LE CORBUSIER AS AN ORATOR

Le Corbusier as an Orator

Le Corbusier as an Orator

Surprisingly perhaps for an architect best known for his role in creating the stripped-down, rationalist aesthetic of the 1920s, Le Corbusier's training in the small Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds was based on the Romantic ideas of such nineteenth-century figures as John Ruskin, Eugène Grasset and Owen Jones. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the young Le Corbusier (born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) developed an artistic and architectural style that was rooted in his reverence for nature in general and his feeling for the Jura landscape in particular. How, then, did his city plans of the 1920s, with their strongly orthogonal grids and decoration-defying façades, develop? What was the journey which took him from pattern and organicism to rationality and the 'call to order', and what does it reveal about his conception of the natural world? Le Corbusier, applied to the discipline of musical design. The spatial and geometric relationship between the disciplines of music and architecture highlight their shared generative technique. Xenakis' work also integrates the distribution of graphical information and quasi-genetic tree diagrams onto the spatial topology of the piano keyboard and orchestra, illustrating the significance of abstract (mathematical) conceptualisation and visualisation to design creativity.

Corbusier's understanding of nature as fundamentally ordered from his early years to his mature career, and trace the parallel story of the far-reaching influence of the Garden City movement on his work in urban planning. Ultimately, although the dominant philosophical framework of his training was profoundly Romantic, Le Corbusier's concern with the urban realm, where man and nature can be brought into harmony rather than the human being subsumed by the natural, makes his engagement with Romanticism somewhat problematic, as this article will conclude by suggesting.

The most comprehensive account which Le Corbusier gave of his training at the art school in La Chaux-de-Fonds is found in the final chapter, entitled “Confession”, of The Decorative Art of Today (1925). In it he emphasised the formative influence of the landscape in which he grew up:

My master was an excellent teacher and a real man of the woods, and he made us men of the woods. Nature was the setting where, with my friends, I spent my childhood. Besides, my father was passionately devoted to the mountains and the river which made up our landscape. We were constantly on the mountain tops: the long horizons were familiar.

Earlier in The Decorative Art of Today Le Corbusier recalled that, Our childhood was illuminated by the miracles of nature. Our hours of study were spent hunched over a thousand flowers and insects. Trees, clouds and birds were the field of our research; we tried to understand their life-curve, and concluded that only nature was beautiful and that we could be no more than humble imitators of her forms and wonderful materials.

Charles L'Eplattenier, Le Corbusier's teacher at La Chaux-de-Fonds and the “master” referred to above, encouraged him and his fellow pupils in their devoted study of nature:

My master had ...