II. Adventure of Reason

revised on 2010.10.16 II. Adventure of reason Chapter II II- 1 3. Construction from zero (1) World view of Purism At the end of World War I in 1918, Le Corbusier started the Purism movement together with Amédée Ozenfant. Le Corbusier debuted as a painter at an exhibition at the Thomas Gallery in Paris. His first work, entitled “La cheminée” (“The Fireplace”), was a mysterious painting (Fig. II-1). The thing that catches the eye is a white cube in the center that appears like Japanese tofu(bean curd). Classical console decoration is visible in the lower left, and it can be understood that this is definitely located above the fireplace. However, there is no clue to identify what this cube was drawn to represent. Furthermore, there is shading and reflections on the mirror-like top of the fireplace. Because of the realistic scene, it has the mysteriousness of a Surrealism painting. In the same year, Le Corbusier and Ozenfant wrote a book entitled “Après le Cubisme” (“After Cubism”), which attempted to be the critical successor of the Cubism artistic movement. Cubism carries the new sensibilities of the 20th century to geometrically disassemble the three- dimensional spaces that can be seen using the eye, and pioneered a method for redrawing abstract paintings. However, Le Corbusier and others thought that Cubism continued to fail in the mannerisms of the method. Le Corbusier sought a new reality. Although a cube also appeared in the painting entitled “Bol, Pipes, et Paipers Enroulés” (“Cup, Pipes, and Paper Rolls”), the trend toward abstraction was more clear in this case. There are curled up rolls of paper, pipes, and a white pottery cup on top of a cube arranged on a table, and these are clearly represented by abstracting a realistic scene (Fig. II-2). However, the identity of the brown cube that appears like it could be a box placed there is unclear. There is also deep interest in the dangerous positional relationship that raises concern over whether the cup might fall off from the cube. Le Corbusier seems to have returned Cubism to the straightforwardness of Paul Cezanne. As can be seen in paintings such as “House at Aix” (“Maison et ferme du Jas de Bouffan”, 1885 to 1887), Cezanne abstracted the plain red brick house that appears in the middle of the scene to the point where it is barely discernible as a house. He was the first painter to start with piecework-like elements (Fig. II-3). Although Le Corbusier gradually increased the level of abstraction, this did not develop to the point of virtually discarding any connection to the real object, as Picasso had done. The fact that he was not purely a painter but was also an architect demanded a realistic space even within the painting space. In spite of this, his cubes remain mysterious. This is the same as the mysteriousness of the pyramids of Egypt. Because the perfect square pyramids heightened the mysterious structural art of reality such as a gravestone, these were created by a designer who knew the phenomenon of the strong impression of simple yet abstract shapes on the human psyche. It was important also for Le Corbusier, that the pure shape produces power regardless of its simplicity. Chapter II II- 2 Of course, this knowledge was hidden when abstract shapes were used in architectural designs. The abstract shapes do not necessarily have psychological power. Although functional structures such as factories have clear ordered patterns, normal factories do not stand out. Intentional stylization such as the temple motif given to the factories by Behrens was required for this. Although Le Corbusier stayed at Behrens architectural offices in search of something, it became clear after looking for a while that there was little to be gained, and the forms sought by Le Corbusier were slightly different. I introduced the basic idea of information aesthetics earlier, and that also plays a role in the interpretation of what Le Corbusier was trying to obtain through Purism. He knew that the objects that we can actually see with our eyes contain too much information, and some alterations were needed to reduce the amount of information in order to convey or represent something. Cezanne certainly did this, and Le Corbusier clarified the validity of the origins of Cubism. But for the painter of Impressionism, it was important that the outer world is reflected in the eye, that is the phenomenon of “im-press” against the heart. On the other hand, Le Corbusier must create the form of a house in a vacant space as an architect, where his painting work was nothing more than preparation for it. For an architect, the job is to create information. The forms created must contain an abundance of information. The mysteriousness that can be seen in the cubes in “La cheminée” and other paintings is because the shape created by 8 simple points and 12 edge lines is imbued with psychological information in addition to physical information. The first 20 years or so of the 20th century was a time when the drive toward simplicity began, and Le Corbusier attempted aggressively to manifest the power held by simple items as an extension of this. The word Expressionism specifies the artistic action of “ex-press” that is to push out to the outside world. Although the mode of expression of the strong impetus of German Expressionism was evident from a peculiarly expressive intention, the artists of the early 20th century aggressively generalized the construction of objet d’art (works of art) and spaces. If we take a form of Expressionism that attempts to express everything merely by the silhouette of a shape, then there is also a path that achieves expressive power like that of the pyramids through the simplification and transparency of shapes similar to Le Corbusier. In any event, the time where groups of excessive and chaotic shapes were a means of communication became a thing of the past. The first building “Villa Fallet” built by Lu Corbusier in the town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watch handworker’s town on the North side of Lake Geneva where he grew up, was packed with a variety of information, including the steeply inclined wooden roof, construction with the traditional curved braces, the design of the window frames that symbolizes a tree-like structure, and the fresco-like decorations with a repeating-pattern-like wallpaper (Fig. II-4). This revealed a light and gentle design that could be called a slightly girlish extension of simple conventional construction methods without the excesses of neo-baroque or the organic curves to the degree of Art Nouveau. He was strongly affected by Cubism that led to the extreme of abstraction, i.e., the reduction in the amount of information. This was because cubes without any meaning were the Chapter II II- 3 extreme of virtually zero information. Before the declaration of Purism, Le Corbusier presented the principles for an architectural pattern named Dom-ino in 1914 (Fig. II-5). This showed that the skeleton of a building could be formed if the floor was supported by only four concrete columns, and only required the foundation slab (the surface in contact with the ground) and stairs for buildings of two or more stories. The revolutionary point of this idea was that it reversed the idea of the traditional brick construction method in Europe, where construction of brick walls started first, with the construction of internal wooden beams and floor being added later. The walls were added later, and the full glass surface architecture that came much later was derived logically from this. Although it was simple, this architecture was a reversal of the conventional knowledge of the past and had to pass through a variety of strife before it became generally accepted. This spirit was common to Purism, where unnecessary information was cut away and objects were reassembled from the remaining minimum elements. In the several years from Dom-ino until the announcement of Purism, Europe slid into political and social chaos, with World War I intervening, which turned common sense on its head. During this time, the Russian Revolution occurred, followed by the German Revolution at the end of the war, with the Czars and Kaisers expelled and the society of Europe changing into a society of popular democracies. Le Corbusier himself cultivated Dom-ino only through architectural thinking, and started his artistic and spiritual movements of Purism to make it grow as a universal idea. Eventually, Le Corbusier proposed a plan for reforming the city center of Paris called “Plan Voisin” in 1925 (Fig. II-6). This is said to have been aimed at appealing through the shocking expression, and was a surprising proposal that would have completely changed the skyline of Paris. The model of the proposal took an area that was the most historical place in Paris where Roman ancient planned city “castrum” were, located to the north of Île de la Cité, and replaced it with orderly streets of high-rise buildings. This had already been presented in the proposal for “A Contemporary City for 3 Million Inhabitants” (1922), and applied to Paris as a theory of functionalistic urban planning where sun, air and greenery are taken as primary. There was a view point to clear away existing information created through the accumulation of history and to rethink a city from nothing. This type of method to destroy existing buildings at first and to redesign and redevelop a completely new design forgetting the figure of the past is called generally “scrap and build,” and has spread throughout the world particularly since postwar reconstruction after World War II, whose idea was brilliantly here.

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