On page 159 of this book there is a charming photograph that looks like a holiday snap, showing a group of young children splashing around in a paddling pool, with mountains in the background, The children are actually high in the air, on the roof of the Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles (1946‐52), which contains 337 apartments and five “internal streets”. The roof deck is the size of a stadium, and evidently features a gymnasium, an outdoor theatre, a nursery school, and a 300‐metre running track. Kenneth Frampton calls it “a full incarnation of the communal”, and compares it to an ancient agora.
Professor Frampton provides here a deeply interesting “synoptic account…part thematic, part chronological” of the fantastically productive career of Charles Edouard Jeanneret‐Gris (born La Chaux‐deFonds, Switzerland, 1887), who came to call himself Le Corbusier. The first illustration in the text is an engraved watch case produced as a school exercise in 1903 under the tutelage of Charles L’Eplattenier, an inspired polymath and admirer of the English Arts and Crafts movement. The final illustration is the plan of a 12‐foot by 12‐foot holiday cabin at Rouebrune‐Cap Martin in the south of France, designed in 1952 and described by Frampton as “some sort of last will and testament”.
The young Le Crobusier read Nietzshe, and according to Frampton he was “burdened throughout his life with a romantic disposition”. On page 107 he is pictured with the young Josephine Baker, returning in 1929 from a trip to Latin America which changed his life (this had something to do with the “undulating” Brazilian landscape and the female form). Following a prodigious burst of creativity in the 1920s the Wall Street Crash began to undermine his faith in “the manifest destiny of the machine age”. His paintings moved away from “Purist” abstraction and grew “erotic and esoteric”.
A persistent theme of the book is Le Corbusier’s compulsively dualistic or “dialogic” cast of mind ‐ “a tendency to think in terms of interdependent opposites” ‐ which Frampton first sees manifested in the design of the watch case. Later in life he played up a possible genealogical connection with the Cathar heretics of the medieval pays d’Oc, and became preoccupied with alchemical symbolism and “a pantheistic spirituality”.
In a remarkable passage Frampton suggests that the roof of Notre Dame‐du‐Haut at Ronchamp (1950‐55) can be seen as a ship’s hull as well as an aeroplane’s wing, connoting “the aquatic origin of all life and the ultimate transformation of this aqueous state into the aerial”. One of the profound experiences of 1929 was a flight over the Latin American pampas in which Le Corbusier witnessed “the diurnal cycle of evaporation and condensation”.
A bibliography includes:
The Le Corbusier Archive (32 volumes of drawings);
the complete works (8 volumes), the sketchbooks (4 volumes), and
Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie (1987).
Among the sources of inspiration for the Unité d’Habitation concept were the temples of ancient Egypt, the writings of the French libertarian Charles Fourier (1772‐1837), and the thinking of the Soviet architectural avant‐garde of the 1920s. The “flared concrete cowl” on the roof of the Marseilles Unité, which ventilates the bathrooms, looks to me like a vaguely menacing piece of monumental sculpture.
One of Le Corbusier’s aims in devising this way of living was the preservation of pre‐industrial greenery, and in the last of his voluminous writings, entitled Mise au point (Into Focus, 1965), he expressed bitterness about the chaotic urban sprawl that was taking over the planet. Among his final thoughts were these:
Over the years a man gradually acquires through his struggles, his work, his inner combat, a certain capital, his own individual and personal conquest. But all the passionate quests of the individual, all that capital, that experience so dearly paid for, will disappear…Thought alone, the fruit of labour, is transmissible.
