Le Corbusier's Understanding of Nature Emma Dummett

Green space and cosmic order: Le Corbusier’s understanding of nature Emma Dummett Ph.D University of Edinburgh 2007 Candidate’s declaration I declare that this thesis has been composed by myself, that the work is my own and that the work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Abstract This thesis attempts to define Le Corbusier’s understanding of the natural world. While this theme has frequently been discussed in the secondary literature, it has not yet been comprehensively addressed. Each chapter of the thesis approaches the topic from a different thematic angle, in an attempt to bring together the different aspects of Le Corbusier’s conception of nature. The first deals with his sense of nature as both ordered and Order: a way of thinking which owes more to pre-modern than modern culture. The second, in tackling the connection which Le Corbusier made between nature and the well-being of urban dwellers, considers a more instrumental aspect of his thinking. The third shows that he saw the experience of nature primarily as belonging to the private domain, and investigates the consequences of this for his cities. The fourth links the idea of the architectural promenade with the natural world and shows that nature was figured as both static image and dynamic experience by Le Corbusier. The fifth takes as its starting point his conviction that ‘primitive’ peoples lived in closer contact with nature than those of the industrialised world, but argues that he was not therefore guilty of the reductive, idealising approach to non-western culture usually associated with primitivism. Le Corbusier’s attitude to vernacular architecture, the dwellings of “natural” men, is explored in the sixth chapter, where the connection between the vernacular and the idea of the standard is considered. Throughout the intention is to position Le Corbusier as caught between an ancient sense of nature as cosmic order, full of symbolic potential, and a modern approach which sees nature as nothing more than an expanse of greenery or a view of trees. Contents Acknowledgements 2 Prefatory notes 3 Introduction 4 Chapter 1: Nature as ordered 11 Chapter 2: Nature as provider of physical and spiritual well-being in the city 47 Chapter 3: Nature as private retreat 81 Chapter 4: Visual and experiential approaches to nature 112 Chapter 5: Primitivism and nature 144 Chapter 6: Nature and vernacular architecture 182 Conclusion 216 Bibliography 219 1 Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council in granting me the doctoral award that I held between October 2003 and September 2006. The AHRC also provided funds for a research trip in May and June 2005, which gave me the opportunity to consult the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris and to visit buildings in France and Switzerland. A further trip to the Fondation in September 2007 was funded by the School of Arts, Culture and Environment of the University of Edinburgh, which also helped me to visit Chandigarh and Ahmedabad in September 2004. Particular thanks are due to Professor Chhaya of the School of Architecture in Ahmedabad, who helped me to locate Le Corbusier’s buildings there, and to the staff of the Fondation for their helpfulness and efficiency. I would like to thank Professor Iain Boyd Whyte and Dr Dagmar Weston of the University of Edinburgh for their supportive and stimulating supervision. It has been a great pleasure to be part of the lively postgraduate community in Architecture at Edinburgh, and I thank all my colleagues there for their help, support and friendship. I have been grateful for the chance to present papers at the Density Inside-Out conference in June 2007 and the Architectural Humanities Research Association postgraduate symposium in April 2006, both held in the School of Arts, Culture and Environment at Edinburgh, and at the postgraduate conferences held by the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York in June 2006 and the University of Glasgow in October 2004, and for the opportunities for publication which resulted. The Architecture postgraduate seminar series and the History of Art postgraduate days at Edinburgh have also given an enjoyable forum in which to present work. Dr Richard Williams of the University of Edinburgh and Professor Jeff Malpas of the University of Tasmania read early drafts of Chapter 4 and made helpful and constructive comments. I remain very grateful to Dr Leslie Topp of Birkbeck College, University of London, without whose encouragement I would never have embarked on doctoral work. Above all, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parents and brother, Nick, Julia and James Dummett, for their constant support, and to Gregory Norminton, for everything. 2 Prefatory notes Le Corbusier went by his given name, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, until 1920; to avoid confusion, I have referred to him by his pseudonym throughout. I have followed published translations wherever they exist. All other translations are my own, with the original French given in footnotes. All italics in quotations appear in the originals. 3 Introduction “Above all”, wrote Le Corbusier in 1950, the future city “must keep in view the aim of taking man back to nature ” and so “bring new light into the individual’s life”. 1 As the phrase “taking man back to nature” implies, he saw human and natural worlds as hopelessly and dangerously alienated from each other: the nineteenth century industrial city had caused a division between man and nature which only the twentieth-century city could now repair. Le Corbusier saw himself as uniquely positioned – called, even – to find a formula for modern urban living that restored harmony between human and natural domains, and over the course of his career the effort to do so would become one of his most deeply felt concerns. “Restor[ing] the conditions of nature to the life of man”, 2 as Le Corbusier put it towards the end of his life, was a concern of the modern movement in architecture more generally. The early modernists Hermann Muthesius and Peter Behrens placed great emphasis on the importance of gardens in the new architecture: the Deutscher Werkbund-built town of Hellerau in which both were involved sought to provide ample green space to promote the physical and mental well-being of its inhabitants. For Behrens, a garden could facilitate the spiritual renewal that he and many others in the early twentieth-century avant-garde were seeking: In my opinion, a garden is as essential a part of a dwelling as a bathroom, for only in the garden […] can we find a spiritually purifying union with nature. Only if we have grown together with this fragment of nature, only if we have been influenced by it even if it has been given form by our desires, will we rediscover the relationship to organic being that leads to inner harmony. 3 1 Le Corbusier, The Marseilles Block , Geoffrey Sainsbury, trans., Harvill Press, London, 1953, p. 24. First published as Unité d’habitation Marseille , Le Point 38, November 1950. 2 Le Corbusier, Mise au point , in The Final Testament of Père Corbu: A Translation and Interpretation of Mise au point by Ivan Žakni , Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 96. 3 Peter Behrens, “The Modern Garden”, quoted in Barry Bergdoll, “The Nature of Mies’s Space”, in Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll, eds., Mies in Berlin , ex. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001, pp. 66-105, p. 76. 4 Barry Bergdoll has suggested that Mies van der Rohe, who, like Le Corbusier, worked with Behrens in the early 1910s, should be seen as the inheritor of this way of thinking about the relationship between architecture and nature. He cites the “complex layering of outdoor and indoor space”4 in Mies’s buildings and argues for a reappraisal of his work which takes his interest in gardens more fully into account. Certainly the attempt to break down the boundaries which had traditionally existed between interior and exterior space was a central concern of architectural Modernism, as one of its earliest historians, Sigfried Giedion, noted in 1941. 5 Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the first of the “high” modernists to make this fusion of internal and external space a central part of his work: the strong horizontals of his early houses seem to extend into the landscape beyond them, and in Falling Water (1934) he achieved a radical interleaving of architecture and nature, conceiving the house as a series of cantilevers jutting out over rocks and water. For Wright as for Behrens, however, nature was more than merely a setting for a building: it was a moral force, spiritually cleansing and reviving. In The Natural House he extolled the virtues of building with large areas of glazing: It is by way of glass that the sunlit space as a reality becomes the most useful servant of a higher order of the human spirit. It is first aid to the sense of cleanliness of form and idea when directly related to free living in air and sunlight. It is this that is coming in the new architecture. And with the integral character of extended vistas gained by marrying buildings with ground levels, or blending them with slopes and gardens; yes, it is in this sense of earth as a great human good that we will move forward in the building of our new homes and great public buildings. 6 4 “The Nature of Mies’s Space”, p. 67. 5 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition , Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

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