cultural milieu of the German capital at its great moment of intellectual and artistic experimentation. It also entailed situating his designs, both realized and proposed, in the specific urban and suburban landscapes for which they were created, beginning with the earliest neo-Biedermeier villas in Babelsberg, where both Mies and Le Corbusier worked in Peter Behrens’s studio. Also in 2001 Sarah Williams Goldhagen published the first major monographic study of Louis I. Kahn to break with the formalist reading of his work and understand the stakes of place and culture in a practice that spanned from Philadelphia to Bangladesh. Goldhagen identified Kahn’s “situated modernism,” thereby making clear that to speak of even the most formally rigorous projects of twentieth-century modernist architecture in relationship to landscape was not simply to speak of the formal relationships between buildings and gardens, although these had often been overlooked in the consideration of modern architecture as paradig[1]matic and transportable rather than culturally contingent.5 Le Corbusier had passed through the very culture of the architectonic garden that was to have such a profound influence, in the same year, on the young Mies’s early residential designs in Wilhelmine Berlin. And like Le Corbusier, Mies had a lifelong interest in cultivating a relationship between abstraction and place that could make buildings into frames for a different kind of modern awareness or even consciousness.6 Both house and garden in the remarkable Villa Favre-Jacot (1912–13) in Le Locle, Switzerland, are a direct working-out of this culture, absorbed in Behrens’s office and in traveling through Germany and Austria. But he went beyond the tight interweaving of nterior and exterior rooms to an understanding of the building as a type of viewing device for the landscape beyond it, a means, therefore, of making the landscape into an object of contemplation in ways quite distinct from the picturesque tradition he had absorbed in his student days under Charles L’Eplattenier, in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
These techniques, echoed
as well in Le Corbusier’s use of photography and film, soon merged with those
most modern forms of capturing the landscape, both static and moving, of
recording the changing haptic and optic relationships between viewer and
viewed.7 The experi[1]ence and cultural meaning of landscape was in many ways
as central to Le Corbusier’s vision of design and his conception of
architecture and cities as it was to architects more commonly associated with
the organic, such as Alvar Aalto or Frank Lloyd Wright. As landscape
histo[1]rian Caroline Constant has noted, in a compendium of two decades of
essays that attempt to reweave the historiographically frayed entwining of
modern architecture and landscape, “Indeed, the notion of genius loci was
crucial even to an iconoclast such as Le Corbusier. . . . Unlike his approach
to architecture and urbanism, which evolved as his radical a priori
theo[1]retical assumptions were tested through his built work, Le Corbusier’s
approach to landscape evolved a posteriori from practice. Thus, despite the
militant tone of his utopian urban pro[1]nouncements, Le Corbusier carefully
calibrated his building designs to their specific locales.”8
hat this atlas contains,
then, is both a tour of Le Corbusier’s international activi[1]ties and an
accounting of the diverse and sometimes contradictory relationships he
developed with places, from his native alpine birthplace to his refuge on the
Mediterranean coast, a voyage that took him from mountains to sea, from a
snowbound climate to one of year-round vegetation. But this was not solely a
European journey, for it was in Chandigarh more than anywhere else (other than
perhaps the pilgrimage church at Ronchamp) that Le Corbusier developed, in the
final decade and a half of his practice, a more profound notion of the
archi[1]tect as one whose work encompasses the relationship of people to
physical environment. The aim of this “atlas of modern landscapes” is to
revisit some of the most influential works of twentieth-century architecture
and expand our understanding of them, by both embedding them in specific
geographies and relating them to the common horizons that were central to Le
Corbusier’s experience of the world and the frames of experience he sought to
embody.
1. “Le
Corbusier and Australia: Reaction and Reception in the Antipodes,” a esearch
project, is currently under[1]way at the University of Queensland. See
www.uq.edu.au/atch/ le-corbusier-and-australia.
2. See
Helen Bieri Thomson, ed., Le Style sapin: Une Expérience Art Nouveau à La
Chaux-de-Fonds (Paris: Somogy, 2006).
3. Henry-Russell
Hitchcock, “The International Style Twenty Years After,” Architectural Record
110, no. 2 (August 1951): 89–98. Reprinted in Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The
International Style, rev. ed. (1932; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), p. 250.
4. Terence
Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2001).
5. Sarah
Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Moderism (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001).
6. See
also Christophe Girot, ed., Mies als Gärtner (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2011).
7. Beatriz
Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1994).
8. Caroline
Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 20.
POLYHEME 1955
Black ink,
Newspaper and Collage on Paper
Dimensions : H : 0,635 m x L : 0,48 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
CAPITOL
COMPLEX CHANDIGARH 1951 - 1965
Ink and
Pencil on Vellum.
Dimensions:
89 x 152 cm
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC
BONJOUR
CALDER 1958
Wool Tapestry
Dimensions : H : 2,20 m x L : 2,98 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
ETUDE QUATRE
MAINS 1955
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions : H : 038 m x L : 0,46 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
PALACE OF THE
LEAGUE OF NATIONS –GENEVA 1927
Axonometric
View From the West.
Gelatin Print
on Paper With Ink, Airbrush and Collage Additions.
Dimensions:
135.5 x 147 cm
Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zurich
NATURE MORTE
( STILL LIFE ) 1920
Oil on Canvas.
Dimensions:
80.9 x 99.7 cm
The Museum of
Modern Art, New York.Van Gogh Purchase Fund, 1937.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW
YORK
Founded in 1929 as an
educational institution, The Museum of Modern Art is dedicated to being the
foremost museum of modern art in the world.
Through the leadership of
its Trustees and staff, The Museum of Modern Art manifests this commitment by
establishing, preserving, and documenting a collection of the highest order
that reflects the vitality, complexity and unfolding patterns of modern and
contemporary art; by presenting exhibitions and educational programs of
unparalleled significance; by sustaining a library, archives, and conservation
laboratory that are recognized as international centers of research; and by
supporting scholarship and publications of preeminent intellectual merit.
Central to The Museum of
Modern Art’s mission is the encouragement of an ever-deeper understanding and
enjoyment of modern and contemporary art by the diverse local, national, and
international audiences that it serves. You may read more about MoMA’s entire
information to click below link.
http://press.moma.org/about/
DR. GLENN D. LOWRY DIRECTOR OF MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK
DR. GLENN D. LOWRY DIRECTOR OF MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK
.jpg)
LA MAIN
OUVERTE 1954
Watercolour
and Paper Mounted on Paper
Dimensions : H : 0,21 m x L : 0,27 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
LES DES SONT
JETES 1960
Wool Tapestry
Dimensions : H : 2,18 m x L : 3,55 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
PLAN FOR
BUENOS AIRES 1929
Profile View
From the Rio de la Plata.
Pastel on
paper.30 11/16 x 44 7/8” (78 x 114 cm).
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC
TROIS FEMMES
SUR FOND BLANC 1950
Wool Tapestry
Dimensions : H : 2,20 m x L : 3,00 m
Signed and dated at middle bottom Le Corbusier 50
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
PEINTURE
MURALE, 35 RUE DE SEVRES A PARIS 1948
Oil on
Plywood
Dimensions : H : 3,82 m x L : 3,50 m
Fondation Le Corbusier Paris
MUSIC
PAVILION FOR VILLA CHURCH – VILLE D’AVRAY 1927 - 1929
General
Axonometric View of the Pavilion in the Site, 1927
Ink, Pencil
and Colored Pencil on Tracing Paper
Dimensions:
92 x 44 cm
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC
ASSEMBLY
CHANDIGARH 1961 - 1964
Model of the
Roof Structure, 1964.
Plaster and
Painted Wood
Dimensions:
81 x 114.5 x 115.5 cm
The Museum of
Modern Art.Gift of Barbara Jakobson and the
Architecture
& Design Purchase Fund, 2010.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC
UNITED’HABITATION MARSEILLE 1946 – 1952
UNITE
D’HABITATION MARSEILLE 1946 - 1952
View of the
Model of the Roof Terrace, Mounted on a
Background of
the Provence Landscape.
Silver
Gelatin Print Mounted on Paper
Dimensions:
10 x 18 cm
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC
LE CORBUSIER
AT HIS PARIS STUDIO 1954
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERNST SCHEIDEGGER
VOISIN PLAN
FOR PARIS 1925
Axonometric
View With the Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin Gates
Ink, Pencil,
and Colored Pencil on Paper
Dimensions:
74 x 102 cm
Fondation Le
Corbusier, Paris.
© 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC
CENTER OF LE
CORBUSIER
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF WESTERN ART TOKYO
VILLA SAVOYE POISSY 1928 – 1931
VILLA SAVOYE,
POISSY 1928 - 1931
Patio -
Photograph 2012.
The Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Elise
Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.
Photo © 2013 Richard Pare
VILLA SAVOYE
POISSY 1928 – 1931
Photograph
2012
The Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
Gift of Elise
Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.
Photo © 2013 Richard Pare
VILLA
JEANNERET – PERRET, LA CHAUX DE FONDS 1912
Photograph.
2012.
© 2013
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/FLC
Photo © Richard Pare
CHANDIGARH: A NEW URBAN
LANDSCAPE FOR INDIA
After 1945 Le Corbusier
would face new frustrations when the headquarters of the United Nations in New
York were built by Wallace K. Harrison, based on sketches by Le Corbusier and
Oscar Niemeyer. But he finally managed to design an entire city, the only one
in his career, as the result of a commission from the Indian government. Le
Corbusier developed the plan for Chandigarh, the new capital of the Indian
state of Punjab, a project that enabled him to implement, over a vast
territory, ideas developed 30 years earlier in relation to ancient Rome.
Numerous drawings, sketches, and models of Chandigarh are on view. The flights
he took twice a year between Europe and India provided the opportunity for him
to practice “the view of the airplane,” as he termed it. The sketches on view
retain the countless traces of his observations of continents, islands, and
mountains. If the architecture of the 1920s was strongly related to his paintings,
that of the 1950s echoed his sculptures, from works in wood produced by the
Breton cabinet-maker Joseph Savina to sand-casts he developed in Long Island
with Costantino Nivola. Le Corbusier also continued his
work as an author,
publishing numerous books. With the Modulor, a system of harmonic proportions
unveiled in New York in 1947, and on behalf of the "Synthesis of the
Arts," he aimed to become the central figure of a modern architecture that
was almost universally accepted by that time.
TOWARD THE MEDITERRANEAN,
OR THE ETERNAL RETURN
During the last 15 years
of his life, Le Corbusier appeared to achieve many of the objectives he had
been pursuing for decades. He finally realized a building in the United States,
the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, as well as five large residential
units, including his building in Marseille. This project for a “unité
d'habitation” (“housing unit”), or a “vertical garden city,” was developed in
1945 and commissioned for the rehousing of people left homeless by the war. In
Marseille, for the 337 double-height apartments assembled on a reinforced
concrete frame, Le
Corbusier used the
proportions of the Modulor to design the elements of the building. The
roughness of the surfaces and the traces of wooden formwork that resulted from
the lack of sufficient skilled labor led him to assert the beauty of “rough”
concrete. The interiors resulted from a collective effort. The built-in kitchen
cupboards, designed by Charlotte Perriand, and the steel stairways, designed by
Jean Prouvé, are complemented by elegant shelves. The loggias became an
intermediary space between the interiors and the Provencal landscape. The
building is represented in the exhibition through models, photos, drawings, and
the final room-sized interior.
Toward the end of his
career the question of landscape remained central to Le Corbusier's work, and
he strove to respond to geography whether in the east of France, at Ronchamp,
or in the region of Lyon at La Tourette. The hospital that he designed in Venice
beginning in 1962 transposed the reflections he had made during the 1930s, and
is represented through drawings, models, and plans.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1321
You may visit MoMA’s
Architectural department exhibitions news of Conceptions of Space and Cut 'n'
Paste From Architectural Assemblage to Collage City both curated by Pedro
Gadanho to click below links.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2014/09/conception-of-space-at-museum-of-modern.html
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2013/08/cut-n-paste-from-architectural.html
LE CORBUSIER
1887 – 1965
( French, Born Switzerland )
