This Web Site Also Has Several Images of His Buildings

Le Corbusier “Towards a New Architecture” 1923 [comes from essays beginning in 1921, perhaps co-authored by Amédée Ozenfant.]

http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Le_Corbusier.html This web site also has several images of his buildings

"(b. La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland; d. Cap Martin, France 1965) Charles-Edouard Jeanneret- Gris was born in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1887. Trained as an artist, he traveled extensively through Germany and the East. In Paris he studied under Auguste Perret and absorbed the cultural and artistic life of the city. During this period he developed a keen interest in the synthesis of the various arts. Jeanneret-Gris adopted the name Le Corbusier in the early 1920s. Le Corbusier's early work was related to nature, but as his ideas matured, he developed the Maison-Domino, a basic building prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid floors. In 1917 he settled in Paris where he issued his book Vers une architecture [Towards a New Architecture], based on his earlier articles in L'Esprit Nouveau. From 1922 Le Corbusier worked with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. During this time, Le Corbusier's ideas began to take physical form, mainly as houses which he created as "a machine for living in" and which incorporated his trademark five points of architecture. During World War II, Le Corbusier produced little beyond some theories on his utopian ideals and on his modular building scale. In 1947, he started his Unite d'habitation. Although relieved with sculptural roof-lines and highly colored walls, these massive post-war dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism. Le Corbusier's post-war buildings rejected his earlier industrial forms and utilized vernacular materials, brute concrete and articulated structure. Near the end of his career he worked on several projects in India, which utilized brutal materials and sculptural forms. In these buildings he readopted the recessed structural column, the expressive staircase, and the flat undecorated plane of his celebrated five points of architecture."

I Mass

1) Architecture has nothing to do with styles that are sometimes pretty, but never more. [Think of Loos’s criticism of ornament and Bell’s criticism of descriptive painting.] 2) Architecture is capable of the sublime. [Kant] i) It impresses the brutal instincts by its objectivity, ii) and the highest faculties by its abstraction. [Plato] 3) Its abstraction is rooted in hard fact but spiritualizes it. It also materializes possible ideas. i) The naked fact applies "order" to ideas. 4) It arouses emotions that spring from inevitable physical conditions. 5) Mass and surface are the elements. 6) It is determined by the plan, with imagination. 7) Definition of architecture: it is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. [Kant: play] i) Our eyes are made to see forms in light: the great primary forms. ii) Since of the image of these is most distinct within us they are the most beautiful forms 8) Egyptian, Greek, and Roman buildings [are good], but not the Gothic cathedral. There we search for subjective compensations. i) It is a drama: a fight against the force of gravity, which is a sensation of a sentimental [kitsch] nature. ii) He is also critical of the Gare du Quai d'Orsay and Grand Palais [Paris]. iii) The architects of today are lost in sterile plans, in foliage and pilasters. They do not consider primary masses. 9) The engineers of today are guided by the results of calculation: the living organism: provoke architectural emotions i) American grain elevators and factories are the first fruits of a new age. II Surface 10) The task of the architect is to vitalize the surfaces which clothe the masses, without making the surfaces parasitical, eating up the mass. i) Leave the mass intact in the splendor of its form in light, while appropriating the surface often for utilitarian needs. ii) Find the accusing [means?] and generating lines of the form. iii) An architectural structure is a house, temple, factory: the surface of which is in most cases a wall with holes for doors etc., which must be made to accentuate form. iv) The generating and accusing lines of pure forms (spheres etc.) are on the basis of pure geometry, which terrifies the architects [of his day]. v) Actual needs: towns laid out in a useful manner, whose general masses shall be noble. (1) Clean streets, suitability, spirit of mass-production, serenity of the whole effect shall ravish the spirit, bring charm. vi) These accusing lines are in practice the chessboard or grill - American factories. vii) Engineers tend to the generating and accusing lines of masses, giving rest to our eyes and to the mind the pleasure of geometric forms. viii) Factories are the reassuring first fruits of this movement. III Plan 11) The plan is the generator. [like Aristotle on plot?] 12) The eye of the spectator: the formal impact of the masses expresses a clean rhythm and just proportion 13) The mind gains satisfaction of a high order. This is architecture. 14) The structure rises in accord with a rule written in the ground plan. 15) Without a plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, mass and coherence. i) The plan calls for the most active imagination, and the most severe discipline. ii) It is an austere abstraction. iii) But it is among the highest activities of human spirit [Hegel]. iv) The arrangement involves a primary and pre-determined rhythm. v) Infinite modulation is the law of a good plan.