LeCorbusier: the Pol Pot of architecture
It's not every day you come upon an essay with an opening sentence like this: "LeCorbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform."
Is the author, Thomas Dalrymple, trying to be over the top? Dalrymple, a physician and a contributing editor of City Journal, does have a wicked sense of humor. But the more I pored over the essay, the more reasonable Dalrymple's point of view impressed me as being.
The essay builds a persuasive case—from LeCorbusier's own intermperate words and from the French-Swiss designer's effect on cities worldwide—that the "most important architect of the 20th century" was captivated by perverse visions: of concrete, of highways rammed through cities, of little that's recognizably human.
Here is what Dalrymple writes as follow-up to his audacious opening sentence:
In one sense, [Corbusier] had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.
Dalrymple's thoughts reminded me of a story in the book The Architecture of Leon Krier. Krier, when he was about 17, growing up in his parents' home in Luxembourg, felt absolutely certain that LeCorbusier was a master deserving of the widest emulation. Consequently, the teen-aged Leon persuaded his family in 1963 to make a pilgrimage to Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille:
Until then, I had, via my brother, become acquainted with modernism merely through the books of Le Corbusier, Giedion, and Gropius. The formidable promise expressed there had swollen my sails.... Le Corbusier had become for me a second messiah and as a result, I imagined modernist architecture to be something superior to all the beautiful buildings I had seen and grown up with so far.
The Krier family arrived at their destination "ill-prepared for the tawdry reality of the Cité Radieuse. We were all speechless with shock," Krier says, "wondering at first whether we were at the right address." Le Corbusier's vision of mass society inhabiting a monolith of concrete turned out not to be utopia; it turned out to be hell.
First-hand experience led Krier to reconsider his opinions, and ultimately to become a chief proponent of a return to traditional city-making principles.
The tragedy is, the architectural world has, for the most part, not done the same. As Dalrymple sees it, just as "Lenin was revered long after his monstrosity should have been obvious to all," Le Corbusier "continues to be revered."
Indeed, says Dalrymple, "there is something of a revival of the adulation. Nicholas Fox Weber has just published an exhaustive and generally laudatory biography, and Phaidon has put out a huge, expensive book lovingly devoted to Le Corbusier's work. Further, a hagiographic exhibition devoted to Le Corbusier recently ran in London and Rotterdam."
Dalrymple offers some explanations for why Le Corbusier became a totalitarian of the design world. But why, decades later, should architecture schools still be favorably inclined toward a theorist who hated streets and their sociability, and who loved roads despite their barrenness? That is the unanswered question. Why is the appetite for the perverse so resilient?
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The Heroic-Genius-Artist-Revolutionary Cult
"But why, decades later, should architecture schools still be favorably inclined toward a theorist who hated streets and their sociability, and who loved roads despite their barrenness? That is the unanswered question. Why is the appetite for the perverse so resilient?"
To me the answer is pretty obvious:
http://www.intbau.org/archive/essay3.htm
Architecture as cult
Marc, thanks for referring me to Nikos Salingaros' essay, "Twentieth Century Architecture as a Cult." It's an interesting piece. Salingaros says:
I have found, to my surprise, that architects are not interested in laws of architecture. They prefer to design buildings on the basis of artistic fashion and ephemeral philosophical concerns. ... Architecture is a cult, and the last thing a cult wants is to be transformed into a proper scientific discipline. The reason is that the two types of system have very different internal structures, which in turn generate a form for the controlling power structure. There is no smooth transition from a cult to a discipline based on logical precepts....
The moment when society decides to abandon architecture as a cult, and replace it with architecture as a field based on logical reflection, the present architectural power structure will cease to exist.
I'm not sure how far I would push the idea of architecture-as-cult, but Salingaros makes some telling arguments about a cult-like atmosphere in the Bauhaus and other sources of Modern architecture. Among the things Salingaros says:
One of the slogans of the Bauhaus was "starting from zero". Its aim was a radical restructuring of human consciousness. Every incoming student was subjected to intense psychological conditioning designed to cleanse every preconception regarding architecture, so as to re-wire the student's neuronal circuits.
The studio method of architectural training lends itself perfectly as a technique for cult indoctrination. A student's project is judged -- without having a basis of proven logical criteria -- as to how far it resembles currently fashionable buildings. The student's grade is entirely up to the whim of the teacher. It is no wonder then that, despite the widely-pronounced aims of limitless creativity, all students' projects tend to look the same and to conform to stylistic dogma.
Fron what I've seen, there have been some strong attempts over the years to get architecture to pay much closer attention to how people respond to buildings and environments. In the 1970s, architecture schools brought in teachers who were interested in environmental psychology, "man-environment relations," and, in general, fields aimed at making architecture much more attentive to human needs and human preferences.
Architecture professors such as Michael Brill at SUNY-Buffalo did great work in that arena. Environmental psychologists such as Stephen Kaplan and Rachel Kaplan at the University of Michigan produced findings that can help designers produce more humanly satisfying settings. (Stephen Kaplan, in 1980, was the first person to encourage me to read Christopher Alexander.) That kind of approach has not disappeared, but it rarely if ever seems to figure into the work of global figures in architecture—Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and the like. Architecture as a field seems generally to be as divorced from human needs as it was half a century ago. It's a huge loss.
Video recording of a lecture by Christopher Alexander in Novem
Here's a video recording of a lecture by Christopher Alexander in November 2011. Islandshrine writes:
The First Part of Chris's lecture to the Urban Design Group in London on the 23rd of November 2011. After being introduced by John Worthington, he proceeds to take off his jacket and gives one of the most memorable talks that I have ever listened to. His opinion that "Design" is one of the most fatuous activities of an architect was challenging to this group of Architects and Planners at the time but after a careful study of his talk it seems to me that that he may be absolutely right. As they say enjoy! - Islandshrine
Cult vs. discipline
An Architecture for Our Time
Thank you Marc for that link! When I looked up some other essays at Intbau I also came above a brilliant piece by Charles Siegel:
"When modernist urban planning was put into practice, it produced our suburban landscape of housing tracts, shopping malls, business parks, and freeways. It created total automobile dependency, because separating land uses meant that there were no services within walking distance of homes. It destroyed the sense of community that older neighbourhoods had, because people no longer walked by their neighbors' houses on their way to local shopping streets. It created a bleak, ugly landscape of strip malls and parking lots, because the single-function developments faced inward and turned their backs to the arterial streets that surround them.
The New Urbanists reject this modernist urban design in favor of traditional urban design. Instead of large blocks, they build small blocks, so traffic is dispersed on many narrow streets. Instead of single-use zones, they build mixed-use developments, with the street grid connecting different uses and making it attractive to walk as well as to drive. Instead of complexes that face inward with parking lots facing the streets, they design buildings oriented to the street and sidewalk. To make walking possible and save land, they build at higher densities than conventional suburbs.
New Urbanists are building developments today that are similar to the railroad suburbs, streetcar suburbs, and urban neighbourhoods of a century ago. Their use of models from the past is a real challenge to the modern economy, because it implies that people would be better off living more simply. Suburbia and the automobile were the mainstays of postwar economic growth, whereas New Urbanists are saying that we would be better off if we lived in homes that use less land and in neighbourhoods where we have the choice of walking, rather than being forced to drive every time we leave our houses.
If New Urbanist neighbourhoods are more liveable than conventional automobile-dependent suburbs, that fact is a real threat to General Motors, ExxonMobile, and Wal-Mart - unlike the self-consciously 'radical' gestures of the post-modernists, which do not challenge our economy at all." - Charles Siegel
For me as an alexandrian I especially valuated this quota:
"In architecture, also, we need to reject the avant garde's pursuit of novelty and its belief that new technology should sweep away the past, in favor of design based on enduring human values. Christopher Alexander has laid the groundwork with his theory that there are continuing patterns underlying all traditional architecture, which modernists have abandoned, but to which we must return in order to build on a human scale." - Charles Siegel
here in europe we definitely
here in europe we definitely need more traditional architecture schools. hope they will come soon!
architecture is not a cult
It's not traditional vs. modernist, its architecture vs. art, or philosophy, or whatever. You can choose modernism as a style if you like, but the philosophy behind it has nothing to do with how architecture is designed, built, and most importantly, experienced.
A Week With Nikos Salingaros
I'm not sure of what you mean, but this interview series give a good insight into the ideology behind modernism: A Week With Nikos Salingaros -- Part one--Part two--Part three--Part four--Part five
Part one
I misslinked Part one!
corbu
Well, there is Ronchamp. But that's competely different from the rest of his work. So, no, I don't understand why he's revered.