“LE CORBUSIER THE GREAT”
Book review by Wendy Kohn
in The Boston Book Review
Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage Toward an Archaeology of Modernism
by Adoph Max Vogt
The MIT Press
353 pp., $40.00
ISBN: 0-262-22056-3
Raise one finger and you’ve counted the number of buildings built in this country by Le Corbusier. Ask an auditorium full of American architects (most of whom affectionately refer to the architect as “Corb” or “Corbu”) how many have actually laid eyes on any of his seminal projects, and you will see many more eyes ashamedly lowered than hands excitedly raised. But every single member of that group, regardless of age, would name Le Corbusier as one of the greatest architects in all history, if not the single most formidable force in the course of twentieth-century architecture.
Le Corbusier’s always breathtaking and sometimes violent visions for buildings and cities rest in the minds of architects like a primal dream. His unadorned, floating cube of the Villa Savoie in Poissy (1928-9), his majesterial, rhythmic and haunting Parliament Buildings in Chandigarh (1951-65), and his Chapel at Ronchamp (1951-3) – swooping up and falling toward the ground as with a great, soulful breath – such individual projects sear the printed page, even once their images are seemingly familiar.
The sheer scope of Le Corbusier’s ideas for the salvation of crowded industrial cities (his 1925 Plan Voisin accomplished its salutary goal of freeing up ground space, providing new, unobstructed vistas by razing an entire quarter of Paris and building a matrix of cruciform skyscrapers in its place), for forging a new architectural vocabulary infused with the spirit of a contemporary utopia, has provoked a constant stream of controversy and scholarship.
To this already dense pile of analysis, Adolph Max Vogt adds Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage and manages to elevate the field of inquiry. Intending nothing less than to “break down and remove the encasements, the defensive encrustations that had coalesced into the LC cliché,” Vogt began this book after a self-described “short and sketchy” lecture given at Harvard on a 1991 visit. Anything but short (353 pages) or sketchy (the book is minutely detailed), Vogt’s thesis more than dents the existing bulwark of Le Corbusier scholarship. And it does so by spinning a powerful new argument out of a most unassuming approach.
With due deference to his colleagues, the author carefully traces the enthusiastically futuristic themes of Le Corbusier’s mature work to his earliest encounters with the particular regional history and local landscape of his birthplace. Many scholars before Vogt have quoted Le Corbusier’s repeated contention that history was his “only real master” and credited his native Switzerland and its regional politics as formative to the architect, but this scholar alone interprets his startling forms and his principles of the “free plan,” “long window” and roof garden as originally and intrinsically rooted in the picturesque Jura mountain region in turn-of-the-century Switzerland.
Founder of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Max Vogt has written historical surveys and monographs ranging over four centuries of art and architecture. He undertakes this “archaeology of a great European avant-gardist” with evident respect for the many layers and broad extents of his subject. Yet, while deferential to the complex interplay between politics, culture, architecture and the individual, the author meticulously defines his objective: “What interests me,” writes Vogt, “is how a building rises from the ground…what happens at the emergence from the earth’s crust or the grass’s scar and how this is mastered…What I am undertaking here is an attempt to develop a typology from a frog’s perspective.”
For those of us without the native ability to see the world from the vantage point of a frog, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage presents a fascinating, crystal clear portrayal of the emergence of a modern master, starting at the roots. In the classic manner of an art historian (Vogt’s early training was in art history, archaelogy and the German language), the author carefully constructs his argument one piece at a time. But unlike most dusty academic art histories, Vogt’s account conveys the wonder of his own fresh discoveries and invites the reader to follow all the twists and turns on the path to his unorthodox conclusions. Vogt differentiates Le Corbusier from his fellow avant-garde architects whose “houses were also white and cubical and ‘cool’” by his unique insistence on the piloti, the slender steel columns he used to elevate his spaces from earthbound, concrete volumes to “boxes in the air.” His book tells a story of the fire behind Le Corbusier’s nearly mythic belief in the power of his invention.
Drawing on a extraordinarily broad body of evidence, the author takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from Swiss mountaintops to the shores of Turkey, from turn-of-the-century pedagogic principles to the discovery of prehistoric Irish huts in the 1830s. We witness the architect as a boy, learning that the original building type of his ancestors was a house on pilings, projecting over land and water alike. We see the happiest times in his childhood, climbing with his mountaineering father toward the adrenalin rush at the parting of trees on a mountaintop, and the sudden open light, air and views. We discover in an adulthood sketch of Rome the wooden sphere, cube, cylinder, and cone of his “intuitive and moral education” at a Froebel elementary school. And we hear how compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s teachings, no less than any of the above influences, rang out explicitly through some of Le Corbusier’s most important words and projects.
Vogt describes a 42-year old Le Corbusier standing at a podium in Argentina as, “entranced as if transported into a daydream” as he lectures on his entry to the League of Nations competition:
“Flocks are grazing here and there. This touching rustic scene that takes us back to the sensitive texts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – under no circumstances do I want to disturb it…I preserve the grass and the herds, the century-old trees, and all the fascinating views across the landscape; and above that in the air…on a horizontal ground of concrete elevated to the height of the pilotis…I erect the transparent and pure cubic units of utilitarian buildings; I am uplifted by an elevating task; I set the squared buildings and the surrounding spaces into their proportioned relation; I compose atmospherically.”
Vogt’s argument is convincing; his book is charmingly written, and this writer clearly likes his subject. What’s more, he sympathizes with Le Corbusier’s notoriously proud, zealous, even “missionary” manner. The region of Western Switzerland where Le Corbusier grew up becomes in Vogt’s words, “the specific culture of a French borderland that for us Swiss Germans is an object of admiration.” And after describing one of Le Corbusier’s flowery and ecstatic expositions of his pilotis principle, Vogt chimes right in with: “If in the twentieth century there exists a Song of Songs in praise of architecture, these lines [Le Corbusier’s words] belong in it! What euphoria, what a feeling of joy about the vision attained!” Elsewhere, describing Le Corbusier’s belief that studying “one’s own work is the springboard to progress” draws Vogt into a pre-emptive, almost paranoid, defense of the architect: “Who is saying this? A narcissist? If he were one, he would keep this insight to himself and would not recommend it to all of his colleagues.”
Such intimacies can add an unfortunate precariousness to Vogt’s otherwise convincing conclusion, and the comfortable pace at which he minutely tells his story requires a certain patience. In the face of such lines as “Let us follow in their temporal sequence all his proposals that have to do with reform from below,” one is tempted to avoid what sounds like a laborious catalogue and flip to the conclusion sometimes more than one hundred pages later. But as a veteran of this technique, I would urge you to settle down with a cup of tea, preferably by a fire, and relax. The sheer pleasure of following this generous and deferential discussion of the sources of creative genius will reward even those unfamiliar with architecture. And anyone familiar with Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (1961-4) – Le Corbusier’s only American building and his last ever – will approach this “forest of pilotis,” hovering concrete lobes, and curved climb rising and falling in their midst with renewed wonder at this architecture that can appear dour and messy one day, graceful and dignified as a dance the next.
Book review by Wendy Kohn
in The Boston Book Review
Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage Toward an Archaeology of Modernism
by Adoph Max Vogt
The MIT Press
353 pp., $40.00
ISBN: 0-262-22056-3
Raise one finger and you’ve counted the number of buildings built in this country by Le Corbusier. Ask an auditorium full of American architects (most of whom affectionately refer to the architect as “Corb” or “Corbu”) how many have actually laid eyes on any of his seminal projects, and you will see many more eyes ashamedly lowered than hands excitedly raised. But every single member of that group, regardless of age, would name Le Corbusier as one of the greatest architects in all history, if not the single most formidable force in the course of twentieth-century architecture.
Le Corbusier’s always breathtaking and sometimes violent visions for buildings and cities rest in the minds of architects like a primal dream. His unadorned, floating cube of the Villa Savoie in Poissy (1928-9), his majesterial, rhythmic and haunting Parliament Buildings in Chandigarh (1951-65), and his Chapel at Ronchamp (1951-3) – swooping up and falling toward the ground as with a great, soulful breath – such individual projects sear the printed page, even once their images are seemingly familiar.
The sheer scope of Le Corbusier’s ideas for the salvation of crowded industrial cities (his 1925 Plan Voisin accomplished its salutary goal of freeing up ground space, providing new, unobstructed vistas by razing an entire quarter of Paris and building a matrix of cruciform skyscrapers in its place), for forging a new architectural vocabulary infused with the spirit of a contemporary utopia, has provoked a constant stream of controversy and scholarship.
To this already dense pile of analysis, Adolph Max Vogt adds Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage and manages to elevate the field of inquiry. Intending nothing less than to “break down and remove the encasements, the defensive encrustations that had coalesced into the LC cliché,” Vogt began this book after a self-described “short and sketchy” lecture given at Harvard on a 1991 visit. Anything but short (353 pages) or sketchy (the book is minutely detailed), Vogt’s thesis more than dents the existing bulwark of Le Corbusier scholarship. And it does so by spinning a powerful new argument out of a most unassuming approach.
With due deference to his colleagues, the author carefully traces the enthusiastically futuristic themes of Le Corbusier’s mature work to his earliest encounters with the particular regional history and local landscape of his birthplace. Many scholars before Vogt have quoted Le Corbusier’s repeated contention that history was his “only real master” and credited his native Switzerland and its regional politics as formative to the architect, but this scholar alone interprets his startling forms and his principles of the “free plan,” “long window” and roof garden as originally and intrinsically rooted in the picturesque Jura mountain region in turn-of-the-century Switzerland.
Founder of the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Max Vogt has written historical surveys and monographs ranging over four centuries of art and architecture. He undertakes this “archaeology of a great European avant-gardist” with evident respect for the many layers and broad extents of his subject. Yet, while deferential to the complex interplay between politics, culture, architecture and the individual, the author meticulously defines his objective: “What interests me,” writes Vogt, “is how a building rises from the ground…what happens at the emergence from the earth’s crust or the grass’s scar and how this is mastered…What I am undertaking here is an attempt to develop a typology from a frog’s perspective.”
For those of us without the native ability to see the world from the vantage point of a frog, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage presents a fascinating, crystal clear portrayal of the emergence of a modern master, starting at the roots. In the classic manner of an art historian (Vogt’s early training was in art history, archaelogy and the German language), the author carefully constructs his argument one piece at a time. But unlike most dusty academic art histories, Vogt’s account conveys the wonder of his own fresh discoveries and invites the reader to follow all the twists and turns on the path to his unorthodox conclusions. Vogt differentiates Le Corbusier from his fellow avant-garde architects whose “houses were also white and cubical and ‘cool’” by his unique insistence on the piloti, the slender steel columns he used to elevate his spaces from earthbound, concrete volumes to “boxes in the air.” His book tells a story of the fire behind Le Corbusier’s nearly mythic belief in the power of his invention.
Drawing on a extraordinarily broad body of evidence, the author takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from Swiss mountaintops to the shores of Turkey, from turn-of-the-century pedagogic principles to the discovery of prehistoric Irish huts in the 1830s. We witness the architect as a boy, learning that the original building type of his ancestors was a house on pilings, projecting over land and water alike. We see the happiest times in his childhood, climbing with his mountaineering father toward the adrenalin rush at the parting of trees on a mountaintop, and the sudden open light, air and views. We discover in an adulthood sketch of Rome the wooden sphere, cube, cylinder, and cone of his “intuitive and moral education” at a Froebel elementary school. And we hear how compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s teachings, no less than any of the above influences, rang out explicitly through some of Le Corbusier’s most important words and projects.
Vogt describes a 42-year old Le Corbusier standing at a podium in Argentina as, “entranced as if transported into a daydream” as he lectures on his entry to the League of Nations competition:
“Flocks are grazing here and there. This touching rustic scene that takes us back to the sensitive texts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – under no circumstances do I want to disturb it…I preserve the grass and the herds, the century-old trees, and all the fascinating views across the landscape; and above that in the air…on a horizontal ground of concrete elevated to the height of the pilotis…I erect the transparent and pure cubic units of utilitarian buildings; I am uplifted by an elevating task; I set the squared buildings and the surrounding spaces into their proportioned relation; I compose atmospherically.”
Vogt’s argument is convincing; his book is charmingly written, and this writer clearly likes his subject. What’s more, he sympathizes with Le Corbusier’s notoriously proud, zealous, even “missionary” manner. The region of Western Switzerland where Le Corbusier grew up becomes in Vogt’s words, “the specific culture of a French borderland that for us Swiss Germans is an object of admiration.” And after describing one of Le Corbusier’s flowery and ecstatic expositions of his pilotis principle, Vogt chimes right in with: “If in the twentieth century there exists a Song of Songs in praise of architecture, these lines [Le Corbusier’s words] belong in it! What euphoria, what a feeling of joy about the vision attained!” Elsewhere, describing Le Corbusier’s belief that studying “one’s own work is the springboard to progress” draws Vogt into a pre-emptive, almost paranoid, defense of the architect: “Who is saying this? A narcissist? If he were one, he would keep this insight to himself and would not recommend it to all of his colleagues.”
Such intimacies can add an unfortunate precariousness to Vogt’s otherwise convincing conclusion, and the comfortable pace at which he minutely tells his story requires a certain patience. In the face of such lines as “Let us follow in their temporal sequence all his proposals that have to do with reform from below,” one is tempted to avoid what sounds like a laborious catalogue and flip to the conclusion sometimes more than one hundred pages later. But as a veteran of this technique, I would urge you to settle down with a cup of tea, preferably by a fire, and relax. The sheer pleasure of following this generous and deferential discussion of the sources of creative genius will reward even those unfamiliar with architecture. And anyone familiar with Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (1961-4) – Le Corbusier’s only American building and his last ever – will approach this “forest of pilotis,” hovering concrete lobes, and curved climb rising and falling in their midst with renewed wonder at this architecture that can appear dour and messy one day, graceful and dignified as a dance the next.