FROM “THE NEW YORKER”
June 18, 2013
Le Corbusier at MOMA
The psychological center of the
Museum of Modern Art’s giant Le Corbusier retrospective, “An Atlas of
Modern Landscapes,” is located in the second-to-last gallery. There,
taking a few steps in any direction, it’s possible to see many of the
Swiss architect’s qualities represented, for better and for worse.
His
ardent explanations, for one, which are embodied by wall-size drawings
made during lectures on his 1935 trip to America, describing what’s
wrong with New York skyscrapers (“not big enough”) and how the
traditional peak-roofed house must be replaced by a house on stilts. His
attention to reputation, represented by a 1947 collage laying sole
claim to the design of the United Nations complex, sketch by sketch. His
make-no-little-plans ambition, realized (for once!) in the design of
Chandigarh, the new capital of Punjab, in India, seen in plan, drawing,
film, photograph, and an arresting six-by-eight-foot wooden model, built
by a cabinetmaker and hung on the wall like sculpture. His lifetime
exploration of materials, which took him from the delicate hardwood
veneer of his mother’s writing desk, designed in 1915-1916, to the
curved, chromed tubing of his famous 1928 chaise, or from the white
stucco walls of the modernist icon Villa Savoye (1928-31) to the béton brut (rough concrete) of his apartment tower, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1946-52).
These products suggest the terrific span of Le
Corbusier’s career in time, space, and scale, attacking the problems of
how we should build and how we should live at home and abroad. They also
point to his awareness of audience: Le Corbusier understood, as so many
younger architects do now, the publicity value of the provocative
image, the aggressive quote. Films by and featuring Le Corbusier offer
an additional and welcome look at his self-presentation. If current
architects take anything from the exhibition—a must-see, despite some
critical flaws—it should be the power of those big, gestural drawings,
where visual and verbal argument vividly come together.
Perversely, for an architect that many blame (incorrectly) for the failed towers-in-the-park model of American public housing, the theme of this long-overdue exhibition is landscape. The show begins with a tiny watercolor of the Jura, painted by the fifteen-year-old Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and ends with his tiny seafront cabanon in the south of France. (He renamed himself Le Corbusier in 1920, in the first issue of the journal L’Esprit Nouveau.) It was while at this one-room retreat that the architect made his final swim in August, 1965; it is assumed that he had a heart attack and drowned. Landscape is much on the minds of architects today, as parks have replaced buildings in the narrative of urban transformation, and the resilient city, as outlined in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s twenty-billion-dollar waterfront-defense plan, depends as much on wetlands as it does on bulkheads. Every generation finds contemporary resonance in heroes of the past, and the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, marshalling vintage models, room-size installations, paintings, and drawing after detailed drawing, make a valiant attempt with Corbu.
Does it work? I don’t think so, not in the exhibition as presented here. Knowing the theme makes you notice the presence of landscape (mountains, trees, views) in many of the archival drawings on display, but these elements are often rendered generically, or from Le Corbusier’s favorite “view of the airplane.” Among the most spectacular of these views are his ideas for Rio de Janeiro, running horizontal highways across the city’s up-down topography, and building cell-like structures below the roadbed. This idea of the endless building, one that would house the population and give everyone a look at the water, is repeated elsewhere, as in his Plan Obus for Algiers. Is it truly sensitive to the “landscape” if you can pack up the idea and take it on the road? Or was Le Corbusier merely an opportunist, shopping his ideas to whoever had the power to make them happen?
Complicating acceptance of the landscape theme is the minimal wall text, which sometimes fails to connect the dots between the domestic, mountainous, and urban landscapes on display, and even to state some Le Corbusier essentials for the general public. We get a 1916 perspective of a Dom-ino housing scheme placed on a Mediterranean site, but not the definitive Dom-ino drawing that explains his then revolutionary idea that houses could be made of concrete columns and flat floor plates, the better to wrap the exterior in glass. The wall text refers in one place to Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture,” but never tells you what they are. (One, pilotis, the first-floor columns seen on so many of his projects; two, roof gardens; three, the free plan; four, the free façade; and, five, the horizontal window.) Three of the five are essential to Le Corbusier’s design approach, as described in “Vers Une Architecture”: “Considering the impact of a work of architecture on its site … the outside is always an inside.” Dear MOMA: Please type them out and put them up, preferably with Le Corbusier’s drawing of such a building.
It’s not as if there isn’t any evidence for Le Corbusier’s interest in landscape. If I were trying to convince you of Le Corbusier’s love for natural forms, I might pick a repeating design motif, like the curving path, and show how he uses it over decades, in projects domestic and monumental. Here it is as a ramp on the deck of the shipshape Villa Savoye; here it is again in the uphill approach to the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (its landscape position right there in the name), in Ronchamp (1954); here it is a third time rendered in concrete for Le Corbusier’s only American building, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard (1963). The ramp appears at the urban scale in many of Le Corbusier’s unbuilt planning projects: there, it is designed to accommodate the motorcar, which one suspects the architect loved equally. (A drawing of a 1935 design for a multistory apartment building in Montmartre includes what must have been a rare-for-Paris surface parking lot, the autos pencilled in.) The exhibition also includes a series of Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings from the late teens and early nineteen-twenties, clearly connecting these abstract, tabletop still lifes to the architect’s habit of arranging prism-like buildings on an open field. In comparisons like these, one glimpses the creative mind at work, filing visual effects away for later use at the city scale.
It’s these details, like the lecture drawings, that make Le Corbusier’s practice come alive in the gallery. Urbanism is always a hard sell in an exhibition, as it is difficult to engage with the details of city planning, particularly in cities where you’ve never been. But given the many scales at which Le Corbusier worked, there seem to be missed opportunities to make his choices more tactile, and to triangulate between photography, drawing, model, and three-dimensional example. (Photographs by Richard Pare are mounted high on the walls, as if giving us the long view through a horizontal window. Their impact was dulled by the distance and the glare from gallery lights.) In my hazy memories of previous MOMA retrospectives on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto, what stands out are chunks of architecture, made of real materials, in the galleries. Don’t just tell us about béton brut, show us a piece! I appreciated the mention, in a 1966 documentary on the making of Chandigarh, that the whole complex was made by hand, with footage of Indian women carrying materials on their heads.
The exhibit does include Le Corbusier’s pastel-tinted paintings and a period model of the Villa Savoye in the same gallery, walls colored in matching light blue and terra cotta. The wall text should make that chromatic connection, and mention Le Corbusier’s line of paints and specific palettes. He can seem so cerebral, so abstract, that more objects like the heavy, crusty sand casting made in collaboration with the sculptor Costantino Nivola, on Long Island, would show him as he was: tactile and sensual as well as technical and analytical. What makes Le Corbusier so fascinating is his many parts, the terrible ideas and the brilliant ones, the big plans and the tabletop studies. Choosing landscape as the theme may be topical, but those new to Le Corbusier are likely to need a better map.
Perversely, for an architect that many blame (incorrectly) for the failed towers-in-the-park model of American public housing, the theme of this long-overdue exhibition is landscape. The show begins with a tiny watercolor of the Jura, painted by the fifteen-year-old Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and ends with his tiny seafront cabanon in the south of France. (He renamed himself Le Corbusier in 1920, in the first issue of the journal L’Esprit Nouveau.) It was while at this one-room retreat that the architect made his final swim in August, 1965; it is assumed that he had a heart attack and drowned. Landscape is much on the minds of architects today, as parks have replaced buildings in the narrative of urban transformation, and the resilient city, as outlined in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s twenty-billion-dollar waterfront-defense plan, depends as much on wetlands as it does on bulkheads. Every generation finds contemporary resonance in heroes of the past, and the curators Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, marshalling vintage models, room-size installations, paintings, and drawing after detailed drawing, make a valiant attempt with Corbu.
Does it work? I don’t think so, not in the exhibition as presented here. Knowing the theme makes you notice the presence of landscape (mountains, trees, views) in many of the archival drawings on display, but these elements are often rendered generically, or from Le Corbusier’s favorite “view of the airplane.” Among the most spectacular of these views are his ideas for Rio de Janeiro, running horizontal highways across the city’s up-down topography, and building cell-like structures below the roadbed. This idea of the endless building, one that would house the population and give everyone a look at the water, is repeated elsewhere, as in his Plan Obus for Algiers. Is it truly sensitive to the “landscape” if you can pack up the idea and take it on the road? Or was Le Corbusier merely an opportunist, shopping his ideas to whoever had the power to make them happen?
Complicating acceptance of the landscape theme is the minimal wall text, which sometimes fails to connect the dots between the domestic, mountainous, and urban landscapes on display, and even to state some Le Corbusier essentials for the general public. We get a 1916 perspective of a Dom-ino housing scheme placed on a Mediterranean site, but not the definitive Dom-ino drawing that explains his then revolutionary idea that houses could be made of concrete columns and flat floor plates, the better to wrap the exterior in glass. The wall text refers in one place to Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture,” but never tells you what they are. (One, pilotis, the first-floor columns seen on so many of his projects; two, roof gardens; three, the free plan; four, the free façade; and, five, the horizontal window.) Three of the five are essential to Le Corbusier’s design approach, as described in “Vers Une Architecture”: “Considering the impact of a work of architecture on its site … the outside is always an inside.” Dear MOMA: Please type them out and put them up, preferably with Le Corbusier’s drawing of such a building.
It’s not as if there isn’t any evidence for Le Corbusier’s interest in landscape. If I were trying to convince you of Le Corbusier’s love for natural forms, I might pick a repeating design motif, like the curving path, and show how he uses it over decades, in projects domestic and monumental. Here it is as a ramp on the deck of the shipshape Villa Savoye; here it is again in the uphill approach to the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (its landscape position right there in the name), in Ronchamp (1954); here it is a third time rendered in concrete for Le Corbusier’s only American building, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard (1963). The ramp appears at the urban scale in many of Le Corbusier’s unbuilt planning projects: there, it is designed to accommodate the motorcar, which one suspects the architect loved equally. (A drawing of a 1935 design for a multistory apartment building in Montmartre includes what must have been a rare-for-Paris surface parking lot, the autos pencilled in.) The exhibition also includes a series of Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings from the late teens and early nineteen-twenties, clearly connecting these abstract, tabletop still lifes to the architect’s habit of arranging prism-like buildings on an open field. In comparisons like these, one glimpses the creative mind at work, filing visual effects away for later use at the city scale.
It’s these details, like the lecture drawings, that make Le Corbusier’s practice come alive in the gallery. Urbanism is always a hard sell in an exhibition, as it is difficult to engage with the details of city planning, particularly in cities where you’ve never been. But given the many scales at which Le Corbusier worked, there seem to be missed opportunities to make his choices more tactile, and to triangulate between photography, drawing, model, and three-dimensional example. (Photographs by Richard Pare are mounted high on the walls, as if giving us the long view through a horizontal window. Their impact was dulled by the distance and the glare from gallery lights.) In my hazy memories of previous MOMA retrospectives on Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto, what stands out are chunks of architecture, made of real materials, in the galleries. Don’t just tell us about béton brut, show us a piece! I appreciated the mention, in a 1966 documentary on the making of Chandigarh, that the whole complex was made by hand, with footage of Indian women carrying materials on their heads.
The exhibit does include Le Corbusier’s pastel-tinted paintings and a period model of the Villa Savoye in the same gallery, walls colored in matching light blue and terra cotta. The wall text should make that chromatic connection, and mention Le Corbusier’s line of paints and specific palettes. He can seem so cerebral, so abstract, that more objects like the heavy, crusty sand casting made in collaboration with the sculptor Costantino Nivola, on Long Island, would show him as he was: tactile and sensual as well as technical and analytical. What makes Le Corbusier so fascinating is his many parts, the terrible ideas and the brilliant ones, the big plans and the tabletop studies. Choosing landscape as the theme may be topical, but those new to Le Corbusier are likely to need a better map.