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if the idea of being a modern person and
leading a modern life still has an
exciting ring to it it's at least in
part down to the influence of an
extraordinary swiss architect le
corposier who in the first half of the
20th century wrote books put up
buildings and designed bits of furniture
that all conveyed the excitement
sleekness and glamour of the modern
technological world
le corbusier began his career by
attacking the architecture of the
victorian age and contrasting it with
what he saw as the beauty and
intelligence of modern engineering
our engineers are healthy and virile
active and useful balanced and happy in
their work he exclaimed in his famous
polemical book towards a new
architecture written in 1923 meanwhile
the corbusier added our architects are
disillusioned and unemployed boastful or
peevish this is because there will soon
be nothing for them to do we no longer
have the money to erect historical
souvenirs at the same time everyone
needs to wash our engineers provide for
these things and they will be our
builders le corbusier recommended that
the houses of the future be ascetic and
clean disciplined and frugal his hatred
of any kind of decoration extended to a
pity of the british royal family and the
ornate golden carriage in which they
traveled to open parliament in every
year he suggested that they push the
carved monstrosity off the cliffs of
dover and instead learned to travel
around their kingdom in a hispano
suicide 1911 racing car he even mocked
rome the traditional destination for the
education of young architects and
renamed it the city of horrors the
damnation of the half educated and the
cancer of french architecture on account
of its violation of modern principles of
architecture through all its baroque
detailing elaborate wall painting and
statuary
for look up his year true great
architecture meaning architecture
motivated by the quest for modern
efficiency was more likely to be found
in a electricity turbine or a low
pressure ventilating fan it was to these
machines that his books accorded the
reverential photographs which previous
architectural writers had reserved for
cathedrals and opera houses
once asked by a magazine editor to name
his favorite chair le corbusier cited
the seat of a cockpit and described the
first time he ever saw an aeroplane in
the spring of 1909 in the sky above
paris it was the aviator the controller
bear taking a turn around the eiffel
tower as the most significant moment of
his life
he observed that the requirements of
flight of necessity rid aeroplanes of
all the superfluous decoration of
buildings and so unwittingly transforms
them into successful pieces of modern
architecture to place a classical statue
on top of a house was for le corbusier
as silly as to add one to a plane but at
least by crashing in response to this
addition the plane had the advantage of
rendering the absurdity starkly manifest
he concluded
but if the function of a plane was to
fly what was the function of a house le
corbusier arrived at a simple list of
requirements beyond which all other
ambitions were no more than as he put it
romantic cobwebs the function of a house
was to provide one a shelter against
heat cold rain thieves and the
inquisitive two a receptacle for light
and sun three a certain number of cells
appropriated to cooking work and
personal life what modern man wants is a
monk cell well lit and heated with a
corner from which he can look at the
stars
le corbusier
his private houses which he built in and
around paris in the 1920s and 30s were
unlike anything that people had ever
witnessed both inside and out le
corbusier took an interest in their
smallest details always with an eye to
increasing efficiency he built much of
the furniture himself and was often to
earn more money from it than from his
architecture lucavia was evidently one
of the world's greatest architects but
he was also one of the world's most
disastrous urban designers his manifesto
on how to make cities contained in two
books the city of tomorrow and its
planning written in 1925 and the radiant
city of 1933 called for a dramatic break
from the past
the existing city centres must all come
down to save itself every great city
must rebuild its center
lucobusio wanted ever taller towers some
housing as many as 40 000 people when he
visited new york for the first time he
came away disappointed by the relatively
small scale of the buildings your
skyscrapers are too low he told a
surprise journalist
by building upwards two problems would
be resolved at a stroke overcrowding and
urban sprawl
look obviously planned to abolish city
streets in his vision of the future
people would have footpaths all to
themselves while cars would enjoy
massive dedicated motorways with smooth
curving interchanges
even more than paris new york was follow
corbusier the epitome of an illogical
city because it had managed to graft
skyscrapers the buildings of the future
onto a tight street plan better suited
to a medieval settlement
on his trip around the united states he
advised his increasingly bemused
american hosts that manhattan ought to
be demolished to make way for a fresh
and more cartesian attempt at urban
design
ironically what lucovisia's dreams
helped to generate were the dystopian
housing estates that now ring historic
paris the wastelands from which tourists
avert their eyes in confused horror and
disbelief on their way into the historic
city to take an overland train to the
most violent and degraded of these
places is to realize all that look
obviously forgot about architecture and
in the wider sense about human nature
for example he forgot how tricky it is
when just a few of one's
2699 neighbors decide to throw a party
or buy a handgun he forgot how drab
reinforced concrete can seem under a
grey sky he forgot how awkward it is
when someone lights a fire in the lift
shaft and home is on the 44th floor when
look opposite died in 1965 having had a
heart attack in the south of france
where he'd gone for a swim he was
responsible for having built some of the
most beautiful private houses of all
time but his ideas had also destroyed
some of the great cities of europe and
the united states for a man whose
ambition was to change the world we can
revere him paradoxically for the most
modest things about him his beautiful
white-washed fillers his door handles
and his arm chairs
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