Art: Corbusierismus

Puzzled but persistent, a few elderly architects who still believed in tradition went to Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art last week to listen to the first U. S. lecture of a lean, excitable Swiss in gaudy tweeds and enormously thick horn-rimmed spectacles. The lecturer’s name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. The traditionalists were outnumbered three to one by excited modernists” and lion-hunting socialites, because M. Jeanneret, 47, better known under his professional name of Le Corbusier, has had more effect than any living man on the development of modern architecture, and has become the patron saint of a whole school of ardent practitioners who write tomes on the subject of Corbusierismus.

Even such a burning defender of Le Corbusier’s work as red-bearded Professor Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr. admitted last week in his introduction to an exhibition of the architect’s work that “as his practice developed there was frequent amazement that his executed works were not, in an everyday sense, always practical.” His constructed works have been few in number: a street of modern houses in Paris; an apartment house in Geneva; Salvation Army headquarters in Paris; a number of country houses for rich esthetes in Switzerland, Holland, France, all in the stark, boxlike manner that critics like to call the International Style.

Architect Le Corbusier’s real service to modern architecture has been as philosopher and phrasemaker. Though the great expanses of glass that he favors may occasionally turn his rooms into hothouses, his flat roofs may leak and his plans may be wasteful of space, it was Architect Le Corbusier who in 1923 put the entire philosophy of modern architecture into a single sentence: “A house is a machine to live in.”

Realizing that the architecture he preaches represents a new manner of living as well as a problem in glass, concrete and steel, Architect Le Corbusier has turned more & more from the problem of the individual house to the intricate business of town planning. In La Ville Radieuse (“The Radiant City”), his newest book, published last September in Boulogne, he tries to express his idea of the city of the future in some 400 confused pages jammed with maps, plans, cartoons, old engravings, photographs. Slower minds could make little of it beyond the fact that he has not yet lost his skill in epi-grammatics. Excerpts:

¶ ”Architecture is the wise, correct and magnificent play of form under light.”

¶ “Modern society has created its own tools. The first machine age, which today is coming to an end, has covered the world with the residuum of its work: houses and cities. We have not had time to bother with the happiness of man.”

¶ “I have said that the materials of city planning are: sky, space, trees, steel and cement, in this order and in this hierarchy.”

¶ “You can do the most exact planning. But your plans may be unrealizable because the laws of society, institutions and authority oppose them. I believe that planning is putting Authority’s back to the wall.”

At last week’s lecture Architect Le Corbusier tried to explain his Radiant City all over again. Speaking no English, he strode up & down with a box of colored chalks before enormous sheets of thin paper on which he scribbled skyscrapers on stilts, trees, frogs, elevated roadways, blue clouds, orange suns. The secret of Radiant City seemed to be to limit motor traffic to elevated roadways, put all buildings on stilts with playgrounds and footpaths underneath, roof gardens above.

“Thus instead of the 88% of usable land in such a city as New York, Radiant City’s land will be 112% usable, and of the four hours a day average humans devote to transportation, they will save three.”

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret likes to say that his thick glasses were already on his nose when he was born. That event occurred near Geneva in 1888 where his father, from whom he inherits his passion for machinery, was a prosperous watchmaker. He traveled widely, studying architecture in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, Rome, finally set up shop in Paris just before the War. Commissions being slow, he turned to painting and writing essays for art magazines. In 1921 he adopted his mother’s family name, Le Corbusier, but still signs Jeanneret to the Léger-like abstractions he paints in his spare time and which he has never tried to sell. Not until after the Arts Decoratifs Exposition of 1925 did he gain an international reputation as a builder. By that time many a young architect was working on the problem of stripping the petticoat from architecture and making honest use of modern materials in building. But it remained for Le Corbusier to supply the crackling phrases which often did more to promote and popularize modern architecture than any number of houses in that style designed by less articulate fellow-workmen. Architect Le Corbusier’s view of his own profession: “There is one profession and only one, architecture, in which progress is not considered necessary, where laziness is enthroned, and in which the reference is always to yesterday.”