Canonizing : The Making of an Architectural Icon as Colonial Hegemony

by

Eric Nay

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Justice Education Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

© Copyright by Eric Nay 2018 Canonizing Le Corbusier: The Making of an Architectural Icon as Colonial Hegemony

Eric Nay

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Social Justice Education

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

In 2016, it was announced that iconic Franco-Swiss modern architect, Le Corbusier, and his nearly complete oeuvre of seventeen , would be enshrined on the United Nations Educational,

Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s World Heritage List. With this notable decision,

Le Corbusier, the figure, moved from beatification as a “modern master” to achieving the architectural status of canonical sainthood. No other architect had been so completely enshrined on UNESCO’s list. The discussions and debates centered on this landmark decision provide evidence regarding how and why Le Corbusier’s figuration persists and is sustained. The

Corbusiern figure remains foundational in architectural pedagogy, modern architectural history text writing and in the imaginaries formed in aspiring students of as a global project that is both colonial and hegemonic. How this decision to reify Le Corbusier came about after a decade of debate and deliberation provides the basis for this project. The argument suggests ways to explain how we continue to tell and perform the history of today, using Le

Corbusier as a figure, as well as the legacy of the and International Style modernism, as pedagogical tools to perpetuate an ongoing hegemonic colonial regime situated in architectural knowledge production and pedagogy. ii

Acknowledgements

I thank all of those at UNESCO, the and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in ; Association des Sites Le Corbusier in Ronchamp, ; and the Association Maison blanche in La Chaux-des-Fonds, for opening up their offices, archives and their worlds to me with such kindness. Individual thanks go out to Gwenaëlle Bourdin, director of Evaluation Unit, ICOMOS International Secretariat; Dr. Christine Cameron, C.M., Ph.D., FRSC, Research Chair on Built Heritage, Faculté de l’aménagement, Université de Montréal; Edmond Charrière, president, Association Maison blanche, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland; Dr. Jean-Louis Cohen and Sheldon H. Solow, professor in the , University; Benoit Cornu, Président de l'Association des Sites Le Corbusier, Ronchamp, France; Leslie Mozdan, Chargée de mission. Association des Sites Le Corbusier, Ronchamp, France; Dr. Vikramaditya Prakash, professor of Architecture, adjunct professor of , adjunct professor of and Planning, and director of Chandigarh Urban Lab, University of Washington; Dr. Mechtild Rössler, director of Heritage Division and director of the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO; Michel Richard, director of Fondation Le Corbusier; and Marie-Noel Tournoux, project officer, and North America Unit, World Heritage Center, UNESCO.

I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. Abigail Bakan for her enduring support as my primary advisor, as well as Dr. Martin Cannon and Dr. Tara Goldstein for their insight and guidance. I also am very grateful to Dr. Sherene Razack and Dr. Tanya Titchkosky, in particular, for their wisdom and kindness. I wish to also thank Dr. Lynne Milgram, professor, OCAD University for her continuing mentorship and support, as well as Dr. Kathy Shailer for bringing me to Canada and serving my mentor for so many years now. I am thankful to my family, Polly and Alex, for their encouragement and support. I would like to remember and thank my parents, as well as my maternal grandmother, Johanna Sambold, who lived an entire lifetime separated from her own land as a result of oppression, poverty and war.

I am also very honored to have been invited to live and work on this land, which has, for thousands of years, been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River, and is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island.

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Table of Contents

Preface 1

Introduction Introducing Le Corbusier 5

Chapter One Methods and Critical Frameworks 18

Chapter Two UNESCO, Le Corbusier and “Outstanding Universal Value” 40

Chapter Three Canonizing Le Corbusier, the Person 79

Chapter Four Performing Le Corbusier in the Studio 98

Chapter Five Manufacturing Le Corbusier through Texts 133

Conclusion Towards a Post-colonial (Re-) Imagining of Le Corbusier 147

Bibliography 181

Appendices 214

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List of Appendices

Appendix A Interview Questions 214

Appendix B Illustrations. Le Corbusier’s 2016 UNESCO World Heritage Listed 217 Buildings (courtesy of the Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris).

Appendix C Illustrations. Sketches from the Fondation Le Corbusier Archives 226 (courtesy of the Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris).

Appendix D Le Corbusier and UNESCO Timeline 229

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Preface

Architecture is a curious art form, and I had no interest in any of it until I began drawing as a form of escape. I was raised in a small town in southern Indiana where there were no such things as architects, and daily life was consumed by practical needs. Architecture was an unknown and distant luxury. Later I would, in time, realize that the farmhouses, barns and “empty” landscapes that I grew up with were, indeed, as well, which were also quite full of meaning and often unacknowledged value. The incongruities between who I was and who I was fashioned to be by architecture school was something that I had never quite been able to verbalize, until later in life, when I began teaching architecture in universities.

My architectural education began at the University of Kentucky when I was eighteen years old. I performed well throughout my education, eventually graduating first in my class and winning more than a dozen awards and scholarships in both design and architectural history along the way. I also had the indirect benefit of studying under architects and scholars, whom I would later realize were Le Corbusier protégés, some of whom had even worked with him in Paris when they were young. Le Corbusier was, therefore, an ever-present spectral figure in my education. Later, I would think about how cohort after cohort of homogenously white, middle-class kids from across the would be taught to value and emulate the modern European masters - and Le Corbusier, in particular - using the same methods and rituals that had been brought to the United States via the Bauhaus nearly a century ago.

Le Corbusier’s life, work and thoughts became an unquestionable staple in each of our educations, regardless of where or when we were educated. I found this odd and troubling. We were all introduced to Le Corbusier on a daily basis in our history classes, in our studios and in our expanding imaginaries of how we saw ourselves. We would be trained to desire Corbusiern aesthetics, and every design problem assigned to us seemed to begin with an analysis of a Le Corbusier project to ground our work in a very particular way of being in the world. Ideas and forms presented to us moved from being entirely foreign to being unconsciously desired, performed and mimicked. Later, when we were ritualistically sent off to Europe for a term abroad, as has been the practice to civilize young architects for generations, it became clear that we had been reprogrammed with help from Le Corbusier, all the while being painfully unaware of the hegemonic, colonial legacy we would carry with us.

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After completing my Bachelor of Architecture degree, I found work as an intern architect in . After three years of grueling, but exciting, professional practice in Manhattan I left, choosing this time to go off grid to upstate New York and a world of seclusion to study architecture once again. I began my teaching career while in graduate school, teaching my first architectural design studio in 1994. While teaching and doing my own work, I came across Klaus Herdeg’s book, The Decorated Diagram: Harvard Architecture and the Failure of the Bauhaus Legacy (MIT, 1983) and began thinking about how I was being taught to teach. The methods and projects I was using were the very same Bauhaus exercises that Herdeg had critiqued in his book, so many years ago. Aiding my introspection and doubts, was my thesis advisor, Dr. Mark Jarzombek, whose own work had articulated his doubts about the sanctity and fictional narratives of the modern masters.

My new path included several travel research fellowships, which initiated my lifetime of searching for architectures that are not part of the modernist canon. I still seek out apparitions of non-compliant modern architectures that can operate as critiques of universal modernism. I most frequently find them when buildings are situated in place and material traditions that are rarely taught and more often not acknowledged by architectural academia. For the past twenty years, I have alternated between architectural practice and writing scholarly work, with both buildings and written publications on my list of accomplishments.

The validity of learning to worship a collection of dead, European, white men is getting more and more ridiculous with each passing year. My desire to seek out and teach forms of place- based resistance continue to evolve. These efforts have been realized over the years in diverse forms of alternative pedagogies, most often in course offerings such as non-Western architectural history, historic preservation principles, and sustainable design theories and practices framed as methods to unseat the canon and dislodge the modern masters from their perches. However, I worry that these courses have all been framed within the same hegemonic colonial as such courses always have been.

While at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), I deliberately broadened my scope to allow myself to see architecture and design as a broader social construct in relationship to intersectionality, social justice and a need for broader and better definitions of inclusivity and diversity as an ongoing pedagogical problem. By using the lenses of race, class and gender as a

3 critical method of inquiry, I was also able to trouble notions of architectural heritage and tradition as a post-colonial construct in my coursework. I was, then, in turn, able to critique the colonial nature of my field as both a social and pedagogical problem.

The research goal of this project is to trouble the ossified canon of Western modern architectural pedagogy using the iconic modern architect, Le Corbusier, and his systemic institutional figuration, as it has been enshrined in architectural education, as evidence of an ongoing practice of knowledge production rooted in settler colonialism, white supremacy and the dominance of the West as an embodied architectural imaginary. I am hopeful that this project might be useful to map out a critical pedagogical method to reframe architecture while acknowledging settler colonial legacies, racism, classism and gender bias, as well as contextualizing the odd little man, whom we were all trained to worship for who he really was.

I am hopeful this research will appeal to non-architects, in particular. And, as such, have written this with a non-architectural audience in mind. It has always been my concern that the insularity of my field, one whose social purpose is to build for Others, has always been neglected its primary social responsibility to provide built environments for Others that are not just safe and aesthetically and functionally pleasing, but also socially grounded.

This critique is interdisciplinary and is centered specifically around the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars who have been writing about Indigenous epistemologies and how notions of the land and being in the land might productively trouble the architectural canon, which in turn, has produced a number of resistant architectural pedagogies and practices that have, furthermore, begun to productively destabilize and replace an enshrined, raced, classed, and settler colonial system of Western architectural education and material production. By uprooting pedagogical conventions, reframing architectural tradition and questioning the hegemony of modern architecture’s universalizing mission using alternative frameworks, epistemologies and pedagogies, we might begin to reframe modern architectural knowledge production by deconstructing the modernist canon at its core.

Methodologically, this task is completed by producing a multi-pronged analysis of the modern architectural canon structured by investigating how architectural imaginaries have been and continue to be produced in architecture using particular methods and practices. An investigation of how the telling of the history of modern architecture has been framed is completed by

4 analyzing the most widely taught textbooks in North America and by focusing Le Corbusier’s presence in these texts. Using a mixed methodology of pedagogical analysis in the design studio paired with discourse analysis of history texts, I intend to ask how the imaginary of the modern architect has been, and continues to be, produced in the university in relationship to Le Corbusier, as a figure, as my thesis.

I will conclude by looking at Le Corbusier in his most recent incarnation, by focusing on how UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) produced a landmark decision in 2016 to designate seventeen of Le Corbusier’s projects as a collective World Heritage site. The effect of this decision centered on his “lasting influence” on global architecture practice worldwide, and produced evidence of an ongoing colonial regime centered on architectural knowledge production and hegemony. The insidiousness of this decision describes how knowledge production in the discipline remains forever tied to ongoing colonial regimes that perpetuate both colonialism and hegemony, particularly related to how land, space and place are conceptualized and produced through ongoing conquest and occupation. My conclusion is a critique that can shape a way forward by producing a path to achieve methods of resistant practices situated in architectural knowledge production.

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Introduction Introducing Le Corbusier Introduction

This is first and foremost a project about architectural education and pedagogy. When seventeen of Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s iconic International Style buildings were included on the list of “World Heritage sites” accumulated by UNESCO over the past several decades (UNESCO, 2016), the centrality of a very particular modern architectural pedagogy and its central figure were enshrined in perpetuity. Le Corbusier’s UNESCO enshrinement was not surprising, and proves that his systemic figuration across architectural knowledge production is hegemonic and perpetuates colonialism.

This decision to further reify Le Corbusier through UNESCO World Heritage listing was not an isolated act on the part of UNESCO. It followed a legacy of architectural education and practice in which colonialism, white supremacy and Euro-centrism, among other forms of institutionalized social injustice, had been ossified to perpetuate the dominant authority of the modern architectural project, which had been enshrined through a century of modern architectural education. Dominance in teaching practices, architectural history texts and in the by-products of a collective architectural imaginary produce evidence of an ongoing settler colonial project. The evidence appears in architecture studios, in architectural history textbooks, and in the words, images and built environments that reflect an ongoing colonial fantasy framed as a pedagogical system in dire need of reform and revitalization.

The lengthy UNESCO Le Corbusier decision, and the highly fraught process it produced, served as a watershed moment for many architectural scholars and policy makers across Europe. Many of those who helped make this decision served as interview subjects in this study. For a few participants, this decision became the fatal catalyst to end long careers in public service. The political, emotional and personal costs of this decision resulted from the value placed on architecture among a select few, acting on behalf of the many.

Architecture and the built environment have always played a key role in expressing socio-cultural and political identity, and have also attracted more than their fair share of criticism for their apparent failure to live up

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to the expectations for expressing identity concerns of diverse groups. While the extent to which architecture still retains the ability to express identity in today’s schizophrenic globalized world is debatable, and its nature exposed to renewed scrutiny, its role nevertheless continues to be accepted.

Bamndyopadhyay and Montiel, xiv

The argument proceeds through a critique of the pedagogical and colonial hegemony embodied in the figuration of the iconic modern architect, Le Corbusier, as a method of critique. The catalyst for this project occurred in the summer of 2016, when it was announced that Le Corbusier, and his nearly complete oeuvre, had been successfully enshrined on the UNESCO’s World Heritage List (The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement, 2016). No other architect had ever achieved this goal. How this decision to reify Le Corbusier came about followed a decade of debate, deliberation and political in- fighting with numerous position papers providing much of the evidence for this project. In this critique, Le Corbusier’s presence within modern architectural pedagogy is questioned as a form of colonial hegemony.

Under scrutiny are the kinds of behaviors and attitudes that are produced and reproduced, resulting in the kinds of material places that the public both recognizes, and may find distasteful, but which we continue to teach as a set of canonical facts and methods within the academy. Now that modern architecture has also crossed a new interpretational threshold to be considered as belonging to a shared body of “cultural heritage” by institutions like UNESCO, the modern canon and its colonizing effects have been extended. The goal in this project is to systemically propose how the architectural imaginary might be deconstructed, within architectural pedagogy, to provide an opening for the entry of much-needed non-compliant epistemologies, unwelcome and erased figures and oppositional voices to restore social justice to a practice in need of rejuvenation and relevance, which requires the figuration of the most significant architect of the modern era, Le Corbusier, to be critiqued and dethroned.

Architecture has been understood, historically and culturally in the Western tradition, as both a science and an art, and, inasmuch, its methods and histories are inherently interdisciplinary. Therefore, the methods of analysis and critique used in this project are mixed as well. The

7 approach to address these challenges is multi-tiered and uses methods that include interviews, textual analysis, discourse analysis and theoretical provocation, drawing from a range of social science frameworks and methodologies, with a respectful dependence upon the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars working in the interstices of decolonization and education to imagine productive, alternative pedagogies. The research methods employed in this project include a series of integral interviews with key decision-makers conducted on site, as often as possible, at UNESCO, International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the Fondation Le Corbusier. Additional interviews conducted with architectural historians and Le Corbusier experts used as consultants by the aforementioned organizations in the UNESCO-Le Corbusier decision were also interviewed to round out the final group of ten. Therefore, ten official full interviews conducted over a three-month period in Canada, Europe and the United States in 2017 form the core of my data.

One of the key institutions in charge of assessing UNESCO World Heritage sites in consultation with UNESCO is ICOMOS. The notion behind the formation of ICOMOS dates back to the Conference on the restoration of historic buildings held in 1931, which introduced important conservation concepts and principles including “the idea of a common world heritage; the importance of the setting of monuments; and the principle of integration of new materials” (Getty Conservation Institute, 2017). ICOMOS is now housed in Paris and continues its mission to preserve the world's natural and scenic areas and historic sites “for the present and the future of its citizenry” (ICOMOS, 2017), as well as to monitor sites at risk from threats ranging from war to neglect and indifference.

Original research also includes guided visits of key Le Corbusier sites in France and Switzerland; archival research at institutions charged with preserving Le Corbusier’s legacy (Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, Association des Sites Le Corbusier in Ronchamp, Association Oeuvre Notre- Dame du Haut in Ronchamp and Association Maison Blanche in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland); and personal reflections and informal discussions with architectural educators who teach Le Corbusier and the modern canon, and with others in the offices and on site at many of the Le Corbusier buildings visited.

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On Methods

The expansion of critical methods includes reading and listening to Other voices who have been marginalized and made invisible in architectural pedagogy and practice as a central tenet of this critique. The methods used in this project are guided by an interdisciplinary approach to modern architecture as an entrenched colonial industry. By deliberately drawing from fields outside of conventional architectural knowledge production and avoiding standard art historical and connoisseurial discourses, the hope is to systemically trouble the stability and insularity of the modern architectural canon using the figuration of Le Corbusier as a method.

The key critical frameworks and literatures that I use in this project, have been drawn from the work of Abigail Bakan and Enakshi Dua (2014), Michel Foucault (2011), Antonio Gramsci (1971) and post-colonial scholars including Frantz Fanon (1968) and Edward Said (1979). Other key frameworks and literatures draw from the work of critical race scholars such as David Goldberg (2006), Sherene Razack (2002) and Robyn Wiegman (2012). The phenomenological and sociological methodologies practiced by disability scholars Rod Michalko (2012, 2022) and Tanya Titchkosky (2012, 2011) have also helped shape this project. Lastly, methods for future critique draw from the work of Indigenous scholars such as Martin Cannon (2015, 2011), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1998), and Eve Tuck (2015, 2012) et. al., who write using settler colonialism as a framework for intersecting how educational institutions and settler colonialism are co-produced as a critical methodology to address hegemony, racism, white supremacy and the perpetuation of colonial regimes of land occupation situated in contemporary contexts, but always with educational reform at the center of their work.

The data and evidence used in this project appear in a variety of forms and have been gathered using a range of different methods and methodologies to produce a multi-pronged approach to deconstructing Le Corbusier’s canonical figuration. Methods employed include textual analysis, analysis of archival documents and images, face-to-face interviews and guided observation of key Le Corbusier architectural sites in Europe. The most critical data in my research comes from a series of ten interviews with architectural historians involved directly or indirectly as consultants for ICOMOS and UNESCO; ICOMOS and UNESCO officials and decision-makers involved in much or all of the decade-long process to achieve World Heritage List designation for Le Corbusier’s work and review; and officials and political figures linked to institutions

9 directly tied to the architectural legacy of Le Corbusier who also were involved in the UNESCO- Le Corbusier decision. Interviews took place in the spring and summer of 2017 in Canada, France, Switzerland and in the United States via Skype. Another valuable source of data came from touring and observing Le Corbusier buildings in person alongside experts and members of the communities who lived with Le Corbusier’s legacy on the ground. While these sources were not treated as formal interviews and are not part of my data sets, many of these site visits and discussions did shape my understanding of how Le Corbusier’s legacy is maintained through personal histories and narratives tied to him as a figure.

The finalized interviews utilized in this project that form the original data were chosen from a longer list of actors who had an extended relationship with the UNESCO Le Corbusier decision. The intent was to speak to those, who over the course of the nomination process, had participated in the decision-making from the inside, or who had served as first-hand participants in the lengthy and fraught nomination and designation process. All interviews were conducted in English and followed standard University of Toronto research ethics protocols with a prepared set of standard questions. The majority of the ten key interviews took place in France and Switzerland in the summer of 2017. One interview took place in Canada in the spring of 2017 and another was conducted over Skype from Canada in the spring of 2017. In two cases, interviewees chose to respond in writing to the questions after several introductory informal conversations due to time and travel constraints.

The common criteria for selection of those interviewed required that each individual must have played a significant role in the process to enshrine Le Corbusier’s oeuvre on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The roles played among my interviewees varied widely, but the cumulative knowledge and history, when pieced together, added significant clarity to many of the issues I was seeking to understand. The central argument of this dissertation, that Le Corbusier’s UNESCO enshrinement on the World Heritage List was demonstrative of a system of ongoing colonial and hegemonic knowledge production, emerged from these interviews. The struggles and setbacks in the nomination process, which failed twice and was almost jettisoned numerous times, allowed my interviewees to each relay their own interpretations of how Le Corbusier functioned within a larger colonial construct.

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In the summer of 2017, I travelled to France and Switzerland to sites including UNESCO’s Paris headquarters. I interviewed a range of experts who had played a role in the inclusion of Le Corbusier on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, which was finalized in June 2016 after a decade of highly politicized and vigorously documented difficulties. My intent was to interview individuals who had been involved in this decision at a number of different levels over the past decade (2006-2016), as well as gain access to archival data related to this process including UNESCO’s mountain of publicly available data.

I interviewed officials at UNESCO and ICOMOS in Paris in their offices when I could, sometimes spending days in these offices meeting division heads, project managers, interns and staff. Conversations that began as email exchanges from Canada were extended often with personal interviews in Toronto and sometimes even lunch in Paris. I also interviewed a number of the academic “experts” who had been commissioned to work on the Le Corbusier dossier at some point in the process by UNESCO as consultants, who offered other forms of insight into the very complicated World Heritage site nomination process from perspectives quite different from that of the official position papers and meeting minutes and endless reports that I had read over and over again.

I conducted ten formal interviews in total, and had more than a dozen informal discussions, which I will not use as data, but will include when necessary for context. Two interviews were conducted via email with final written responses submitted later. One interview took place in Toronto on the University of Toronto’s campus. All other interviews occurred on site in Paris and Ronchamp at interviewees’ offices. Several of those interviewed remained in contact with me over the course of my month in Europe, with follow-up visits, emails and even repeat appearances as observers in interviews with others. All formal interviews followed University of Toronto research ethic protocols, and each of my interviewees’ names have been removed and replaced with indicators (Interview A, B, C, etc.) to protect their anonymity.

The ten key interviews consist of UNESCO expert consultants and active university faculty in Canada, France and the United States, May to July, 2017; officials and staff at the Association Maison blanche, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, July, 2017; officials and staff at l'Association des Sites Le Corbusier, Ronchamp, France, July, 2017; officials and staff at ICOMOS’

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International Secretariat, Paris, July, 2017; and officials and staff in the Heritage Division of the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO headquarters, Paris, July, 2017.

Additional data was gathered in follow-up visits to key institutions producing continued and collegial contact with interviewees. Follow-up visits also included invitations to read and analyze archival data and comb through archives of files at the ICOMOS International Secretariat and to spend time in the archives of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. The president and secretary of l'Association des Sites Le Corbusier, staff at the Heritage Division of the World Heritage Centre, UNESCO, also have continued to stay in contact with me after interviews, offering additional resources and future contacts as my project unfolded. When I could, the questions I asked deliberately used the precise language of UNESCO, notably phrases such as “outstanding universal value.” This language formed the core of the controversies, arguments and discussions about the legacy and cultural relevance of Le Corbusier’s nomination and the modern project itself in many of the internal documents I read. Pondering “outstanding universal value” formed the core of each and every interview.

Additionally, I travelled across France and Switzerland to meet those in charge of Le Corbusier’s cultural legacy by touring as many of Le Corbusier’s buildings on the UNESCO World Heritage 2016 list as I could. Many times, these tours were accompanied by discussions with association presidents and staff, tour guides and even local residents and fellow tourists. Many of those I spoke with, had either grown up in the shadow of a Le Corbusier , or grown up knowing that they must one day make a pilgrimage to his buildings. One of my most interesting informal conversations was with a Japanese woman whose father had been an architect, and who insisted a visit to Paris must be accompanied by a day trip to Poissy to see Le Corbusier’s (1929). Every conversation used in this project, contributed to my understanding of Le Corbusier’s social construction and allowed me to understand Le Corbusier’s institutionalized figuration in ways that textual data often could not.

My research also included access to the entire case file of all documentation produced over the past decade in the comprehensive Le Corbusier World Heritage files held by ICOMOS at their main office in Paris. While UNESCO officials discounted the absolute authenticity of these files, they contained official and unofficial documents including sometimes vitriolic emails between UNESCO and ICOMOS project managers over process, intellectual territory and jurisdictional

12 authority. The files I was able to see included the record copies of official nomination dossiers for each of the three attempts to list Le Corbusier’s work submitted by UNESCO. These included technical reports about the care and management of specific sites, such as engineering reports about degradation at Chandigarh, as well as official letters from state parties, such as the governments of Japan and India.

The timing of this project was also critical. Many of those interviewed occupied key positions at UNESCO and ICOMOS, and had just returned from an unusually hyper-political, and deeply troubling World Heritage meeting in Krakow. The 2017 UNESCO World Heritage committee meeting resulted in the inclusion of a body of two hundred examples of colonial modernism in Africa being enshrined on the World Heritage List, as well as the inclusion of a controversial site in Hebron, on the West Bank in Palestine. The inclusion of the site in Hebron meant that UNESCO had officially acknowledged the Palestinian State in a decision that would change UNESCO and the World Heritage List forever. Immediately after the Hebron decision furious efforts by Israel to derail the decision followed. The old city of Hebron would be listed, and known thereafter, as a Palestinian World Heritage site. This site includes a particular holy site known to Muslims as the Ibrahimi mosque and to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Beaumont, 2017).

For President Trump and for Mr. Netanyahu, the recognition of World Heritage sites in the Palestinian territories, like Hebron and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and the 2015 resolution and another in 2016, showed an anti-Israel bias. The 2016 resolution condemned Israel’s “escalating aggressions” regarding a holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount. It was submitted by the Palestinians and was supported by 24 countries, with six opposing it and 26 abstaining. The resolution referred to the holy site only using Muslim names and prompted angry reactions from Israeli politicians (Harris, Gardener and Steven Erlanger, 2017).

President Donald Trump announced on October 12, 2017 that the United States would withdraw from UNESCO by the end of 2018, which included withdrawing critical American funding. The future of UNESCO’s World Heritage unit was, as a cumulative result of the Hebron decision, in a state of turmoil in the summer of 2017. As a result, the Le Corbusier decision mostly faded into

13 the background. The growing geopolitical nature of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee dismayed those I interviewed and became a recurrent theme of discussion.

Some interviewees chose to defend Le Corbusier’s “intellectual legacy” (Interview I, 2017) or to optimistically use the Le Corbusier nomination to mark a need to finally end the World Heritage List’s legacy of “European domination” (Interview G, 2017). Others saw the scale of the Le Corbusier decision (seventeen buildings) as a signpost to mark a path forward where non- European architectural heritage would be given more attention by a renewed UNESCO World Heritage Committee in the near future, with Europe’s World Heritage sites having been entirely exhausted at this point (Interview B, 2017). One very outspoken UNESCO official even suggested that the Le Corbusier decision might be the last European World Heritage site ever, if she had her way (Interview G, 2017). While all of this may be true, European and French domination of World Heritage remains intact, as long as the view from Paris remains the only one that counts and modern architectural heritage will again assume a colonial lens – if only by the simple fact of who gets to decide what counts and where they are situated.

Research Goals

The intention of the thesis is to interrogate the Corbusiern figure across a broad spectrum of architectural knowledge production, to seek out new methods and epistemological tools to highlight and foreground voices on the margins and to disrupt the primacy and centrality of the Corbusiern figure and the hegemonic and colonial system to which he belongs. This project takes up a multi-pronged critique of the colonial hegemony of the modern project in architectural pedagogy and practice by focusing on the persistence of Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier as its central iconic figure – and as a problem. This project interrogates the canonization of Le Corbusier as both a manufactured pedagogical system and an ongoing knowledge regime, put in place to reinforce the modern colonial project. In this project, the central question asked is, how Le Corbusier, as a figure, was forged over the past half-century through architectural pedagogy, and how Le Corbusier, almost inconceivably, still dominates architectural pedagogy and knowledge production to support a modern project that remains entrenched in colonialism.

The methods by which Le Corbusier shapes architectural discourse, structures historiography and is manufactured through learned rituals speaks to a larger pedagogical project, which when

14 extrapolated and analyzed, produces and reproduces racism, classism and colonialism as a by- product. Situating this critique directly within the fixtures of architectural pedagogy is purposeful. The distinctions that need to be drawn depend upon recent and ongoing scholarship in critical pedagogy centered around social justice and equity in the classroom, much of which has been produced at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. As Tara Goldstein demonstrates, critical pedagogy demands reframing questions to disrupt the status quo:

There are similar tensions between educators who talk about multicultural education and “tolerance” for differences and those who talk about anti- racist education and moving beyond “tolerance.” For many anti-racist educators, tolerance is associated with privilege, and acceptance of the status quo and only the slightest accommodations to difference in our schools.

Goldstein in Selby and Goldstein, 24

Furthermore, now that Western notions of architectural heritage and are being expanded and expropriated to include the post-colonial Global South, a universal system of shared cultural heritage, as framed by UNESCO and Le Corbusier, has also invited challenge to the ongoing project of colonialism and architecture to operate in perpetuity. Acknowledging ongoing colonial projects and regimes and how they have been extended through modernism is a first step. Fortunately, this step already well underway, even though we often neglect the obvious when we do not positon architecture at the center of the colonial project, as Zeynip Çelik has done so eloquently in her work as seen when she writes, “Architecture and urbanism in the colonial context should thus be viewed among the practices that make up the colonial discourse” (1992, 6).

In chapter one, the critical approach and methods of inquiry are described, and key literatures used in this project are identified. In chapter two the focus is on Le Corbusier’s relationship with UNESCO and his “outstanding universal value” using primary research centered on the 2016 UNESCO World Heritage Committee’s decision to enshrine Le Corbusier’s oeuvre as a foundational case study. In chapter three this trajectory is continued by re-situating Le Corbusier’s life and career within the historiography of modern architecture and modern architectural education. In chapter four the discussion turns to how architecture is taught and

15 how Le Corbusier, as a figure, is reproduced in the studio as a central performative method. In chapter five the focus turns to key architectural history texts that continue to produce and reproduce Le Corbusier, as a figure, in perpetuation of a canon that is closely tied to colonialism as a by-product. In chapter six the argument concludes by exploring how “Other” voices and epistemological ways of framing architecture and architectural thought can be seen as active critiques of a status quo that is in desperate need of revision. These approaches are led by architects of color and Indigenous voices, in particular, who suggest re-centering the land as a central methodology and telling their stories at a bare minimum to rethink how we conceptualize architecture at its core.

To conduct a fulsome analysis of Le Corbusier, as a figure, this project deliberately draws from fields outside of traditional architectural knowledge production for methods and methodologies of inquiry and analysis. These methods are meant to disrupt and trouble the stability and insularity of the modern architectural canon. Applying social science methods and methodologies to architectural thought is not a new idea. Most recently the expansion of the scholarship and practices of design ethnography into the academy has produced an upsurge in social science content in design and architecture practice, and now curricula across the planet (Segelström and Holmlid, 2015; Suri, 2001; Ventura, 2013). Segelström and Holmlid write, “(The) differences in approach to ethnography mean that the same techniques are used in very different ways. What once was developed in anthropology has been appropriated to fit into design” (Dourish, 2006; Segelström, 2013). Segelström and Holmlid continue, “However, there is still a very limited body of literature which has investigated how these differences manifest themselves” (2015, 136).

While Segelström and Holmlid call for a deeper understanding of how the social sciences and architecture might meet, a similar intersectional analysis of how Le Corbusier persists in architectural education and pedagogy has yet to be published. Others have already skillfully critiqued the singular authority of Le Corbusier by foregrounding alternative views of Le Corbusier and telling the stories of the missing female pioneers of early modern architecture, such as Eileen Grey (Colomina, 1996; Rault, 2011, 2005), Lilly Reich (McQuaid and Droste, 1996) and Charlotte Perriand (2003). Similarly, postmodern scholars have taken up a systemic critique of the modern project using alternative art-historical methods that include post- structuralism and phenomenology, among others (Frampton, 1997; Otero-Pailos, 2010;

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Palaasmaa, 2010, et. al.). However, in each of these critiques the centrality of the modern figure has remained intact, as has Le Corbusier as its irreplaceable central master. This reproduces a very particular narrative that perpetuates a number of ideologies that include white supremacy and colonialism. The call seems to be for a more fulsome, interdisciplinary method of critique, which this thesis is centered upon. A method for such a critique is suggested in the work of Annette Burfoot and others who skillfully interweave mixed methods to unpack the latent and active meanings that material artifacts carry with them (2012, 2006). Architecture theorists, such as Aldo Rossi, simply have not gone far enough into the social sciences in their definitions of critique.

Critique takes distance, it sets apart. In order to pass judgement, it moves (or moves what it wishes to take the distance from) to a different place: there is no turning which is not also a new beginning. Yet, where exactly is this ‘other’ horizon said to reside? From what angle does critique allege to speak? Would this be a safe topos- a permanent and secure origin, a secrete spring of everlasting freedom? If so, who would be tasked to pinpoint and mark out this place and gauge the necessary distance of critique? Who is to name this territory and define the threshold beyond which a discourse would qualify as critical? The questions that I am raising concern the way critique fashions its space of difference.

Rossi, Andrea, 337

While a mass of publications emanating from Princeton Architectural Press in the late 1990s began the grand project of critiquing patriarchy and modernity in architecture using the frameworks of gender and sexuality studies (Colomina and Bloomer, 1996; Wigley, 1995; Sanders, 1996; et. al.), the results of this work have often only reinforced the centrality of the modern canon in which modern masters, like Le Corbusier, still control the dominant narrative. In all of this productive, critical work, there is still an unspoken reverence in place to protect Le Corbusier’s legacy and maintain the institutional standard by which the profession defines itself.

Conclusion

This project is centered on how Le Corbusier, as a figure constructed and reproduced though a hegemonic regime of education and social support, embodies the ongoing predominance of the

17 modern project and perpetuates and transforms as it travels transnationally through architectural education both at home and abroad with numerous racist, classist and post-colonial repercussions. The thesis, however serves as a critique, inasmuch as that modernism in architectural education and knowledge production has become even more insidious over the years. UNESCO’s Le Corbusier World Heritage decision has been drawn upon as evidence that hegemony, pedagogy and colonialism remain in architectural knowledge production, and therefore in architectural production, as a cautionary tale that reform will be difficult and that architectural education may be the best place to start.

To critique the pedagogical hegemony of Le Corbusier, as a figure, within the pantheon of modern architectural knowledge production, requires much more insight and evidence than to merely state that Le Corbusier is a subject that is embedded in a system of colonial architectural knowledge production. This argument is therefore, modest, and can only begin to trouble the canon of Western modern architectural pedagogy. Le Corbusier is certainly not erasable from the texts and the genealogy of modern architectural history, but he is need of contextualization and unsettling.

The conclusion of this project suggests where to go after this critique by observing how an active deconstruction of the modern canon is already well underway. Diverse forms of scholarship and design research, situated as social activism and community participation in the design and building process, have begun the hard work of reckoning with architecture’s whiteness and towards recognizing how architecture produces race, class, gender, Indigeneity and sexuality as a form of resistant architectural knowledge production. The larger project of destabilizing the authoritative and colonial authority of the modern architectural canon is more problematic.

Chapter 1 Methods, Literatures and Critical Foundations Introduction

The centrality and authority of the Corbusiern figure produces a very particular, and easily reproducible, pedagogy that is simultaneously hegemonic and colonial, which is in need of critique. Furthermore, as Western architecture schools proliferate in the industrializing Global South, this system with the Corbusiern figure at its center is able to extend the colonial project in practice and in the imaginary. Following this same trajectory, this pedagogical system becomes a method to reproduce divisions that are part of this hegemonic system, including racism, classism and gender bias through the perpetuation of universal modernism using architecture. Le Corbusier, the figure, arguably serves as a delivery mechanism for settler colonialism and other colonial legacies.

Centrally, architecture is necessary for colonialism and dispossession to occur; architectural education facilitates settler colonialism and social injustice; and to maintain the hegemonic intent of the modern architectural project, complicity between educational systems and settler colonialism must occur. This project demands the very particular presence of Le Corbusier, as a spectral and “saintly” figure to persist as the Western modern canon morphs and spreads across the Global South to perpetuate the colonial project through architecture.

This discussion relies strongly on UNESCO World Heritage sites as a benchmark to gauge how modern architecture and Le Corbusier, in particular, might be seen to perpetuate colonialism on the world stage. The most recent UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in Krakow (July, 2017) included adding the city of Asmara in Eritrea to the World Heritage List. UNESCO stated, “The architecture of Asmara complements the plan and forms a coherent whole, although reflecting eclecticism and Rationalist idioms, and is one of the most complete and intact collections of modernist/rationalist architecture in the world” (UNESCO, Asmara: A Modernist City of Africa, 2017).

When Le Corbusier was finally enshrined by UNESCO in 2016, as World Heritage worthy, after a decade of highly documented battles among a conglomeration of colonial institutions, “state

18 19 parties” and local constituencies, the force of his global “influence” over the spread of modern architecture worldwide was beatified. Le Corbusier was enshrined as a figure whose “outstanding universal value” rather than his mere human “genius” would also be beatified and enshrined as beneficial to the collective culture of the planet. This seminal decision served as a critical moment to mark how modern architecture and colonialism were intertwined, and could be continued, despite the unravelling of the modernist dream following , transnationalism and neoliberalism.

In the Master’s Image

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, the iconic modern architect, were, indeed, the same man. He is referred to at times as Le Corbusier, at other times as Corbusier and even “Corbu,” as the practice in architectural discourse permits. However, Corbu, the mythical figure known only to architects and students of art and architecture, would be produced as someone quite different from the son of a watch maker born in La Chaux-des-Fonds, Switzerland, who dabbled in painting and practiced architecture at the turn of the century with his cousin. He became larger than life, if not mythic, as his story was recounted year after year. Historians like H. Allen Brooks have tried to humanize him by recalling his humble beginnings, but this is an unfamiliar narrative. According to an official at the Fondation Le Corbusier, in a recent survey at a workshop at the Fondation in Paris, participants were asked to name two of the most important living French architects. Jean Nouvel and Le Corbusier were the overwhelming and most popular responses, even though Le Corbusier had been quite dead for nearly half a century (Interview E, 2017). His legacy is mythic.

Le Corbusier, throughout his life, would remain a creature of his upbringing; he was obsessed by the work ethic and by the belief that only though suffering and self-denial can one perform one’s best. He shunned luxury and conspicuous display, preferring, in Paris, to live under the roof in the Latin Quarter (20, rue Jacob) and to work in a cramped, clearly inadequate corridor at 35, rue de Sèvres and for vacation built a small, flimsy, wooden at Cap Martin (Brooks, 20).

Le Corbusier's vast catalog of his own reflective and self-promotional writing provides a solid body of evidence for how he came to be known as an architectural icon. This is demonstrated, often in his own words, in Corbusier’s Gemini-like persona which was revealed in a voice

20 characterized by an often raging, egotistical, self-assurance to produce his authority. Even the legends circulating around “Le Corbusier,” his professional nom de plume, are filled with mystery and intrigue, forming the stuff of architectural legend. Stories range from those who insist that his name Le Corbusier came about as a derivation of a grandfather's name (the most plausible) to his acquisition of a nom de plume that has been loosely translated to evoke a “raven” to describe his appearance as he rode his bicycle while wearing his trademark black glasses with his long flowing black trench coat flapping behind him in his art student days as H. Allen Brooks (1997) has suggested.

Tim Benton, who co-wrote Le Corbusier Le Grand (Cohen and Benton, 2008) maintains that Le Corbusier was, especially later on in life, a “bastard in many ways. He was very severe with people, especially after the 1930s when he became a world figure, and he sometimes slapped people aside. On the other hand, people say how generous he was, and kind.” (Tim Benton quoted in Fakray, 2014). For those gazing into the world of architectural education from outside and seeing the instrumental roles this single human being played, it must seem implausible that this one idiosyncratic trickster could ever have been chosen to embody modern architecture as its patron saint and guiding figure.

However, the vast literature and endless re-evaluations of Corbu’s forms, methods and ideologies are also prevalent. The Corbuisern “gift” presented thus indicates a number of equally troubling dilemmas, with which the world of contemporary architectural scholarship, pedagogy and practice still struggle. Like the eponymous white cubes the modern method produces in studio educations, modern architectural thought, too, celebrates a very deliberate kind of emptiness. It describes a formal approach to human occupation that must be seen as rooted in terra nullius, colonialism and white supremacy as a critique. A model for such a systemic critique appears in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills’ Contract and Domination (2006). In Pateman and Mills’ work, contemporary contract theory is questioned as a central tenet of the Western political tradition, a system which has been constructed by neglecting and ignoring gender and racial justice. Pateman and Mills’ work provides essential tools for producing a critique of contract theory by condemning the gendered and racial domination produced though the contemporary contract tradition and its silencing of race and gender. This is achieved by bringing the sexual and racial contracts together intersectionally as a critical method. Pateman and Mills deracinate and trouble the (white) settler contract that lies beneath the foundational origins of modern civil

21 society in North America and . The end solution proposed is a radical non-ideal contract, which re-centers reparation for black Americans and Others by exploring the intersectionality of gender and race. By extension, following Pateman and Mills, we now might understand that the emptiness of modernity’s white boxes produce universal modern subjects.

To tease out how Le Corbusier has been produced, as a mythical and iconic figure within the master narrative of modernity and architecture, requires several foundational ideas and a number of cross-disciplinary theoretical frameworks to be applied to his figuration. The project calls for an interdisciplinary and multi-pronged critique of, what amounts to, a pedagogical system that depends upon Le Corbusier, as a central figure, to survive. How this figuration is manifest, and how it is then reproduced reveals a much more insidious agenda, that is played out in the material realities of buildings, places and spaces in our everyday lives as an ongoing hegemonic and colonial project.

Questioning Genius

One of the more beneficial results of conducting interviews in person was being was able to spend a number of days with interviewees, often in their offices and lunchrooms. Days were spent either in archives, in meetings or in spare office space as a guest. In each formal meeting, the same set of questions was asked, which were centered on understanding how Others saw Le Corbusier’s “outstanding universal value,” the future of modern architectural heritage, and the lasting results of Le Corbusier’s 2016 UNESCO World Heritage site designation, as well as how Le Corbusier exists today as a “cultural figure” in the popular imagination. The results of each interview always returned to the official 2016 UNESCO strategy that it was not Le Corbusier, the person, who was being enshrined on the World Heritage List; nor was it his oeuvre; but, rather, it was Le Corbusier’s lasting global “influence” over Others that persisted. Among the questions asked was how well known Le Corbusier was to the French population. This question often led to personal stories about how each individual came to be interested in modern architecture, Le Corbusier and modern architectural heritage as an intertwined narrative (see Appendix A: 206–208).

In general, Le Corbusier was in fact not that well known, and even in small towns like Ronchamp, France, where a Le Corbusier chapel is the only reason tourists ever come to the

22 town, Le Corbusier was simply not highly considered by the local population. As my tour guide to Corbusier’s chapel stated, the locals think Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut Chapel at Ronchamp is “a church built by the Chinese.” This realization is significant. Only in the very privileged world of architectural academia is his iconic status produced and reproduced. In reality, in day-to-day life, the local population appeared to have little interest in his work.

Similarly, even at the Fondation Le Corbusier, which hosts numerous conferences and workshops in a restored Le Corbusier villa, the neighbors tolerate the presence of the Fondation Le Corbusier at best. However, neighbors directly adjacent to the property have begun renting a part of their home to the growing body of Le Corbusier tourists and the Association Le Corbusier is currently hard at work promotion a cultural “trail” that will guide architectural tourists across Europe (, France, and Switzerland) structured by Le Corbusier sites. The timing of my visit to Ronchamp was significant. The entire community of those who identified with Le Corbusier, including those who lived in Le Corbusier projects and worked in organizations supporting his legacy, as well as those who studied the architect, were still reeling from the effects of books published in 2015 in France. As mentioned previously, these included new research into Le Corbusier’s past with the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government. While this dark period of Le Corbusier’s life is well known and documented, nobody had used this period before to “out” Le Corbusier as an anti-Semite, which these books did with vigor (Chaslin, 2015; De Jarcy, 2015), marking a new understanding of his iconic status that remains significant. This created an opportunity for questioning the icon in a way that might not have been welcome previously.

Le Corbusier and Architectural Knowledge Production

In his text The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design, the architectural historian Nicholas Pevsner states, “The twentieth century is the century of the masses: mass education, mass entertainment, mass transport, universities with twenty thousand students, comprehensive schools for two thousand children, hospitals with two thousand beds, stadia with hundred thousand seats” (1968, 7). The institutionalization of modern architecture pedagogy is also tied to the particular institutionalization of architecture as a discipline on the modern university campus.

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Up until the 19th century, architecture was seen as a practical art that one learned by apprenticing with a “master” in the field. Situating architecture in a university then became the new norm, which allowed architecture to become a privileged profession, rather than a vocational skill attached to medieval guilds and lower-class labour. Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were the first American universities to offer a university curriculum in architecture. This signaled a shift in how architects were educated and trained. Before 1868 there were no architectural schools in the United States and American architects were either trained through apprenticeships or they pursued studies abroad, very often at prestigious European schools like École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1868 MIT established the first American architecture department in a four-year course on a university campus. Cornell University followed shortly thereafter in 1871. The Illinois Industrial University (the University of Illinois) did the same in 1878. These programs can be tied back to the profession's growing awareness of the need for professional architecture schools in the United States and the actions of the Committee on Education given at the first annual convention of the American Institute of Architects (American Institute of Architects, 1867). Afterwards, architecture schools would proliferate across the North American university landscape with each state requiring their own architecture schools for reasons rooted in both regulation and prestige.

Architecture, once elevated in status within the university system, could be intellectualized, theorized and positioned as a professional practice, and the architect’s persona would rise in status and importance as well. Thus evolved the need for more selective gatekeeping. The effects of new modes of thinking about modern architects would build upon the institutional legacy of École des Beaux-Arts and be transformed forever following Le Corbusier, who himself, derided the classical and foundations of the tired academy, yet retained its adoration of privilege, power and whiteness.

Le Corbusier’s visionary text Towards a New Architecture (first appearing in English in 1927) chastised architecture for being tied to the past and its decorative, pompous and irrational parroting of historical forms and methods. Corbu’s version of utopic modern universalism would celebrate the engineer and the day-to-day rational forms of technologized forms such as grain silos, steamships and factories, while also becoming the visual and typological lexicon through which good modern taste would be taught to architects from this point onwards. A taste for

24 modernity would need to be taught, acquired and learned, which would, in turn, frame architectural education within a particular, white, privileged, social system disguised as progress.

Biopolitics

The history of the rise of architectural education and practice is a familiar tale of white privilege, which is also a familiar colonial tale. Current statistics regarding architecture school enrollment by women and selected minorities today have been shaped by targeting student diversity as a pedagogical and professional goal. The resulting metrics that inform these initiatives seem to have neutralized the dominant white, upper middle-class maleness of architectural student bodies in North America, but the dominance of whiteness remains. The 2013 annual report from the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) states that “43% of a total of 25,958 enrolled students in NAAB-accredited architecture programs (B.Arch, M.Arch, and D.Arch) in 2012-13 were female” (Chang, 2014). However, these metrics fail to take up an intersectional analysis of how race, class and privilege are intertwined to understand how “whiteness” is not restricted or defined by skin color, and to truly understand who is excluded from architecture schools as a result of class.

However, a more fulsome critique framed around how and why architecture remains systemically white, drawing upon critical race theory and other social science methods, is necessary to more fully capture how Le Corbusier’s figuration operates today within a hegemonic system that still dominates architectural thought. Considering Foucault’s notion of biopower and how he situates race is useful in this critique. According to Foucault, biopower means having power over other bodies, “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.I, p.140). Biopower also is framed positively by Foucault to stress the protection of life rather than the threat of death by situating power in technologies used to regulate bodies such as sexuality.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson draws upon Foucault's genealogy of race to see how Foucauldian biopower and terra nullius can be seen as being conjoined to define the fictions of sovereignty that arose using "the threat of war" as a methodology to occupy the land of Others (2006). The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics can be used in social theory to examine the varied

25 mechanisms by which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority. Le Corbusier’s biopolitical body is also worthy of such analysis. Foucault explains, “To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population.” (2011, 252-3)

At this point in my argument, I will focus on the notion of the land as a subject and will return to whiteness in future chapters. If land could be framed biopolitically as a subject rather as an abstract form of property, then new readings of modernity may be possible. Modern architecture can be seen as a material method to enact and perform property. Actions like mapping and policing artificial borders and mapping "savages" and untamed spaces have been described as methods used to enact a regime of property. P.D. Harvey states that map-making served "not only a functional purpose but also as ‘a statement of ownership, a symbol of possession such as no written survey could equal’.” (Harvey, 85 quoted in Blomley, 126)

Once mapped, the physical enforcement of property became an enforceable abstraction, which then could be acted upon to be eject bodies from space and, therefore, from existence. The mapping, naming and accounting of natural features; the imposition of grids, borders and zones; and the right to impose a rule of law on land previously untamed and free of ownership created a conceptual regime that continues today As Nicholas Blomley argues, it has created a logic of “ethical violence” practiced through framing land as property (2003, 133). The centrality of regimes of land and property, framed biopolitically, foregrounds how architectural education and the Corbusiern figure reproduce hegemonic regimes that might be deconstructed using Indigenous relationships to land as a pedagogical method. This is described by Martin Cannon in the following quote:

We are accustomed to a way of thinking and learning about Indigenous sovereignty as though it were a threat to democracy, a destabilizing force (Grande, 2004, 54). Not only has this resulted from a way of thinking in propertied, corporate, and imperialist terms about land and citizenship, it also maintains a version of education that does not work fully enough to

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understand the crossroads of democracy and Indigenous sovereignty and to see them – to use Grande’s theorization – as “competing moral visions”. We need a way of thinking about sovereignty as “the ability to assert oneself renewed – in the presence of Others” (Lyons in Grande 2004, 57). As Grande wrote, we need to “dethink” sovereignty from its exclusively Western ontological underpinnings. Only then might we realize a more equitable practice of education. Only then might we envision a generative way of thinking about where it is that we stand in relation to each other and land.

Cannon 2017, 8

By extension, Foucault provides a range of additional methods to structure how to critique the figuration of Le Corbusier and his relationship to universal modernity within a hegemonic system that relies on biopower to produce heterotopic space. Michel Foucault’s conception of heterotopian space frames utopic space as the fundamental symbol of modernity, as well as its deviant “other” spaces such as drug rehabilitation clinics and others which do not “represent a perfected, hyper-organized environment—the Disneyworlds of modern society” (Miner, 194) and are then used as a method for social ordering that reminds us also that “modernity is still all around us despite very obvious recent cultural changes” (McGrail, 183).

Heterotopias are unique sites that demonstrate a society’s transcendent ideologies in a physical structure and, consequently, are distinctive from quotidian sites, such as shopping malls, apartment buildings, or grocery stores. Rather, while heterotopias are familiar and penetrable sites, they are also dislocating, “draw[ing] us out of ourselves” to contest our feelings of uncritical habitation.

Foucault 1986, 23

Terra Nullius

When occupied and claimed parts of (then uninhabited) Eastern Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat) in the 1920s, it did so by claiming that this particular mass of land constituted terra

27 nullius, or empty land, as a rationale that was legally viable at that time. While the legal case presented by Norway to decide the fate of Greenland was framed as a territorial dispute between Denmark and Norway, this dispute also denied the presence of Indigenous Greenlanders, which remains an ongoing problem today. The reason was that any sign of legitimate occupation required evidence of visible land improvement and development as proof of occupation (Gormley 1966; Svarlien 1964). Andreas Otte has recently taken up this discussion by writing about the ongoing problems facing Indigenous Greenlanders. He describes sovereignty as a battle over territory that it is still being fought often using unexpected methods such as the underground music scene. Greenlanders exercise their sovereign rights right by performing and recording rock music in Greenlandic thereby using language to mark territory (Otte, 2015; Sumé, 2014).

The most crucial notion for reconsidering modern architecture as an ongoing colonial act of occupation is this notion of terra nullius. Terra nullius translates literally as “land that belongs to no one.” In international law, terra nullius means that the first nation to “discover” it is entitled to take it over, as long as it can be proved that the land is not occupied. Terra nullius is also a legally constructed fiction. It is no different than the artificially constructed (treaty-based) administrative authority of UNESCO that erases borders and further colonizes peoples and places by classifying Land as a form of “universally valuable” and “shared” property – where “culture” is defined in both tangible and intangible forms according to an ongoing collective definition of these critical terms meted out in memos and meetings led by a process orchestrated from a safe distance in Paris. Notions of what makes a property “valuable” is as beholding to antiquated notions of territory being those places which have never been subject to sovereignty claims by any state, which thereby is framed as a condition of perceived emptiness.

The essence of the Lockean strategy is to permit dispossession of landholders who do not use their land in a particular way. Both the classical and modern arguments posit an independent conception of the best use of land, and then appeal to the second proviso to reject suboptimal use as ‘waste’. This judgment relies on a strong conception of ‘spoilage’, on which wasting potential is as bad as wasting perishable goods.

Kolers, 391

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René Dietrich situates the settler-colonial discourse in the present, expanding the notion of terra nullius by stating, “...recent iterations of settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies approaches put an emphasis on how biopolitical and geopolitical forms of settler governance operate on conjunction, as for instance in the ongoing attacks against Indigenous lands, bodies and lives so as to produce colonial space in the United States and Canada (Goeman, 2014) or in the employment of ‘Indianness’ for the transit of U.S. empire (Byrd, 2011) in geopolitical and bio-political terms” (2017, 67). Dietrich argues that the biopolitical logic of settler colonialism “discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land” (Ibid). Further arguments calling for the critical alignment of settler colonialism with terra nullius include Carole Pateman’s “The Settler Contract” in Contract and Domination (Pateman and Mills, 2007, 35–78).

Hegemony

Another integral structural component in this project requires thinking about how Antonio Gramsci theorized hegemony as it relates specifically to education. Gramsci’s hegemonic system, like Le Corbusier’s version of universal modernism, depended upon the omnipotence and submission of individual will for the greater common good, which relied on education as a method to achieve absolute compliance. Antonio Gramsci's view, by way of Marx, proclaimed that civil society operated though social classes, which needed to be empowered to maintain hegemony, while ruling the political and economic landscape simultaneously. For Gramsci, hegemony would appear and present itself in two distinct forms in civil society. The first apparition would be in the day-to-day “civil society...the ensemble of organisms commonly called private” (1971). This apparition would demand an array of social institutions and actors, which existed in both the family and the state. However, the platform where hegemony is more clearly shared by consent is in civil society. The apparatus of state coercive power...the political society which reinforces consent by ‘legal’ means and resorts to force when required to maintain order (Ibid). This symbiotic relationship creates a civil society reinforced by agreed and complicit coercion, a system in which everyone becomes complicit, whether conscious of being complicit or not (Borg, et.al, 2002; Hill, 2008; Mayo, 2014). Furthermore, the global and transnational effect of this particular hegemony has repercussions we now see operating on a global scale, facilitated by the spread of modern architectural education regimes.

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Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilisations.

Gramsci 1971, 666

The implications of a Gramscian analysis of architectural thought production and pedagogy also permits other discussions to enter architectural discourse along the way. For example, Gramsci saw the state as the instrument of ruling-class domination in society, but he suggests that in ‘normal’ times this domination is achieved not so much through the repressive apparatus as through hegemony. By this Gramsci means the ideological control wielded by the ruling class, the way in which people come to accept the political-economic system as legitimate (Kertzer, 324). Le Corbusier’s radical modern idealism similarly had to first be taken up as a belief system to be practiced and taught by all, which revolved around a Weltanschauung that remained deeply shaped by the power and will that the masses needed to believe were necessary to achieve modernity and to achieve modern subjecthood. Gramsci references an ideal modern world in which “all aspects of social reality are dominated by or supportive of a single class” (Livingstone 1976, 235 quoted in May 2008, 419).

Le Corbusier’s view of modern man focused on a fictional modern subject, who also belonged to an idealized social order. This is reflected in his larger urban projects as well as his villas. In Corbu’s large-scale work, spaces were organized in zones dedicated to functions such as housing, industry, bureaucracy, leisure, etc. Each zone was separate and defined but connected to other zones by mass transportation networks to ease movement between zones. Le Corbusier’s modern city was a model of modern management and complicity and conformity was expected and rewarded. As a trade-off for high density, high-rise housing block occupants would be rewarded with shared public parks and green spaces. Multi-lane superhighways would be diverted under these massive parks as another trade-off. Le Corbusier proposed a socially engineered hegemonic system of negotiated compromises, which would require compliance.

This notion of hegemonic complicity and universal modern-subject formation appeared in the design of Corbu’s early villas. As a requirement for living in a Corbusiern house, Le Corbusier’s clients (Ozenfant, Stein, Savoye, et. al.) had to agree to live in a “machine for living” and to

30 choose a modern life by sacrificing material comforts for a more rational and abstract way of dwelling that demanded occupants become universal “modern” subjects themselves. For example, Le Corbusier’s villas remained quite small, despite their fame. The internal spaces are shockingly small – from the winding spiral stair and ramp of the Villa Savoye to the monks’ cells in the monastery at La Tourette. Hallways were narrow and spaces were just large enough for one person to pass at a time. Corbusiern dwelling spaces were for individuals, even when they are situated in dense arrangements. In Le Corbusier’s villas there are frequently spaces, such as small balconies, as at the Villa Garches, that can only hold one occupant at a time. Similarly, kitchens and other working spaces are stripped down in features, as well as in scale. At first glance, many critics extol Corbu’s control of scale as evidence of his humanity, which he would describe in his idealized “modular” construction system (Le Corbusier and De Francia, 1967).

Critical Pedagogy

The intellectual leap needed to do this work has numerous precedents and also requires that a critique be situated where the architectural subject is formed. Following the reasoning of Peter Mayo, architecture produces a “work oriented” educational paradigm in which formal education systems and other “learning strategies” provide the basis to situate power and serve as a methodology for centralizing and formalizing hegemony (2008). We make architect-citizens in support of universal modernism, to perpetuate the systemic whiteness of architecture and architectural education, all in support of a particular hegemony to perpetuate colonialism that can then be materialized through the built environment as Giroux explains:

Gramsci also makes clear that pedagogy is the outcome over struggles over both the relations of meaning and institutional relations of power and that such struggles cannot be abstracted from the construction of national identity and what it means to be a citizen. In this context the pedagogical is inextricably grounded in a notion of hegemony, struggle and political education articulated through a normative positon and project aimed at overcoming the stark inequalities and forms of oppression suffered by a subaltern group.

Giroux 2011, 61

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Methodologically, to begin to think about the figure of Le Corbusier as a figurative participant within such an insidious system, requires applying the work of Antonio Gramsci as a vital methodological framework to critique the multi-tiered figuration of Le Corbusier as a hegemonic system. Le Corbusier’s words, meant to inspire students and produce followers, are far more indicative of how he saw himself and how he chose for others to see him as modernity’s master:

Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms.

Le Corbusier, 1986

The demands to critique Le Corbusier’s centrality is, therefore, a pedagogical problem not a formal problem. Critical pedagogy, as a method, views teaching as a political act and thus rejects the idea that teaching and knowledge production are neutral and that its practitioners are merely benign actors (Giroux, 2011; Kanpol, 1999; et. al.).

Critical pedagogy also draws on the work of Antonio Gramsci in its analysis of power and culture, tracing its influence on education in its broadest sense. Critical pedagogy insists that education should be considered within the context of power and the dominant interests that power represents. It calls on progressive educationalists to pursue a practice which exposes these interests and empowers learners to think critically, to act as critical citizens, to make a commitment to social action so as to promote social justice and freedom and to embrace the vision of a global democracy.

Clemitshaw, 278

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Decolonization

The frameworks and fraught rhetoric of decolonization provides a significant critical framework that this critique will draw upon. Decolonization presents an opportunity to critique educational regimes using lenses that do not hide racism, colonialism or genocide, but rather confront these practices as ongoing realities by denying settler innocence. Decolonization presents critique as a form of active resistance, including resistance through pedagogical reform. The types of pedagogical questions raised by Indigenous education scholars (like Martin Cannon) who work in settler colonial critique, include questions about how one reconciles that it is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) rather than the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP, 1996) that has been chosen to provide the path to guide decolonization. And, even more relevant to this particular thesis, Cannon has asked, why has the work of Indigenous architects like Douglas Cardinal remained invisible? How do we explain Cardinal’s ongoing invisibility and argue for decolonizing pedagogy? Are the two issues not intertwined? Natalie Baloy writes, “As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe and critical theorist Andrea Smith have argued, the elimination of Indigeneity was and remains a goal of the settler colonial project” (2016, 209). Cardinal’s erasure, in spite of his vast contribution to the discipline of architecture, is evidence of a much more deliberate and insidious project.

Across the landscape of Canadian policies, laws and practices, Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonialism will hopefully be reshaped by post-TRC educational policies. The TRC is already producing important critical questions, forcing important conversations to be had and provoking a need for immediate action. However, if the ruling colonial elite recognizes injustices but does nothing, then what will change? How seriously will the project of decolonizing pedagogy be taken? Will architects continue to produce and reproduce systemic racism, spatial oppression and social injustice by design, if their educational and pedagogical models do not change? A powerful rising cacophony of voices addressing reconciliation and redress has produced a vast literature and a broad range of activism in Canada that remains outside of architectural discourse and pedagogy in Canada today.

As a next step towards change, I suggest that we think very critically and interrogate what multiculturalism has meant for Canadian education. I suggest multicultural education has not done a particularly good job at

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inviting questions about lands dispossession, Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. The failure to address these matters is due in part to a “homogenizing” impulse inseparable from its liberal democratic underpinnings.

Grande 2004, 47

The section in the TRC report about what must be committed to in education in Canada is very specific. The TRC provides an opening for not just Indigenous rights and well-being, but also provides an avenue to confront ongoing colonial practices present across the Canadian state and society. The TRC is already producing some immediate positive effects. For example, the Canada Council for the Arts announced that the Indigenous design project (UNCEDED) has been selected through a national juried competition to represent Canada at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The team in charge includes only Indigenous members: Douglas Cardinal, Gerald McMaster and David Fortin (Canada Council for the Arts, 2017).

However, it must be acknowledged that there are numerous risks involved in taking up reconciliation in such a project. It could potentially reaffirm the white canon, reify the colonial gaze and further marginalize by trivializing their sacred, as well as day-to- day, traditions and practices. As non-Indigenous settler-scholars take up these issues, they must acknowledge that this work requires a reckoning with their own settler positionality as a first step rooted in “understand(ing)...engagement with Indigenous people within a broad moral and political framework” (Land, 203). This is also why foregrounding Indigenous scholars is a decolonizing methodology. As Andrea Smith writes, “Our goal may not be to ‘understand’ the Native but to challenge the grid of intelligibility under which the Native is known” (2013, 270).

Critiquing pedagogy provides a pathway to understanding. Martin Cannon has asked, “How might we work in collation with privileged learners – and especially with new Canadians – to consider matters of land, citizenship and colonization? an approach to teaching that disrupts the binary of self/Other?” (2015, 21). Scholars like Cannon, Moreton-Robinson and others, who critique settler colonial regimes and include settlers in their solutions, call for an intersectional engagement with settler colonialism as a methodological tool to achieve settler reckoning.

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Canadians do not usually think in critical ways about the land, or even about the direct action that is used to occupy and protect them.

Cannon 2017, 9

Canadian citizenship remains predicated upon the erasure of Aboriginal sovereignty, and unless this institution can be transformed in relation to the realization of Aboriginal sovereignty, it will remain an instrument of colonial dispossession.

Ibid, 15

There will be no decolonization in Canada simply because non-Native people learn more about Indigenous history and culture. Better knowledge must be accompanied by the return of land to alter settler colonialism’s structural foundation.

Ibid, 9

Whiteness

Architecture studios produce and reproduce race. As a pedagogical method, studios often use the pure white cube as the embodiment of rationalism and abstraction. The pure white, innocent, cube is perceived as being placeless, raceless, classless, genderless and neutral. Evidence of Le Corbusier’s lingering influence is the dominance of the white cube. The cube is necessary to produce exclusionary bias towards all other ways of being and all pre-existing forms of expression. The cube establishes the means by which erasure of all alterity can be enacted.

In contrast, the field of industrial design has openly embraced notions of identity and the self by taking up methods borrowed from the social sciences in both pedagogy and practice (Plowman, 2003; Suri, 2003; Vincente, 2003). Tied to increasing markets and rebranding campaigns based upon seeing users and individual subjects as valuable, the results of these ideologies are seen in practices enlivened by identity and subjectivity that deconstruct the whiteness of design practice. The types of students drawn to these renewed and even anti-racist practices, have started to come

35 from previously marginalized populations. The opening up of markets and subjects is now understood as being essential to economic survival. The universal modern figure has been entirely reconfigured in industrial design, as a result. Imagining non-homogenous consumers and creating new markets acknowledges difference as an asset.

In contrast, architecture remains stagnant and white. The reasons are undoubtedly tied to social class and privilege, but are also tied to regimes of capital and property. However, architecture also remains entrenched in a very particular historical imaginary that depends upon the figuration of a few modern “masters” to remind us that architecture is a method to master the land through conquest and occupation. Le Corbusier’s legacy and the teaching of Le Corbusier are required to maintain this distance between marginal practices and mainstream practices.

Issues of identity, subjectivity and the user are now thoughtfully considered in recent architectural theory. Whereas in architectural practice, the universal modern subject remains. Mark Wigley took up the “white wall” as his central critical object to metaphorically discuss modernity’s obsession with whiteness, hygiene and universal subjectivity to ponder the nature of modern desire and its “fashionable” anti-aesthetic in a thinly veiled attempt to write about the whiteness of architecture. The inherent whiteness of modern architecture is at once literal, metaphorical and quite clearly racial according to Wigley’s critique (1995).

The methodological use of whiteness in this project, serves as yet another critical pedagogical tool. By critiquing architecture using frameworks and methods borrowed from critical race scholarship, the canon can be critiqued using another critical lens. The term “particularity,” for example, is used frequently in this analysis in an effort to discuss the “particularity of whiteness” as framed by Robyn Wiegman. Wiegman uses “particularity” as a method to contextualize how whiteness can be considered beyond skin tone, privilege and power situationally and reflexively (2012). For Wiegman, whiteness and white supremacy are both “universal” and “particular.”

Furthermore, the notion of white privilege, from which Weigman draws, is best rooted in the foundational scholarship of Peggy McIntosh, feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centre for Women, and founder of the National SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) Project. McIntosh’s articles “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work on

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Women's Studies” (1988) and “White Privilege” (1989) placed the dimension of privilege into discussions of power, gender, race, class and sexuality in the United States, thus framing how the field of whiteness studies would be positioned for future scholars. This is a valuable social science framework that must be considered in critiquing the Corbusiern figure. To explain how grounding an architectural critique in an interdisciplinary methodology might be useful, Robyn Wiegman’s work serves as a model, as does the interdisciplinary work of Annette Burfoot.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless backpack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.

McIntosh, 2006

Wiegman analyzes a Klan museum in the deep South of the United States and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute to ponder the “essentializing” of blackness and of whiteness. She uses her analysis of these two museums as subjects, positioned dialectically across from one another in the conceptual space of racist practices and historical memory. Her intent was to see how race is institutionalized though architecture and how whiteness is practiced on the ground in a town with a horrific, indelible racist past. In Wiegman's analyses, buildings act as surrogates for the black and white bodies they represent and perform as. She troubles whiteness using architecture to ask how the law reproduces race as a thesis, but centers her discussion on how two museums came to be construed as a result of legislation that determined what could and could not be built. Her larger thesis reveals that the self-conscious anti-racist subject can only “reconfirm a universalist narcissistic white logic mobilized now through the guise of an originary discursive blackness that simultaneously particularizes and dis-identifies with the political power of white skin” (2012, 242).

It is whiteness’ historical elasticity and whiteness’ ability to transform that Wiegman fears the most and which also has bearing on the Corbusiern figure. To understand how whiteness thrives

37 in the curricular ambiguity of the architecture studio and surfaces as “unconscious pedagogy” is to question how race is produced through architectural education and as a fulfillment of white desire, which may indeed produce alternative critical practices that are anti-racist, but is more likely to perpetuate racism as a project. To speak about whiteness, in this context, also requires an honest conversation about accepting the ongoing presence of race in the studio and to admit that studio pedagogy produces race.

Following on the work of David Roediger (1991), an entire field of whiteness discourse and white studies has been introduced into the academy. This has produced its own set of problems including legitimizing the idea of “white victimhood” by turning the language and ideas of racism around on itself to empower and claw back white privilege, specifically in the face of racial discrimination cases that appear in the courts. This inversion further problematizes the limits of privilege and whiteness as interchangeable definitions. Terrance MacMillan has warned that in these cases of inverted racism, “racial analysis” might make it “hard, if not impossible, for anti-racist theorists to convince white folk that there is such a thing as systematic white racism” (MacMillan 1995).

Annette Burfoot uses methods that draw equally from the social sciences, and visual analysis to analyze and critique how the female body and its role as a “marker of the boundary between life and death” (2006, 107) is produced. Burfoot does this by examining how medical imaging and anatomical models, as well as contemporary horror films and science fiction writing portray the female body. Her work, in its breadth and in its interdisciplinary methodologies, provides a useful precedent in this project, as does Wiegman’s. Burfoot explains, “The iconic representation of femininity in terms of curiosity and knowledge in the classical myth of Pandora” (Ibid, 109) results in “a dislocation between her (Pandora’s) appearance and her meaning. She is a Trojan horse, a lure, a trap, a trompe l’oeil” (110). Furthermore, Burfoot states, “An almost identical tension between the packaging of femininity feared and femininity idealized is found in early modern medical imaging” (Ibid), thus situating her theoretical argument in the made material evidence found in the objects and images through which these pedagogies were produced. Burfoot’s methods are extremely useful in dissecting the multi-pronged methods by which the Corbusiern figure has been produced: materially, ideologically and experientially.

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Conclusion

The intertwining of interdisciplinary research methodologies and literatures chosen in this project is deliberate and meant as a form of critical interrogation. Modern architectural historians continue to struggle with how to re-tell the story of the history of modern architecture as a global transnational story untainted by whiteness and colonialism, which ironically remains consciously and insidiously devoid of race as a form of both. This willful ignorance, in turn, perpetuates racialization, marginalization and prevents any form of epistemological difference from ever entering the studio. In “Ralph Erskine's Special Kind of Arrogance: Erskine's White ” (Ray and Werner, 2014) the overwhelming whiteness of Erskine, his practice and his products are critiqued simultaneously as a method. In the white pedagogy of the Scandinavian university where the paper’s author teaches architecture, the whiteness of the student body and even the whiteness of the walls are seen as intertwined within the literal and phenomenological space of whiteness as an inter-related system.

What does it mean to achieve whiteness in the studio? Dana Cuff describes numerous professional achievements and stages in the process of becoming an architect as “rites of passage.” These include obtaining a university degree, interning, passing a registration examination and eventually establishing one’s own office. This is the prescribed path which requires both physical and social mobility to pass from one space to another. Architectural practice is centered on the “metamorphosis” of individuals into a homogenized body of like- minded souls seeking to find a meaningful place in society. This perpetuates a particular image of homogeneity and phenomenology of social mobility as prerequisites, which exclude all non- conforming bodies and imaginaries as a regime. By positioning Le Corbusier as modern architecture’s most iconic figure and by continuing to teach Corbusiern projects, Corbusiern logic and Corbusiern methods, we teach whiteness. Second, through the ritualization of performances in the architecture studio, whiteness is taught through an invisible and unconscious pedagogy. This white imaginary then carries forward into the lives, practices and material spaces that all of us inhabit, and thus the studio system becomes a racialized system as a project.

We also must be reminded as we think through Le Corbusier’s white boxes, that none of this was invented from scratch. Le Corbusier absorbed, transformed and colonized the architecture of Others to fit his agenda. He was also, quite literally, asked to envision the colonizing of Algiers,

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Chandigarh and Buenos Aires by building his universal modern fantasy for how a post-colonial state would operate in massive projects that were as unwelcome as was he. “It should also be noted that…Le Corbusier sought not his own vernacular, but that of other people. In today’s parlance he sought the other, a pure and natural man, in contrast to Western man corrupted by the turmoil of the nineteenth century” (Passanti, 438).

In light of this genealogy. the institutionalization of Le Corbusier as a figure has not been adequately theorized or contextualized as a colonial project. As stated to me in an interview with one official, “The outstanding universal value of Le Corbusier’s work sparks from its reimagining of the ways we inhabit architectural works, be it collectively or as individuals. Moreover, this reimagining has its roots in a reading of the vernacular building traditions of the Greco-Roman world” (Interview D, 2017). When Beverly Daniel Tatum asked, many years ago, “Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” (Tatum, 1997), she asked a much more difficult question and an opportunity to discuss race in the classroom resulted. Similar questions need to be asked about why are only white imaginaries the ones that count in architectural education, and how will this play out across the Global South in the upcoming decades.

Despite the massive body of literature on Le Corbusier, he remains sacrosanct and untouchable as an icon, which still canonizes him. The long and brutal battle to enshrine him on the UNESCO World Heritage List proves that he has been rendered with superhuman powers to resist his own decolonization. However, his beatification, canonization and spectral transformation may have been accepted for the past half century, but there are new voices of protest who have only just emerged in the past two decades who are not content with the status quo, nor in supporting Le Corbusier’s centrality as canonical.

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Chapter 2 UNESCO, Le Corbusier and Outstanding Universal Value Introduction

In this chapter, the decision to enshrine seventeen of Le Corbusier’s architectural projects as a “transnational serial nomination” and the decade-long process it took for this to happen is analyzed as a central case study. Interviews throughout have been identified as Interview A, B, C, etc. to ensure anonymity of interviewees. All interviews were conducted in English. The goal of this chapter is to identify and analyze how the arguments used to enshrine Le Corbusier on the UNESCO World Heritage List were situated and how the nomination finally succeeded. The result of this success is that Le Corbusier’s “outstanding universal value” would be situated within a colonial framework to both prove his legitimacy and to perpetuate deep-seated colonial regimes using the global spread of Western modern architecture as a very particular material manifestation of an ongoing colonial project.

By analyzing the discussions, debates and even email conversations surrounding this landmark decision made by UNESCO in 2016 and its processes, the complicated and highly politicized process of nominating the Le Corbusier UNESCO World Heritage dossier becomes a body of clear evidence for how colonialism is perpetuated through modern architecture as a regime. Personal interviews with key decision-makers, who had been on the front lines and in the back rooms where these decisions were made, form the core of the data in this project. Positioning Le Corbusier as a figure within the evolving ideologies and policies of UNESCO World Heritage forms a critical contextual backdrop for asking the question, why Le Corbusier? The answers are often phrased as being self-evident and beyond discussion. “As with the Bauhaus, conscious preservation efforts for modern buildings typically develop through a focus on the legacy of one of the masters; the most salient example is Le Corbusier (1887-1965) in France” (Prudon, 7).

The implications of this exercise paved the way for Le Corbusier to re-enter architectural thought and discourse, but now as architectural heritage. To see modern architecture within the rubric of World Heritage criteria would require significant public education and new tools, such as these essays, accompanied by an “anthology of significant critical texts on modernity, in-depth studies relating to cultural expressions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comparative studies

41 into properties and sites and the assembly of workshop dossiers to facilitate inductive exercises and test cultural approaches to criteria” as an outcome (van Oers, 14). Papers included Kenneth Frampton's “The Catalytic City: Between Strategy and Intervention” (2003), Jukka Jokilehto's “Continuity and Change in Recent Heritage” (2003), and Derek Japha’s “The Heritage of Modernism in South Africa” 2003), among others.

The story of Le Corbusier’s nomination process is long and messy (see Appendix D). By looking at the origins of his nomination, from the first discussions and strategies laid out by like-minded agencies and organizations in France to the more formal conversations held at UNESCO World Heritage Committee meetings in 1998, the question of Le Corbusier’s inclusion on the World Heritage List in a more substantial way than other architects, had always been under consideration as soon as modernity counted as World Heritage. For nearly two decades before the 2017 decision, the political power behind Corbu’s nomination was fueled from within the French government. It was also shaped by the well-organized and highly influential leadership of the Fondation Le Corbusier. However, despite being rejected in 2006, re-nominated in 2009 and then rejected once again, the desire to include Le Corbusier’s oeuvre on the World Heritage List continued.

The further reification of Le Corbusier generated for the next generation a perpetuation of Eurocentrism and UNESCO’s gaze from Paris. Along with institutions like the United Nations, UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee, in particular, this decision to enshrine Le Corbusier’s work on the UNESCO World Heritage List will perpetuate regimes tied to colonialism and power and white supremacy in perpetuity. The central critical framework in this project intertwines Gramsci, hegemony, pedagogy and figuration as a critical method. The fundamental basis for inclusion on the World Heritage List is formed by ten criteria with achieving “outstanding universal value” as the key criterion.

Criterion (i): The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier represents a masterpiece of human creative genius which provides an outstanding response to certain fundamental architectural and social challenges of the 20th century….

Criterion (ii): The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier exhibits an unprecedented interchange of human values, on a worldwide scale over

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half a century, in relation to the birth and development of the Modern Movement…

Criterion (vi): The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier is directly and materially associated with ideas of the Modern Movement, of which the theories and works possessed outstanding universal significance in the twentieth century. The series represents a “New Spirit” that reflects a synthesis of architecture, painting and sculpture.

UNESCO, 40 COM 8B.31, Examination of Nominations of Cultural Properties to the World Heritage List, 2016

A key component of this research relies on data gathered through a series of interviews conducted in Europe over the summer of 2017 that were focused on the histories and struggles related to Le Corbusier and his fit into UNESCO World Heritage criteria. Interviews were framed to draw on insights, reactions and stories surrounding the decision to reframe UNESCO World Heritage Site criteria to include Le Corbusier's oeuvre and how his “outstanding universal value” would be defined, defended or denied as the decision cycled through UNESCO’s World Heritage listing mechanisms. This decision required a cast of experts, a decade of work and produced a vast amount of data to draw from.

This group of experts included Kenneth Frampton and Jean-Louis Cohen, two key modern architectural historians who helped author and champion the Corbusiern canon in its originary state. Both Frampton and Cohen had written seminal texts dedicated to Le Corbusier (Cohen, 2013, 2012, 2004; Frampton, 2003, 2001, 1997) and were well-positioned to argue for Corbu’s importance. The UNESCO World Heritage White Papers (2001), which included essays by both, drew from a range of international scholars in support of a previous “brainstorming session” that had paved the way for re-defining the value of modern architecture as heritage-worthy using the structural framework of UNESCO World Heritage criteria as a guideline (van Oers, 10).

UNESCO and Architecture

UNESCO was founded on November 16, 1945 as a specialized agency of the United Nations just twenty-four days after the UN Charter came into being. UNESCO's constitution enshrined the

43 goals of the organization “to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed...by the Charter of the United Nations”(Article One, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 1972). UNESCO is currently made up of 195 member states and nine associate member states (UNESCO, World Heritage List, 2017).

The role of the law and treaty vehicles (such as UNESCO) prevent competing voices from entering discourse. For example, to address redress and reconciliation, and inasmuch, confront the ongoing colonial effects of UNESCO World Heritage programs would require accepting alternative viewpoints, ideally ones coming from Paris. Treaties must be seen as modern legal instruments that fulfill particular desires and afford material and political opportunities for gain for those in control. Furthermore, a culture of redress is the potential outcome. When UNESCO permits cultural practices to be codified as “intangible” forms of heritage, it does not reconcile UNESCO’s colonial gaze, nor is its central authority to decide which cultural practices count, and which do not.

The proliferation of redress movements at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first leads the contributors to posit the existence of a “culture of redress,” in which demands for restitution for historical wrongs have taken the place of other forms of community engagement and activism. Political scientist Matt James explains this phenomenon as a function of neo-liberalism, which he argues favours intergroup mediations that minimize dissent.

Pass, 259

UNESCO’s early activities were not always so entrenched in postmodern geopolitics. UNESCO originally focused on education in its early stage and restoring the institutions destroyed by the violence of World War Two on the European continent. However, this focus was soon expanded to include the preservation and protection of more abstract forms of "culture" framed mostly by a notion of perceived risk of impending loss. This has perpetuated UNESCO’s Western-dominated view of history and its own mission to this day.

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One of UNESCO’s very first architectural campaigns was the landmark Nubia Campaign. The Nubia Campaign, launched in 1960, was centered on moving the Temple of Abu Simbel from its original site to protect it from imminent destruction resulting from the flooding of the Nile as part of the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt (Säve-Söderbergh, 1987). The Western imaginary of colonial Egypt was at risk, which made this site easily romanticized, Orientalized and valued, all of which fed the desire to save and protect the site as a “gift.”

One of the main outcomes of this campaign, aside from the dam, was the valorization of what came to be known as “World Heritage” and the establishment of a UNESCO World Heritage Centre – entrusted with the mission to safeguard the cultural heritage of humankind.

Hassan, 73

During the ensuing twenty-years it took to complete this massive project, twenty-two monuments and architectural complexes were entirely relocated for posterity. This was the first of a series of similar UNESCO campaigns that would include similar projects in Fez, Katmandu and Borobudur. The far limits of Empire would need to be reinforced, remapped and re- imagined. With each campaign, UNESCO World Heritage Site criteria was expanded and clarified. However, in 1972, the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage was adopted, and its first sites officially inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978 (UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 2017).

The World Heritage Committee was established in 1976 shortly after the proclamation of the Convention. This was an extra-national body with the authority to assemble consultants, prepare dossiers, and to promote and nominate sites for consideration on the World Heritage List in support of the United Nations’ mission. The Committee’s first sites were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978. UNESCO's policies and practices, including the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) and the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005), have expanded the original treaty and mission of UNESCO World Heritage to consider cultural landscapes, human practices and more abstract material forms of heritage such as trade routes and pilgrimage paths, among others. The World Heritage Committee is a by-product of UNESCO's expansion into the world of

45 architecture as an extension of its original “mission,” and the number of nominations has increased exponentially over the past decades. The treaty powers of UNESCO have also been modified over the years to adapt to changing economic, political and environmental conditions as a result.

The Committee is responsible for the implementation of the World Heritage Convention, defines the use of the World Heritage Fund and allocates financial assistance upon requests from States Parties. It has the final say on whether a property is inscribed on the World Heritage List. It examines reports on the state of conservation of inscribed properties and asks State Parties to take action when properties are not being properly managed. It also decides on the inscription or deletion of properties on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee, 2017

The UNESCO World Heritage List

The way that UNESCO enshrines places, buildings and environments is centered on inclusion on an official list known as the World Heritage List. The process to achieve a place on the World Heritage List is complicated, multi-tiered and political. The process is further complicated by the intertwining of political agendas and economic systems that collide in an effort to maintain and build a collection of architectural and natural “wonders of the world” that the West has chosen to preserve and protect as its own, most often by occupying and claiming the land and cultural traditions of Others on behalf of UNESCO. UNESCO is also still a branch of the United Nations, which carries with it the reality that the UN operates as a supranational treaty.

The core difficulty encountered in enshrining the World Heritage dossier of Le Corbusier was that Corbu’s nomination would require the re-imagining of a number of the fundamental ideologies and frameworks that World Heritage listing criteria had been based on, which was also positioned geopolitically, as well. The main problem with the Le Corbusier dossier was that to enshrine such a massive body of a single individual’s work was unprecedented. It was very difficult to justify to outsiders, particularly because most of the seventeen buildings were unremarkable on their own. What was being enshrined was a common discussion topic among experts, bureaucrats and others. Also, the distortion of the fundamental goal of inscribing

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“places” rather than “people” on the World Heritage List would rely upon a manufactured ignorance of the basic tenets of the organization to enshrine Le Corbusier’s “influence” over Others as his unique form of “outstanding universal value.” Le Corbusier, would need to be seen as exceptional and particular in order to achieve World Heritage status. Le Corbusier would need to be seen as white. Furthermore, if Le Corbusier’s individual buildings were not significant on their own, as all but five of his buildings were agreed to be, a new framework would be needed to see a collective value based on “influence,” rather than actual value, as defined by UNESCO World Heritage criteria. This of course could set a precedent that would contradict UNESCO’s recent progress to internationalize, globalize and decenter its own Eurocentrism.

In researching the process by which the decision to list Le Corbusier’s work was made, many leads could not be followed as key players in the decision quit their jobs and even vanished. The process was highly fraught, but also highly documented. The authority of UNESCO’s World Heritage criteria and those who drafted and supported these criteria had been engaged in their own ideological and epistemological battles, and often singular words embedded in policies, such as “genius” and “universal,” would derail any progress for years at a time as the nomination dossier bounced from agency to agency. For example, the documentation of debates about the criteria of “individual genius” at one point was entirely excluded from the record, while experts “reconfigured” each successive dossier to embrace a more general “contribution to the modern movement,” which in the end rested on the notion that it was Le Corbusier’s “global influence” over Others that was being enshrined as a “strategy” to avoid considering him a genius altogether.

Even the methods by which Le Corbusier would enter the pantheon of modern architects on the World Heritage List became contentious, politicized and polarizing. His status as a master figure troubled UNESCO and ICOMOS staff deeply, as the emails and file folders filled with conversations exposed. The ultimate decision was to use a “serial nomination,” process, which was normally used to facilitate transnational nominations and encourage cooperation among neighboring states in alignment with UNESCO’s supranational mission. Twisting this method to fit Le Corbusier demonstrated his privileged positionality and proved how World Heritage criteria could be manipulated for political gain. Such serial nominations were usually seen as being “good because they encourage cooperation between states, which is the political goal of UNESCO World Heritage” (Interview, B, 2017). The official press release by UNESCO

47 describes Le Corbusier’s serial nomination as follows:

Chosen from the work of Le Corbusier, the seventeen sites comprising this transnational serial property are spread over seven countries and are a testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past. They were built over a period of a half-century, in the course of what Le Corbusier described as “patient research.” The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina) and the Unité d’habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century to the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society. These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalization of architectural practice across the planet.

UNESCO, The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier, an Outstanding Contribution to the Modern Movement, 2016

Modern Architecture and World Heritage Frameworks

Le Corbusier, the figure, would once again dominate architectural discourse, but this time using the debates surrounding modernity and UNESCO World Heritage as a segue to further debates about how modernity and World Heritage might intersect. The UNESCO-Le Corbusier case would provide yet one more instance where the dominance of the colonial master narrative would be reproduced and ossified though practices, policies and perceptions that required the Corbusiern figure to dominate discourse.

The solution eventually arrived at, following a decade of debates and white papers, ultimately hinged on a return to an analysis of the paradoxical condition of the “universality” and “particularity” evident in Le Corbusier's work. UNESCO and ICOMOS compromised in the end and chose to frame Corbu’s work as a series of evolving lessons, rather than a collection of singular case studies to describe his unique “universal value.” Absent from much of the debates were key questions about what it means to canonize a method of building that we now recognize as oppressive and dehumanizing. Enshrining Le Corbusier's lasting “influence” might preserve

48 the seventeen buildings finally agreed upon, but it would also do more than just celebrate the “heterogeneity that derived from the nature of the Modernist Movement” (Rao, 165). Enshrining Le Corbusier, in this manner, would guarantee that Other architectural traditions and opposing voices would be sublimated, or that they would exist in relationship to Le Corbusier as the norm.

The battles and debates that the Le Corbusier case produced between UNESCO and ICOMOS, the two most adversarial organizations working together, proved that this was altogether new territory. These debates shaped much of the original research in this project. The Le Corbusier “dossier” begged for UNESCO World Heritage criteria to be revised to fit him, and inasmuch, the limits of UNESCO’s policies and practices would need to be tested to achieve Le Corbusier’s goals of insuring his beatification and persistence within the modern architectural canon. This particular UNESCO decision was never a struggle just to enshrine Le Corbusier’s work, it was a last effort staged from Paris to enshrine the embodiment of an all-knowing, white master who colonizes by occupying and building on the land of Others for a new generation.

On a very pragmatic level, framing the idea of modern architecture as “heritage” required a foundational shift in values, as well as methods. “Invented traditions” (Hobshawn, 1983) would need to intersect with global geopolitics and emerging definitions of peril and risk (climate change, never-ending civil wars, etc.) to take hold in the public imaginary. Branding modern architecture as cultural artifacts “at risk” would require some conceptual work that art-historical frameworks would not be able to produce. Architectural history had its limits as Crouch and Johnson explain, “With these tools, they (architectural historians) define the forms of buildings, seek the origins of those forms, and relate them to both the iconography - the symbolic representation of meanings - and iconology - the historical analysis and interpretive study of symbols in their contexts” (2001, 5).

How modernity would be placed within the historiography of UNESCO World Heritage and its very particular criteria would require a radical reframing of numerous basic notions, such as the need for “exceptionality.” To define exceptionality and seek out truly exceptional architects as a strategy, would require valuing modern ideologies such as universality, rather than individual works of art as a framework. Broadening World Heritage criteria in this way would seem to desire modern architects like Douglas Cardinal, whose work deconstructed the modern canon, by purposely and skillfully considering Indigenous epistemologies, such as the subjectivity of the

49 land, as a method to produce buildings that are situated in place. Cardinal’s architecture could be seen as interweaving “universal value,” “heterogonous developments” and “particular character” to orient new criteria for the selectivity of artifacts “valid as modern heritage” (Grementieri, 87) if considered within UNESCO World Heritage criteria as a framework, as opposed to a version of modernity tied to “a universality that contradicts the concept of exceptionality” (Ibid).

Assessing and assigning value to iconic works of modern architecture, such as those built by Le Corbusier or those by Bauhaus architects like , has created a number of definitional problems for UNESCO and ICOMOS over the past decade. The project to reframe modern architecture as heritage is complicated. For example, the Bauhaus campus of Walter Gropius, another iconic work of modern architecture, was framed by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, ICOMOs and external experts as being particularly historically significant in that it served the historical role of being the first truly modern school of art and design. It also serves as a textbook model of the modern building style itself, thus emulating Bauhaus' pedagogies and principles in material form, while concurrently showcasing the individual architect, Walter Gropius’ particular “genius.”

For the World Heritage List, the Bauhaus is therefore not only a singular masterwork in the history of architecture and design, but also a testament to the history of ideas of the twentieth century: ‘Even though the Bauhaus philosophy of political and social reform turned out to be little more than wishful thinking, its utopia became reality through the form of its architecture. Its direct accessibility still has the power to fascinate and belongs to the people of all nations as their cultural heritage.’”

from the nomination dossier for receiving the Bauhaus and its sites in the World Heritage List, 1994) (UNESCO, World Heritage Site Bauhaus, 2017

Decisions to place buildings or heritage sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List are never rashly made and the process requires a rigorous and very public vetting process that takes time, has many layers and has many checks and balances by design. Each nomination dossier usually must have a regional or locally situated meaning or geographical grounding in place to be specific enough to matter, that can then be translated as also having a “universal” value while following UNESCO’s World Heritage criteria as a metric (Interview B, 2017).

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Outstanding universal value means cultural and/or natural significance, which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.

Art. 49 UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines, 2017

UNESCO’s World Heritage List criteria are always specific and never general but in a state of constant reinterpretation and refinement. A number of interviewees stressed that the Le Corbusier decision would also be historically significant in the sense that the global thrust of UNESCO World Heritage would be re-focused on “intangible cultural sites” as well as sites that were more “transnational” in nature, which were needed now to understand “modern colonial perspectives” (Interview E, 2017). To elaborate further, a memo from the Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, appearing as a collective body of Wright's work, was being considered for the World Heritage site list, stated:

...The buildings (listed)...were built between 1906–1969 and chosen for their significance in the development of modern architecture. They are the most iconic, fully realized and innovative of more than 400 existing works by Frank Lloyd Wright. Each is a masterwork and together they show varied illustrations of “organic architecture” in their abstraction of form, use of new technologies and masterful integration of space, materials and site. All have been designated U.S. National Historic Landmarks.

Frank Lloyd Wright Conservancy, 2015

Wright's work was thus rationalized as being embedded in the particular psycho-geography of the American Midwest using place-based criteria for assessing an expanded definition of “value.” This value was also tied to the American middle class, domesticity and whiteness. To gain inclusion on the list, the Frank Lloyd Wright sites will have to go through a vetting process that includes a series of site visits by two separate advisory boards, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the World Conservation Union (IUCN), all meant to determine the universal value of the buildings (Geiling, 2015).

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Le Corbusier’s Relationship with UNESCO

Two buildings by Le Corbusier had already been granted World Heritage site designation via the enshrining of the “housing estate project” of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2008, but Corbu’s master oeuvre was still unable to be recognized as a cumulative body of work worthy of World Heritage site status until 2016. Therefore, it was disastrous in 2011 when a “non-inscription” of Le Corbusier’s designation was delivered at the annual World Heritage Committee meeting. A decision that was passed was the lowest level of UNESCO recommendation possible. Many were devastated. As it was explained to me, one of the key champions of the Le Corbusier nomination gave up after the second rejection and subsequently resigned from public office after being “exhausted and humiliated” by the decade-long process (Interview B, 2017). The process took its toll.

The lack of support for Le Corbusier's World Heritage inclusion in 2009 hinged on ICOMOS’ evaluation of Le Corbusier’s work and its subsequent failure to recognize how Le Corbusier’s work could be considered as possessing “outstanding universal value.” These three words would take on greater and greater importance as the story unfolded. ICOMOS posed the question, Does the nature of twentieth century architecture justify it being nominated for designation in different ways to the architecture of other centuries? In other words, is the context in which these architects work so different that it should not be subject to the socio-cultural considerations applied to those of preceding centuries? (ICOMOS 2009 Evaluations, no. 1321, 200)

The Le Corbusier decision was difficult. It took three attempts to pass and the Le Corbusier decision, driven by the French, essentially disturbed many of the fundamental purposes of World Heritage site status established as early as 1979. The most problematic was that people should be taken out of the equation in lieu of ‘place-based’ criteria as an ideological foundation…and the enshrining of Le Corbusier…was at odds with this ideology. This was the fundamental problem with Le Corbusier. In the third attempt it was criterion six – that a place was associated with a particular genius that was the deciding factor.

Interview A, 2017

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The key obstacle in the minds of those at UNESCO and ICOMOS was identified as how to fit UNESCO’s evolving goals and policies within the principle, “to list places, not people” (Interview A, 2017). Le Corbusier’s nomination forced this foundational principle to be called into question and debated for well over a decade. Therefore, the final achieved goal of listing seventeen of Le Corbusier’s buildings scattered across the globe in one singular “serial nomination” meant that Le Corbusier became the human embodiment of the “genius” of modern architecture that many had lobbied against. Moreover, the language of his listing hinged upon an agreement that his “outstanding universal value” would be centered on his “lasting influence” over others, rather than his individual buildings – an influence that was not specific, but general and universal – the very definition of universal modernity.

With the canonization of these seventeen buildings, a very particular colonial legacy in architecture was further buttressed, while concurrently silencing an emergent architectural landscape populated by Other voices. The serial nomination method may have also been entrenched as the method by which all other modernists might thus be enshrined is also a worry, particularly as the anonymous modernism of the colonies falls under the radar of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in the future as a void on the list is filled.

However, in the changing context of UNESCO’s policies for the World Heritage, reaching a new level of international visibility was considered necessary by scholars and Le Corbusier supporters alike. The number of 20th-century objects and sites featured on UNESCO’s World Heritage List is growing, yet some major documents of Modernism and Modernization are still missing, and this is the case with Le Corbusier’s work, despite its seminal importance.

Cohen 2006, 43

Chandigarh

The most critical, and controversial part of the nomination dossier, which also derailed the nomination processes for Le Corbusier in 2009 and 2011, hinged on the lack of inclusion of Le Corbusier’s work in India within his master oeuvre. The inclusion of Chandigarh was seen as an essential piece of the story to demonstrate Corbu’s international reach into the farthest depths of

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Empire. Without representative work in India, Le Corbusier’s global “influence,” the driving thesis behind every version of Le Corbusier’s nomination, would seem incomplete without the inclusion of Chandigarh, according to each of my interviewees. Chandigarh was simply essential to prove Le Corbusier’s universal “influence.” However, the local population of Chandigarh and the multi-tiered Indian governing bodies responsible for the site(s) were not convinced. Worries ranged from potential losses of autonomy to decreasing real estate values. By positioning Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Complex within a settler colonial framework as a critical method, a number of pre-existing and ongoing colonial regimes are revealed. Chandigarh’s inclusion was essential to fulfill the ultimate colonizing intent of UNESCO’s treaty powers. It also reinstated the colonial gaze in the modern age by extending the modern project and colonial management of the land of Others at the limits of Empire in the orientalized East.

Other sites acted as catalysts for spreading ideas around their own regions, such as Maison Guiette, that spurred the development of the Modern Movement in Belgium and the ; the Maison du Docteur Curutchet that exerted a fundamental influence in South America; the Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l’Occident as the prototype of the globally transposable Museum of Unlimited Growth which cemented ideas of the Modern Movement in Japan; and the Complexe du Capitole that had a considerable influence across the Indian subcontinent, where it symbolized the Indian’s accession to modernity. UNESCO, Decision 40 COM. 8B.3

It is telling to look closer at why the UNESCO-Le Corbusier dossier was so contested once again, as well as how it was resolved. In the end, the resolution to include Le Corbusier’s master oeuvre was forged by limiting the number of sites proposed and by adding Chandigarh and other more internationally strategic sites to the nomination list to demonstrate a universalizing global context. The mountains of data and backlogs of files and white papers that led up to Chandigarh’s inclusion demonstrated how the site would prove to be the last conquerable imperial acquisition needed to fulfill Le Corbusier’s case for lasting influence over Others. The Chandigarh Capitol Complex buildings include the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Punjab and Haryana Secretariat, and Punjab and Haryana Assembly along with a collection of monuments including the Monument of Open Hand, Martyrs Memorial, Geometric Hill and the Tower of

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Shadow. In the end, for political and jurisdictional reasons (Interview E, 2017), the final UNESCO World Heritage nomination was restricted to a much smaller version than originally conceived. The local population in Chandigarh did not want UNESCO World Heritage designation, for fear of what UNESCO’s authority and control would do to curtail and restrict rising real estate values and property development opportunities (Interview G, 2017). Additionally, as documented by Vikramaditya Prakash, Le Corbusier’s image in the eyes of those in Chandigarh was clearly colonial, foreign and mostly unwelcome (2017).

Yet while he was not the city’s only designer, the team included a handful of other senior architects, he was undeniably its most famous, adding glamour to independent India’s grandest project. It is an event of global import, and it may cause talk for centuries, as the New Yorker put it in 1955. “The general feeling seems to be that he [Le Corbusier] took on the task primarily as a way of justifying his theories. He is almost 70, it is pointed out, and thus far most of those theories have been tried only on paper.”

Crabtree, 2015

The emergent goal of a final, successful serial Le Corbusier nomination had to fit UNESCO’s evolving World Heritage objectives. These objectives had shifted over the past decade to foreground an ongoing project to decrease European domination as well as introduce forms of architectural heritage that were more “intangible” as an overall mission objective.

Presenting an incomplete picture of Le Corbusier’s global influence and lasting power produced a paradox among the various bodies in charge of ushering Le Corbusier’s oeuvre through the complicated UNESCO World Heritage process. This one project can be seen to embody how modern architecture and colonialism have been perpetuated by European (French) domination over Others with Le Corbusier playing yet another seminal role. The difficulties experienced in including Chandigarh also prompts a need to take up non-compliant literature and methods, such as those defining settler colonialism or the Burra Charter (to be discussed later), to provide an opening for potential remedies to shape the evolving policies and practices of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee and its need to reframe its colonial present.

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Just as UNESCO and ICOMOS regularly sends its area experts, whose home bases are in Paris, on “missions” abroad, Le Corbusier’s own fascination with travel coupled with his compulsion to record and catalog the visual exotica of the Orient, appear in page after page of his lushly rendered pastels of women, animals, souks and the mise-en-scène of daily life observed when he travelled abroad. His normal analytical sketches characterized by rendering unseen regulating lines in ink and pencil, become replaced with lush, colorful and sexualized pastel renderings of exotic bodies in exotic settings. His renderings demonstrate his deepest colonial fantasies and these images permit him to see Others as subjects who will occupy his imagined buildings, rather than clients or individuals. Evidence of his gaze appears in words, images, sketches and, moreover, in his attitudes. For Le Corbusier, it is the sketches of bodies in exotic locales like Buenos Aires and Algeria that his gaze is best materialized and his fantasies realized.

“The idea that images produced by and articulated to colonial enterprises have served as modalities of power and sites of contestation has been well developed…” (Nielson, 474). While much of this work has been historically focused on photography and painting (Barthes, 1981; Ryan, 1997; et. al.), these same kinds of post-colonial actions that began as visual exercise have been translated into architectures, which perform in the same way and which in kind has produced its own critiques. These same critiques, when executed by architectural scholars, have re-centered on how colonial regimes and are enacted through the representation of Others through space, place and form within architectural theory and criticism (Çelik, Jarzombek, Otero-Pailos, Prakash, et. al.).

In Chandigarh, Algiers and Argentina we specifically how Le Corbusier sees Others. Once his projects become grander, larger and more institutional, he becomes more colonial. We see this in the casual renderings that fill his notebooks, drawn while he is away on mission to research exotic sites (See figures 18-23, Appendix C). These sketches situate how he sees Others and how he uses architecture to define Others using massive urban projects to erase the locals and the sense of place that his modernity sought to neutralize. His gesture is colonial, to destroy the Other. Le Corbusier’s fascination with the jazz age in the 1920s similarly projects his racist fantasies about black bodies and Harlem as an orientalized and racialized Other.

Jazz, like the , is an event and not a deliberately conceived creation. They represent the forces of today. The jazz is more advanced

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than the architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle. I repeat: Manhattan is hot jazz in stone and steel. The contemporary renewal has to attach itself to some point. The Negroes have fixed that point through music. Their simple spirit has caused the reformation to spring up from the depths and has situated it in our times.

Le Corbusier, 1964

The View from Paris

The United Nations, of which UNESCO is a subgroup, is an intergovernmental agency originally formed as a collective of fifty-one sovereign nations in 1945 in the aftermath of World War Two. The United Nations Charter, which governs the United Nations’ mission, serves as an international treaty that binds all members to its articles (per Article 103). These obligations to the United Nations prevail over all other treaty obligations that may exist between nations jurisdictionally. Art[icle] 103 of the UN Charter (or the ‘Charter’) in a rather unambiguous articulation, provides that, ‘[i]n the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Members of the United Nations under the present Charter and their obligations under any other international agreement, their obligations under the present Charter shall prevail’” (Istrefi, 81).

The majority of UN member countries in the world have now ratified UNESCO's policies and practices by agreeing to its Charter (1972). The Charter must be approached first and foremost as a modern treaty tied to land, power and, as a result, conceptually and ideologically UNESCO's World Heritage site policies and practices could be framed as evidence of ongoing systems tied to colonialism. Like other treaties, UNESCO operates in the name of a collection of sovereign states, which is able to force its will with impunity upon Aboriginal people, their land and their sacred places and cultural practices when risks, peril or opportunity presents itself.

One could argue that the United Nations is the same body that enshrined the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) 2008, which rejected the “doctrine of discovery” and provided a vehicle to acknowledge the sovereignty of Indigenous nations residing in states, while laying out very clear criteria for legally recognizing Indigenous rights in relationship to land. However, one of my consistent findings is that how UNESCO and World

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Heritage policies and practices are used to nominate, debate, and enshrine new types and forms intangible culture, is limited by UNESCO’s reliance on its own internal criteria. These criteria perpetuate the colonial and deny other epistemological ways of thinking through how culture is defined, whether tangible or intangible.

In one of my more troubling interviews, a UNESCO official insisted that the only research needed on the subject of UNESCO World Heritage was more clarity about how to broaden existing UNESCO World Heritage criteria to permit further adaptation and expansion of a regime already firmly in place (Interview G, 2017). The obligations of UNESCO to fulfill the requirements of UNDRIP is one of many contemporary issues that often seems to elude UNESCO policy makers, who are often entrenched in current geopolitical issues. As another former UNESCO official explained to me, and which was repeated by others, the “Palestinian issue” has dominated the last few World Heritage meetings and the resulting politicization of World Heritage was only getting worse each year. The politicization of UNESCO World Heritage criteria that would be more productive, in terms of addressing UNDRIP, if World Heritage criteria could be framed by the work of Indigenous scholars like Dale Turner and others (Henderson and Wakemen, eds., 2013), who have “proposed a stronger, juridical understanding of reconciliation based on Indigenous sovereignty, territory, rights, and constitutionalism” (Franks, 352).

Achieving World Heritage Status

For many nation states, achieving World Heritage status is highly sought after, akin to achieving official citizenship on the world stage. To scholars like Agamben 2005, Mbembe 2001, Thobani 2012, et. al. the linkages between what it means to “acquire citizenship” run parallel with the intent to achieve sovereign citizenship via World Heritage designation. The colonial and racial injustices that the acquisition of this form of citizenship requires and the reaffirmation of the mastery of the West dominate discourse and shape the nomination process.

I argue that there is instead a fortification of the West and its 'whiteness' (articulated as civilizational-cultural superiority) as an ongoing predatory form of sovereignty. In other words, both Empire and Homo Sacer obfuscate the emancipatory possibilities for revolutionary struggles by

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reproducing as universalist the pretensions of Western sovereignty and rendering irrelevant the extensive Third World (including Muslim) resistance to this form of sovereignty, which enables the ongoing Western domination of the global order.

Thobani, 3

To focus on how UNESCO defines, determines and administers World Heritage site status is to focus on how it produces Others and how it uses the control and designation of World Heritage status as a colonial methodology to perpetuate and extend its power into the postmodern age. It is worth noting how UNESCO’s constitution enshrined the goals of the organization: “to contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, for the rule of law and for the human rights and fundamental freedoms which are affirmed ... by the Charter of the United Nations.” (UNESCO)

Outstanding universal value means cultural and/or natural significance, which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.

Art. 49 UNESCO's Operational Guidelines, 2017

However, it was more than a decade after the constitution passed before UNESCO began delving into the issues of natural and cultural preservation that we now associate it with (Keough, 593-4).

…the following shall be considered as “cultural heritage”: monuments: architectural works, works of monumental sculpture and painting, elements or structures of an archaeological nature, inscriptions, cave dwellings and combinations of features, which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science; groups of buildings: groups of separate or connected buildings which, because of their architecture, their homogeneity or their place in the landscape, are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science; sites: works of man or the combined works of nature and man,

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and areas including archaeological sites which are of outstanding universal value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view.

Article One, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 1972

The decisions to nominate or vote for or against a particular dossier, and who would be in control of voting, has been described as entirely political in nature (Interview A, 2017). Decisions presented as impartial and objective often represented deals “pre-arranged in backrooms” (Interview A, 2017). Even the annual meetings and formal processes that the public saw were described as being “scripted and staged” (Ibid) for the public eye. As it was explained to me, in meetings that take place over an entire week with as many as three thousand attendees at any given time, the sheer scale and “chaos” of UNESCO World Heritage Committee meetings produced their own unwieldly “spectacle” (Ibid). Meanwhile, a system of voting and nomination where states could vote in blocks or “cabals” has been used to support or deny decisions based purely on politics fueled by “backroom deals” and political alignments made long in advance of meetings (Ibid). The task of conserving architectural heritage has become a distant memory, and as my interview below demonstrates, the hypocrisy of World Heritage Committee meetings was obvious and played like a game.

It is not unusual for countries to make back room agreements to support each other's claims in exchange for support. For example, cabals of three politically intertwined countries from the same region – Egypt, Jordan and Libya, for example – may make such collaborations in advance. What you hear in meetings and read in transcripts appears diplomatic and impartial, but was all pre-determined.

Interview A, 2017

The politics of UNESCO today have even shifted further from early aspirational roles to preserve artifacts, environments and to geopolitical issues that have very little to do with architectural or cultural preservation. One UNESCO interviewee stated that architectural

60 preservation was “at the periphery of most decisions” (Interview B, 2017). The literature on the history of UNESCO supports such shifting foci, as does the growing criticism about the organization and its expanded geopolitical role. Like many organizations that have grown and expanded beyond their original mission, the UNESCO World Heritage has become a major transnational global power that wields vast sums of capital on the ground and now wields military power as well.

Each UNESCO nomination needs to be seen as having secondary and tertiary agendas, which only perpetuates colonial power and abuse. For example, when asked why the Villa Curutchet in Buenos Aires and the Villa Guiette in Antwerp – lesser known Le Corbusier villas – were included on the 2016 UNESCO World Heritage List, the answers were almost always assumed to be political, rather than qualitative, even when the answer was unknown. Interviewees assumed that a purely political decision had been made to somehow insure the nomination would pass, even if they could not determine the motivation for unclear decisions (Interviews B, D, G, and H, 2017). Indeed, in both of these cases, one can think that their inclusion in the list had diplomatic reasons and aimed to reach a greater sense of balance between the countries and broader regions included in the project (Interview D, 2017).

Universal Modernism and World Heritage

Modern architecture is a very particular art, one whose particularity lies in its attachment to values that are universal such as abstraction, placeless-ness and universality, but also whose social value lies in practicalities such as utility and fitting-ness to local contexts. This paradox presents problems. Mark Jarzombek writes: “Preservation is an instrument of modernity; stated differently, it is the means by which we define ourselves as moderns” (2009, 31). Following Mark Jarzombek’s postulation, it is useful to think of UNESCO as a global institution that has been specifically charged with instituting and administering programs meant to encourage cooperative, coordinated action by member states in education, science, and the arts, but which now includes architectural heritage and modern architecture, in particular, as a method to materialize and enshrine its intents, with results that extend the colonial project, the Eurocentric gaze, and produce and reproduce race and racism as a by-product.

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The sheer audacity and challenge of a project to define “World Heritage” for all humans requires significant unpacking and historical context. This chapter will focus on the implications including modernity in this project, what role Le Corbusier plays in this situation and what kinds of paradigm shifts, discourses and histories result. Le Corbusier's complicated systemic enshrinement on the UNESCO World Heritage List tested the limits of UNESCO's legislative abilities to define and refine what “universal cultural value” might mean after modernism, as well as the power of the collective gaze of UNESCO as a treaty enforcing institution with a colonial past and a colonial present. UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention (UNESCO 1972) is widely acknowledged as the foremost conservation instrument for “recognising and protecting the outstanding cultural and natural heritage of humankind for present and future generations” (Rao, 2010: 161).

The inclusion of particular and well known iconic works of modern architecture within the broader body of “World Heritage” strengthens UNESCO’s impact on the global stage. It also extends UNESCO’s legal powers into more places, more communities and more ambiguous territory including the arena of geopolitics, war and terrorism. The literature discussing the dangers of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee as a political body has increased as its rate of nominations has ballooned in recent years (Grove and Thomas, 2014; Jarzombek, 2009; Salazar, 2016; Usborne, 2009; et. al.). The fundamental language of UNESCO’s system of multiple criteria centralizes “outstanding universal value” as the key component in assessing World Heritage, listing worthiness, which becomes an essential tool to deconstruct to understand UNESCO’s intentions, methods and its particular “mission” within a colonial framework that has now taken up modern architectural heritage as subject matter.

At the heart of the World Heritage system is the identification of eligible properties. When the Convention came into effect, the States Parties had no operational tools to identify sites having outstanding universal value. How would sites be selected? The Convention is clear that the threshold for inclusion is outstanding universal value. But it must be observed that the term “outstanding universal value” is used thirteen times in the English version of the Convention, but never defined.

Cameron, 32

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Banister Fletcher presented his own Darwinian view of architectural heritage that still dominates Western imaginaries today. In A History of World Architecture (1975), Fletcher explains how certain types of Western architecture occupied the highest Darwinian position while the architecture of Indian, Chinese and Islamic civilizations were shown to be “arrested in their evolution” (1905).

This symbolically represents the difficulties that we face today...in re- evaluating the nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural legacies, because those in the non-Western part of the world, who should be critical of such Eurocentric world views, are still very much living by them. Another reason is because so many buildings created in non-Western countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were in fact built - politically, economically and culturally – in order to support the Western construction of colonies, and thus it is difficult for the once-colonized nations to evaluate such buildings today without an ideological understanding of their often, bitter past.

Muramatsu and Zenno, 114

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the use of the term “heritage,” often came to refer to the material culture, places and artifacts of Others (Fitch, 1982; Mumford, 1941; et. al.). Heritage, as a notion, was most often positioned as a response to modernity and its blind faith in technological progress, and its eschewal of sentimental attachment to artifacts situated in the past. This colonial lens would come to dominate how we frame modern heritage today as well, particularly when the material remains of the modern era, like the work of Le Corbusier, would need to be situated in the past. Eric Hobshawm's view of heritage as “invented tradition” (Hobswawm and Ranger, 1983 quoted in in Harrison, 2013, 43), if taken up as an ideology in modern architectural heritage, inevitably produce its own particular “canon of places” (Harrison, 44) and reproduces the continuation of the very same colonial frameworks that invented heritage was meant to describe adapted to fit the modern project. To maintain this colonial project requires labour, as well as adaptations of policies, practices and the far-reaching powers of international organizations like UNESCO to fit modernity's particular ambiguously universal position within a world culture populated by other ways of being.

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There is a reason why UNESCO headquarters is in Paris. Many of the UNESCO sites in Africa and elsewhere also reflect the colonial projects of the French and Belgians – UNESCO simply goes where the French and Belgians had colonies.

Interview C, 2017

Modern architects had previously achieved World Heritage site status many times over, and the monuments chosen were situated all over the world. Among those were projects by Frank Lloyd Wright (American), Antonio Gaudi (Spanish) and (Brazilian), who had been perceived as being both modern enough and local enough, to count within the vague constraints of World Heritage List designation in relationship to modern architecture. Modern architecture, like whiteness, requires a very particular kind of universal, invisible standard to be achieved to count. Therefore, even when the intent to globalize UNESCO World Heritage by shifting gazes away from continental Europe are enacted, the examples chosen must fit the normative standards of how modern architecture is defined using Le Corbusier, the International Style modernism as precedents.

When UNESCO nominated ten of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings to be on the World Heritage List in 2015, a UNESCO press release quoted in Smithsonian Magazine, stated: “This is the first time the United States has nominated examples of modern architecture and the first time it has nominated a new site since 2013. The ten sites span Wright's prodigious career, from his early Prairie period to his final buildings, and are located in seven states. According to UNESCO, the World Heritage List seeks to recognize sites whose importance stretches beyond their home country, and whose ‘outstanding universal value’ represents the best the built and natural world has to offer” (Geiling, 2015).

Notably, before the 2016 Le Corbusier decision, examples of modern architecture were most often represented by single iconic buildings, often attributed to singular modern architects and locally valued, such as Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Building in Weimar, German (inscribed in 1994), Erich Gunnar Asplund’s Woodland Cemetery in , Sweden (inscribed in 1994); Gerrit Rieveld’s Rietveld Schröder House in , Netherlands (inscribed in 1999), Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat Villa in , (inscribed in 2000), Luis Barragan’s House and Studio in Mexico City (inscribed in 2003), Max Berg’s Centennial Hall in Wrocław, Poland

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(inscribed in 2006), Jorn Utzon’s iconic Opera House (inscribed in 2007) and Peter Behren’s Fagus Factory in Alfeld, Germany (inscribed in 2011) (UNESCO, World Heritage List, 2016).

The Heritage Industry

The intersection of architectural heritage, tourism and postmodern forms of cultural consumption provide yet another lens into the UNESCO-Le Corbusier decision’s lasting colonial intentionality. How to value and “protect” the artifacts and cultures of Others dominates much of the more recent discourse in architectural heritage. The argument is post-colonial and is shaped by a desire to achieve decolonization through change, destruction and attempts to both regain and lose power simultaneously. Architectural heritage becomes a symbolic piece in this struggle. The email exchanges between and attitudes of the French agencies that I spent time with in my research demonstrated both animosity and power struggles over intellectual and procedural turf about artifacts located far away. The “heritage industry” (Hewison, 1987) promoted the belief that the rise of heritage as a form of popular entertainment distracted people from developing an interest in contemporary art and critical culture, providing them instead with a view of culture that was finished and complete (and firmly in the past) in the UK (Harrison, 99).

In judging these omissions negatively, ICOMOS International seems to have ignored the extremely precise rules set by UNESCO for proposals for World Heritage Listing and for which the Fondation and external consultants studied both the conservation of the buildings proposed and the technical, political and administrative obligations set by the World Heritage Committee. The dossier did not include the architecture in Chandigarh or the Carpenter Centre—or even Centrosoyuz—because of an absence of the conditions required by UNESCO for the protection of the building, which must already be safeguarded by the national legislation of its own country which, in turn, is the institutional body that forwards the proposal for World Heritage listing.

Fiordimela, 2011

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Current trends in historic preservation and in museum studies, in particular, have paved the way for a much more interpretive version of cultural representation and heritage that will change UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in the future. The types of nominations over the past few years already reflect this change. The literature of post-colonialism has also produced numerous critiques of museums, monuments and heritage sites as colonizing agents (Chambers, De Angelis, Ianniciello, Orabona and Quadraro, 2016; Crimp and Lawlor,1993; Young, 2000; et. al.). In all of this post-colonial revisionary work, there remains an expressed desire to reclassify the world of objects, places and things according to some revised “order of things” (Foucault, 1973) which requires that dominant narratives, foundational discourses, recognized power structures and colonial taxonomies be deconstructed rather than using the “narrow and specific ways” we have defined heritage in the past (Smith, 11). The tendency to frame heritage today as an “industry,” or even extend heritage to produce hybrid fields like “architourism” (Lasansky and McLaren, 2004; Ockman and Frausto, 2005) defines a burgeoning architectural “heritage industry” that eases the colonial conscience, yet perpetuates colonialism in altogether new ways. By erasing colonial pasts to replace them with new post-capitalist frameworks centered on heritage as a commodity extends the colonial gaze.

They sought to unveil the means by which the viewer was conditioned to see and interpret. In the process, they made visible the various cultural mechanisms that are responsible for constructing the image, myth, and meaning of individual buildings, specific sites, entire cities, and landscapes.

Lesansky, Cornell University Reference Library, 2011

More fulsome critical approaches to seeing heritage range from framing the production of heritage as a “crime” (Grove and Thomas, 2014) as a method to “inflict damage” on Others (Usbourne, 2009) or as a form of continuation for regimes steeped in racialized colonial violence (De Jong and Rowlands, 2010). UNESCO’s interests and values have shifted to become more global in scope and more cognizant of intangible forms of heritage. Recent attempts to expand heritage definitionally within UNESCO include extending colonial gazes to include many more forms of “intangible cultural heritage.” UNESCO World Heritage sites now include things like “Belgian beer culture” that stretch criteria and definitions for what can and may be enshrined as

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“culture.” Making and appreciating beer is part of the living heritage of a range of communities throughout Belgium. It plays a role in daily life, as well as festive occasions. Almost 1,500 types of beer are produced in the country using different fermentation methods (UNESCO, 2016 11COM).

People ascribe a variety of meanings to ‘heritage.’ Traditionally, authoritative expert analyses determined the historical, aesthetic, scientific, ethnological or anthropological value of both cultural and natural heritage. Only recently has the professional heritage field begun to embrace such factors as economics, cultural change, public policy and social issues.

Salazar, 147

UNESCO, Colonialism and Heritage Practices

Positive change on the horizon of UNESCO’s World Heritage List was mentioned in every interview that took place at UNESCO, ICOMOS and with experts when the topic of future practices and directions for the World Heritage List came up in formal and informal discussions (Interviews, 2017). The desire to be less colonial and more cognizant of local stakeholders and environmental impacts dominates much of the recent literature on UNESCO World Heritage with a particular anti-colonial frame of reference (Amir, 2015; Puleo, 2013; Scholze, 2008; et. al.).

Another critique on the notion of culture as applied by UNESCO is that it stresses the importance of culture as a national property, thus neglecting the often conflicting diversity within nation states.

Nas, 2002

Furthermore, this rather naïve perspective obscures the cultural, economical and most of all political implications of heritage. Questions of identity politics are left out of UNESCO’s consideration. Indeed,

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many of the publications on cultural heritage deal exactly with its political appropriation.

Scholze, 214

More often than not this changing focus was characterized using three major methods: shifting World Heritage sites from Europe and the Americas to the Global South, shifting the focus from architectural and physical sites to intangible cultural sites, and aspiring to locate and establish World Heritage sites that could be managed locally rather than colonially from afar with the betterment of the local community as a primary goal.

The decisions made at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in Krakow (July 2017) reflect these shifts. Most notably, the 2017 list of inscribed World Heritage sites included examples of African modern architecture that included over two hundred buildings in the city of Asmara, Eritrea (UNESCO, 2017). However, as was pointed out to me by one UNESCO official, it is no coincidence that the first examples of modernism outside of continental Europe happen to be in former French colonies (Interview A, 2017). This means that the privileged view from Paris will continue to dominate World Heritage Lists well into the future, in spite of conscious shifts to assume an anti-colonial position. The reification of French authority over all things “cultural” was repeated as an ongoing problem by many interviewed as evidence of a colonial legacy that still dominates UNESCO World Heritage Committee pathology.

Several of those with whom I had corresponded online could not be interviewed in Paris because they were abroad assessing future UNESCO World Heritage sites around the globe. When officials are sent abroad, this is still referred to at UNESCO as being “on mission,” thus perpetuating the colonial project into the modern era through colonial language. The current push, within the corridors and offices of the UNESCO World Heritage division that I was able to explore formally and informally, is to identify modern sites in the Arab world and in the Gulf, in particular. Among my meetings was a significant one with an office of case workers nestled within UNESCO headquarters, devoted solely to preparing dossiers for Gulf countries like Qatar. Saudi Arabia, at the time this is being written, has four sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List (sites inscribed in 2008, 2010, 2014, 2015) and currently has another ten under consideration (UNESCO, Saudi Arabia UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2017).

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“The preservation of cultural heritage,” explains the Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, “is essential for two separate sets of reasons: because of its universal aesthetic and historic value on the one hand and because of its importance to the societies and cultures that are its custodians on the other. Cultural heritage provides a link between past and present and as such boosts individuals’ and communities’ sense of identity and social cohesion. In this way, it also cements the foundation on which societies build their future.”

UNESCO, World Heritage and Contemporary Architecture: Towards New Conservation Standards, 2005

The ultimate decision to enshrine Le Corbusier as the embodiment of modernism, using the mechanisms of UNESCO World Heritage listing, would have lasting repercussions and not only ensure that Le Corbusier would once again form the central narrative, but that the framing of modern architectural heritage and preservation would remain a particular colonial story emanating from Paris for the rest of the world to behold and be subjected to. The immense project of framing modern architecture as a form of “universal” cultural heritage would take an enormous amount of psychological and political effort, and classical colonial methods and frameworks would be called upon to achieve these goals. More than ten years were spent debating and framing the “universal” and “cultural” merits of Le Corbusier's work, with the end results being that it was Le Corbusier’s “influence,” rather than his actual work that would be canonized. This decision and the battles fought to achieve this would catalyze a paradigm shift in UNESCO’s and ICOMOS’ very foundation with lasting repercussions on both institutions and individuals.

The preservation of modern heritage, and more specifically of Le Corbusier’s architectural work is a long-term venture. The inscription on the World Heritage List of seventeen buildings or sites by Le Corbusier represents a strong encouragement to continue all along Le Corbusier’s built work to maintain this living heritage and to hand it down to future generations.

Fondation Le Corbusier, 2016

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The dialogues and policy shifts resulting from Le Corbusier's inscription have been favorable, but this landmark decision has also furthered Le Corbusier's prominence among a new generation (Ko, 2016; Meier, 2016; et. al.). The repercussions for how “Other” modern architectures might be perceived in a detrimental way has been palpable. One could also theorize, just as Audra Simpson does, that settler colonialism is a dismal failure in the sense that the project has only produced a “frustrating exercise in failed consent” (2014). And similarly, that Le Corbusier’s centrality in spite of all of the good intentions and theorization about expanding definitions of World Heritage listing simply reaffirms the forays into new methods of defining UNESCO criteria such as framing modernity and “intangible culture” have similarly failed to dislodge the colonial underpinnings of the entire World Heritage enterprise.

A radical regime of unknowing would be necessary to achieve change, following up on recent scholarship on “epistemologies of ignorance” (Mills, 247; Tuana and Sullivan, 2006; et. al.) as a method for achieving colonial “unknowing.” Borrowing from Jodi Byrd, the idea of colonial agnosia conveys how colonialism remains pervasive but not comprehended as an extensive and constitutive living formation by those situated in complicity with colonial occupation (Vimalassery, Pegues and Goldstein, 2016). While a discussion of “multiple modernisms” might structure a more fulsome critique of modernist pedagogies and practices, enshrining Le Corbusier on UNESCO’s World Heritage List will produce the opposite effect. Modernity and modern heritage emerged as a result of modernism’s acknowledged demise and what often followed was a desire to protect modernity’s most sacred landmarks.

Modernity, along with modernism, is a distinctly Western affair. If the colonized globe took on many of the economic and industrial, not to mention the political and cultural trappings, of the colonizers, there remains little doubt as to where the centre of artistic life shines brightest. There may indeed have been movements of Latin American abstraction, for example, but they were regarded as provincial echoes, pale shadows of the European movements with which they coincided or even antedated…they could never considered as important as what transpired in the centres of economic and political power.

Moxey, 2017

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However, modernity’s professed “death” also produced a desire to restore and revitalize the key narratives of early modern architects and keep their iconic buildings alive, rather than allowing them to fall into disrepair, neglect or obsolescence. The numbers of key modern buildings rescued from neglect are numerous and the stories of rescue are becoming more frequent and impassioned. Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat house in Brno serves as one example of this phenomena as does Eileen Gray’s E1027 house in Cap Martin, France.

In many cases iconic buildings were seen as the material embodiments of the key figures who had made them. They were embodiments of the modern project. Le Corbusier became equated with the Villa Savoye. Mies van der Rohe was represented by the Pavilion. Walter Gropius became the Bauhaus campus in Weimar. Along with this embodiment, came the reality that to imagine such key works of modern architecture in ruins became blasphemous, but the buildings were often exercises in banal, universal modernity. How could the language of UNESCO criteria that relied on exceptionalism and even “genius” be applied? How can the iconic buildings, figures and mythologies of modern architecture's past be rendered worthy of standing alongside the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Giza and the Parthenon?

UNESCO is Political

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee and its overly transparent methods of documenting meetings, press releases and funded white papers (all uploaded on the web) produced to support the 2016 nomination of Le Corbusier's work demonstrate how we still depend upon the Corbuisern figure. However, to supplement and question the “official” nature of some of this documentation, a series of interviews took place with UNESCO officials and staff, ICOMOS officials and staff, and others who had been involved at the grassroots level in smaller satellite associations and foundations attached to Le Corbusier, often at a very local level.

In a number of interviews with UNESCO officials, both past and present, conversation often focused on the problematic notion of assessing and adapting “outstanding universal value” to fit modernity and Le Corbusier, in particular, as foundational criteria, as unjust. Seemingly benign questions were often met with statements about personal and professional regrets, as well as historical accounts about how the original mission of UNESCO World Heritage and “the evolving perceptions of the nature of heritage itself and approaches to conservation” had been

71 dramatically altered with causation ascribed to “global trends” ranging from climate change to the desire for recognition of Palestinian statehood to complicate and politicize a process that had taken on entirely different goals over time. This has also been written about, as UNESCO World Heritage listing is, itself, becoming historical.

The Le Corbusier decision was regarded as a “hot site” and the majority of money spent in decision-making, as opposed to actually doing preservation work, is daunting. UNESCO is political. UNESCO World Heritage meetings are big and unwieldly with lots of things going on all around...diplomats, backroom deals…literally three thousand people in one room.

Interview A, 2017

Among the data used in this project were internal, unpublished email exchanges debating how to best manage the process of managing Le Corbusier’s nomination between UNESCO and ICOMOS officials, which time again demonstrated that the UNESCO World Heritage division viewed itself as a supranational power empowered by treaty to always be the lead in any and all decisions related to World Heritage listing. ICOMOS were to be situated as the consultants who would arrange for expert advice, solicit technical reports and do the heavy lifting on the ground to survey how sites would be managed to access their viability from a very practical point of view. This expertise was not to be confused with authority. Among the key points in understanding how UNESCO World Heritage now works is to appreciate its role to ensure and coordinate the process of nomination, assessment, vetting and eventually enshrinement in an annual convention. As was repeatedly pointed out to me, UNESCO “does not make decisions, it only facilitates the process” (Interview C, 2017).

Personal day-to-day experiences in the offices of both institutions reflected the same power dynamic. In the humble offices of ICOMOS, full access to all files, invitations to join in office lunches and the use of office space were graciously offered. By contrast, at UNESCO, even entering the heavily secured building required security clearance in advance, passing through metal detectors and surrendering passports. Interviews at UNESCO were either very public or more clandestine, with similar figures popping up in different locations. The scope of what UNESCO does on the ground is entirely political. The complications of multi-layered teams of

72 consulting experts shaped by a hidden agenda took its toll on many of the interviewees. “The World Heritage Committee and UNESCO are called on to cooperate with (these) advisory bodies and to utilize their services ‘to the fullest extent possible’” in preparing documentation for committee meetings and for implementing its decisions (articles 13.7 and 14.2) (Cameron, 174).

Indeed, the overt politics in each decision, including the one I was investigating, had long lasting political repercussions and either inflamed old battles or forged new political alliances along the way – colonial struggles that seemed to be situated in the wrong century. However, as I was reminded by one very thoughtful UNESCO officer, “UNESCO is a branch of the United Nations after all, which is intended to forge transnational alliances as a goal” (Interview B, 2017). However, the sheer number of advisory bodies for the Le Corbusier file(s) was daunting, and the often highly adversarial relationship observed between ICOMOS and UNESCO officials was more than evident in the reams of often heated and disrespectful email exchanges read.

As the decades unfolded, the strengths and weaknesses of the World Heritage Convention became more obvious. On the positive side, it contributed to an extraordinary international dialogue on heritage matters, fostering a new understanding of heritage theory and practice. On the other hand, flaws in the listing process, insufficient funds for a robust programme of international cooperation, threats from urbanization and mass tourism as well as incidents of blatant politicization were sobering reminders that reform was necessary. As the new millennium dawned, the high-minded ideals that inspired the initial vision for World Heritage were under pressure and the need for renewed commitment was evident.

Cameron, 221

World Heritage and Paradox

The post-colonial repercussions of intersecting World Heritage criteria with modern architecture’s most cherished white icons has spawned its own body of emerging literature, much of it funded by UNESCO. Sophia Labadi’s text, UNESCO. Cultural Heritage, and Outstanding Universal Value, (2013) carefully and methodically dissects how “OUV” (Outstanding Universal Value) has been reinterpreted using the lens of modernism. Discussions around cultural heritage

73 and cultural property within UNESCO’s political realm have, in recent decades, shifted towards a more critical examination of heritage centered on cultural preservation, rather than the preservation of isolated individual objects and historical sites, as a result. This was a conscious and difficult “mission” shift as one UNESCO official explained to me, but one that was necessary and timely (Interview F, 2017).

While UNESCO World Heritage sites are still presented as pristine preserved historic city cores or areas of natural beauty situated in the past, there has been a broadening and critiquing of the colonial construction of the “intangible” (UNESCO, Intangible Cultural Heritage, 2017) values attached to objects and environments. This has given UNESCO experts a greater reach and made time and notions of the past more malleable to fit a more recent past. This expanded view has become critical to how heritage designation will continue to be assigned in the future and the opening up of the term, heritage would pave the way for modern architecture to enter UNESCO discourse, and the architecture of Le Corbusier would serve as a critical example for many of the defining debates and the establishment of the language required. This shift has had a positive outcome as it has destabilized the necessity to safeguard forms of heritage using an authoritative “top-down” approach as performed and authored by “cultural bureaucrats rather than tradition- bearers and practitioners” (Meskell, 41).

How could any modern building that celebrates industrialization, mass production and universality be considered World Heritage? Where is the specificity? Where is the authenticity? Theodore Prudon states, “The concept of material authenticity has served as one of the major philosophical underpinnings of preservation for the last hundred years and continues to be the force of discussions on the larger preservation discourse.” (44) Finding the right work to provide as evidence of modernity’s lasting and specific value presented a significant task for UNESCO officials. Experts recruited for this task included the giants of modern architectural discourse. The process of enshrining modern architecture as a World Heritage site-worthy was a project shackled by the restraints of UNESCO's exhaustive criteria for achieving its World Heritage site goals and objectives. Permitting modernity to enter the realm of heritage also upset UNESCO’s precedents.

UNESCO protection has been framed and reframed more recently using a “holistic and integrated view” of how World Heritage should be framed within today’s global context. As

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Theodore Prudon explains, “The initial interest in modernist buildings as heritage symbols began in Europe as early as the 1950s and 1960s, when insensitive changes and deferred maintenance started to threaten the structures famous for their association with the modern movement, a single architect, or the ideals of modern design.” (7) The challenge of defining universal value has been transformed in many ways as a result of the entry of modernity and its associated values into the rubric of World Heritage site designation criteria.

What emerges, after the years of debates and refined policies, is a fundamentally postmodern approach to how heritage will be framed in the future, which describes looking at heritage from “both banks of the river” (Galla, 15) as well as supporting a method of relationship building based on “stewardship” rather than top-down regulation. “Valuing people living with world heritage” (Ibid, 33) replaces viewing objects and landscapes as dead or irrelevant. While this neoliberal frame has its positive attributes, this frame will also allow the entrance of complex socioeconomic systems such as heritage tourism to enter into the World Heritage formula to provide for local economic life and the continuation of colonial conquest and control over places, sites and territories in perpetuity.

A number of modern anthropologists have similarly taken up such enlightened models for re- defining heritage management by focusing on particularities that are architectural, but disassociated with architecture as a an object, by analyzing spatial behaviors like informal street markets as a methodology to uncover undervalued forms of intangible culture (Grimes and Milgram, 2000; et. al.). The reality is that by the end of World War Two the concept of heritage had irrevocably changed, and the shift from the restoration of environments, institutions and cultural traditions was replaced by reframing heritage as participating in modern day-to-day life. This reframing helped set the stage for Le Corbusier's World Heritage site designation.

Manufacturing Heritage Through Desire and Peril

After reading documents from UNESCO World Heritage cases and seeing dossiers assembled in support of the inclusion of more problematic sites like Le Corbusier’s Capitole Complex in Chandigarh, India, the sense that the World Heritage Committee desires and needs a sense of peril to become operational became clear. The language of cultural heritage is synchronous with that of the natural world—a non-renewable resource that is to be preserved for the benefit of a

75 common humanity. But who defines a “common heritage” and “common humanity” in the age of recognized cultural difference? (Meskell, 570).

Within the interstices of the language of heritage, preservation, risk and peril, ICOMOS negotiates a number of archaic and seemingly benign desires to restore, protect or preserve the architectural monuments and rich natural and material spaces of Others for the good of all. This colonial perspective, emanating from Paris, also produces its own form of justifiable intervention as an extension of the colonial project using preservation as a mechanism. This notion requires material objects, spaces and places to be constructed as being in a state of dire peril to warrant external help and intervention. This also provides a lens to see locals as unable to provide the basic protection needed for their own valuable cultural artifacts, spaces and places, which often leads to disastrous results on the local level. This is a colonial project. The old invented histories and traditions and efforts to rule are giving way to newer more elastic and relaxed theories of what is so discrepant and intense in the contemporary moment (Said, 329).

Given this framework of necessary post-colonial intervention, it is easy to imagine why and how UNESCO could have declared an environmental object like the Jakobshavn Glacier (Sermeq Kujalleq) in Greenland a World Heritage site using its existing criteria exacerbated by impending peril. This particular mass of ice in southwest Greenland covers an area about the size of Portugal. The oldest ice in this enormous area was formed nearly 250,000 years ago, and each year about 35 billion tons of ice breaks off the Jokaboshavn Glacier. These severed chunks of ice become icebergs, some of which are four hundred feet tall, and float in Greenland’s Illulissat Icefjord. As global warming becomes a reality, the state of the and arctic ice is the global barometer for future and impending peril.

The Jakobshavn Glacier is easily recognizable as possessing the kind of “universal value” that UNESCO seeks to capture, and it represents loss in a measurable material way. The glacier is also ideologically situated far off the Western grid, and in need of the help of Western superpowers to survive (UNESCO, Ilulissat Icefjord, 2016). The risk to Greenland's Illulissat Icefjord’s is quantifiable using scientific data and methods. Polar bears, icebergs, melting icecaps all resonate in the popular Western imaginary of the fantasy of the arctic as a place. This particular site, therefore, possesses the kind of “universal value” and manufactures its own desire to produce the need for protection and preservation.

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UNESCO stated that “the combination of a huge ice sheet and a fast-moving glacial ice-stream calving into a fjord covered by icebergs is a phenomenon only seen in Greenland and Antarctica and The Ilulissat Icefjord is an outstanding example of a stage in the earth’s history: the last ice age of the Quaternary Period.” This formed the foundational assessment of the site’s “universal value.” (UNESCO, Ilulissat Icefjord) The media is also interested in this glacier, which helps. “The glacier's recent loss of an especially large piece of ice—one totaling nearly 5 square miles, or more than twelve square kilometers—made worldwide headlines” (Harvey, C. 2015).

Le Corbusier aside, the palatability of modern architectural heritage was a problem unto itself. Various committees had meted out proposals and strategies for a new and revised foundational logic for how to reframe UNESCO’s criteria to alter public perceptions about modern architecture as a shared cultural project worth preserving. This included focusing on a number of broader modern phenomena such as speed, mobility and technological transformation as a methodology to add value to what most saw as banal white boxes. The goal of the UNESCO World Heritage position papers was to arrive at a new set of “objective criteria” for the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to use that would shift desires and values to favor modernity rather than the sceneographic and nostalgic.

Conclusion

Ultimately, most interviews were positive about Le Corbusier’s enshrinement on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The effect of the decision that Le Corbusier’s lasting “influence” on the evolution of modern architecture worldwide would be honored and preserved was also accepted. However, his individual “genius,” was often questioned. The idea that Corbu’s “influence” was being enshrined, rather than the individual artist, was often, if reluctantly, defended among interview subjects. As one UNESCO official pointed out, Le Corbusier was instrumental in bringing concrete construction to France and thereafter, the world, but he did it also by reconsidering “the human body” and the “human experience” in his work as his real legacy to modern architecture, which remains misunderstood (Interview E, 2017). One official went so far as to say that Le Corbusier’s “outstanding universal value” lay in “how the modern architecture office would be structured and run” as an unrealizable, but necessary, fantasy (Interview B, 2017).

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The 2016 UNESCO’s decision arrived as a welcome compromise after a long and tedious battle of wills, as evidenced in documentation and personal accounts. It is worth noting, and stated by one UNESCO official, the key supporter who put the nomination forward at the UNESCO committee was not European, but rather Middle Eastern. This shift was politically facilitated by the non-European-ness of the chosen nominator. However, according to one source this had been pre-negotiated as one of many “backroom deals,” to dispel fears among some member states that this decision was yet another colonial form of domination “with France in the driver’s seat,” as usual (Interview A, 2017).

“The World Heritage Emblem signifies that a Site is not just important to the State Party, but rather that the international community has a ‘collective interest’ in preserving the Site.” (Veblen, 680) The malleable ambiguity of World Heritage criteria, always hinges on an ever- changing definition of “outstanding universal value.” UNESCO processes allow injustices to occur systemically as a result of this malleability, and my interviews revealed consistent themes of frustration with the politicization of the original mission of UNESCO World Heritage listing.

Heritage that originates from a colonial past is by definition a bilateral affair: both colony and motherland are the rightful heirs of this heritage and should commit themselves accordingly. Therefore, and in order to avoid the negative connotation of the adjective ‘colonial’, I would prefer to use the more positive and accurate ‘mutual.’

van Roosmalen, 122

The grand project of convincing the world that modern architecture and Le Corbusier could fit the specific criteria of UNESCO World Heritage was challenging. To imagine that the singular influence of one modern architect changed the world so profoundly that he could be canonized as an institution proved to be even more challenging. The relentless struggle to achieve this goal by so many, despite the many setbacks, proves the lasting and significant potency of re-affirming the colonial positionality of modern architecture as a colonizing force seated in the figure of Le Corbusier, in the autonomy of the French and in the authority of the West. Furthermore, “the World Heritage emblem has today come to represent a grandiose marketing tool – fodder for ‘things to see before you die’ coffee table books. At its worst, the program has left its original aims in the dust in favor of materialism and pacification, and is now ‘incapable of protecting the

78 world's truly endangered places.” (Keough, 599) The inclusion of modernity into the pantheon of World Heritage sites, is part of a larger cultural project, which expands the colonial project into another century.

UNESCO and its World Heritage List are still fraught with numerous conditional problems that the unilateral power of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee produces as a colonial transnational, colonial superpower. As a result, the World Heritage Program today is deeply flawed. Elizabeth Keough points out, “At its best, the program is characterized as teetering on its once sound foundations as its principles and priorities crumble under the weight of bureaucracy and outside influence. The World Heritage emblem has come to represent a grandiose marketing tool – fodder for ‘things to see before you die’ coffee-table books.” (Usburne) At its worst, the program has left its original aims in the dust in favor of materialism and pacification, and is now “incapable of protecting the world's truly endangered places.” (Ibid) Even the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an advisory body to the Committee, believes the program is in need of “radical change if [it] is to remain an effective conservation tool” (Keough, 599).

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Chapter 3 Canonizing Le Corbusier, the Person Introduction

Le Corbusier has a very conflicted presence in French culture. He’s admired by artists and most architects, and some intellectuals, but all too often…and misleadingly blamed for the soulless collective housing schemes of the postwar period, seen more as a dangerous prophet than as a creative poet.

Interview F, 2017

The literature centered on Le Corbusier's life and work continues to expand Corbu’s figurative legacy and celebrate his mythic persona. In this chapter, the focus is on the manufacturing of Le Corbusier as a figure. The stories about Le Corbusier's work and life have been told and retold, as a particular kind of cultural industry, which persists today. One might reframe this particular industry as a project centered on perpetuating white supremacy (Anderson, 2015; Harris, 2013; et. al.), maintaining the centrality of capital (Willis, 1995; et. al.) or perpetuating systemic injustice as a critique. Each critical framework, when applied to the pervasiveness of Le Corbusier as figure, reveals how he has been manufactured as a very particular hegemonic and colonial figure with purposeful intent.

The architectural work of Le Corbusier is an outstanding reflection of the attempts of the modern movement to invent a new architectural language, to modernize architectural techniques, and to respond to the social and human needs of modern man.

UNESCO, 40 COM 8B.31, Examination of Nominations of Cultural Properties to the World Heritage List, 2016

Seeing How Le Corbusier Sees Others

Le Corbusier loved observing, photographing and drawing the long corridors in modern steamships. He incorporated these images and spaces into his work such as in his Unité

80 d'habitation in Marseille (Le Corbusier 1931). Le Corbusier described his spatial method as plan libre. Adolph Loos’ described his method as Raumplan. The modern spatial imaginary became a fantasy. This fantasy was also a particular, white fantasy, one in which modern subjects and figures could pass through spaces free of constraints, with autonomy and silent authority as long as they fit Corbu’s vision of modern man and modern life. In a speech delivered in America, Le Corbusier stated:

The very history of America seems to me a powerful level of stimulation, despite its horrors, its pitiless massacres, its destructions ordered in the name of God. The study of a history demonstrated so diversely and so usefully by written documents, so honestly by its architectures, so finely by the visual arts and music, seems to me the solid basis of an intelligent education, granting that contemporary scientific realities represent its useful application. Beside, scientific truths in their constant mobility sometimes lead to thinking, to a “what use is it” and, by a really personal conclusion, to wisdom…

1991, 14

Similarly, the modern flaneur, as described by Baudrillard and taken up as yet another figure of modernity embodied, proved that the idealized modern figure would define modern society through his own subject formation in how he existed within the modern city. This was the great white spatial hope, which gave privilege to the “view from the road” (Jacobs, 1992: 215). This new spatial mode of being would also usher in new forms of cities, spaces and places as a result and was the great hope embedded in the modern project. These ideologies would evolve their own postmodern critiques to be analyzed, studied and fetishized by urban geographers like Mike Davis and Edward Soja, as well as photographers like Edward Ruscha for their “exceptional topographical and historical context” (Ibid).

Following Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (1986), the modern urban fantasy also had other critics, sometimes even from within architectural criticism’s inner circles. Tom Wolfe's best- selling book From the Bauhaus to Our House (1981) provides a useful counter-argument to the idolization of the modernist gaze. Wolfe writes from deep within the bowels of white elitist culture, which helps situate and articulate why so many people harbor such a deep distaste for

81 modern architecture and Le Corbusier’s legacy to this day. Wolf’s book systematically criticizes the most famous architectural practitioners of the twentieth century. He calls them out for being patronizing and snobbish bullies who have been neglectful of their consumers and, far more insidiously, have integrated their elitist political ideologies into their buildings as a cultural goal to produce an architecture guided by an “authoritarian aesthetic direction” (Gubler, 212). Indeed, the aesthetics and rational style of building that was taken up by American business allowed big business and government, as well as white supremacy, to reign supreme. And, inasmuch, universal modernity, architectural knowledge and whiteness are bound up in a system that produces a very particular kind of hegemony.

Paul Goldberger wrote, “Postwar modern architecture in America is the villain; here, too, Mr. Wolfe wants to argue that ideology has gotten in the way of common sense. Beginning half a century ago with the origins of the International Style in Europe, he attempts to trace the development of that style, which for many, including Mr. Wolfe, is a virtual synonym for modern architecture” (1981). Others like Anthony King have more overtly articulated the relationality of modern architecture with colonial power. King writes:

…representations of the political economy and social organization of the human populations on the globe which has, over the last couple of centuries, provided many different options – from a discourse of civilizations, races, empires, tribes, peoples...to more recent notions of the international, transnational, global, world system (with its center- periphery conceptualizations), post-national, post-colonial, neo-imperial, neocolonial, postmodern and others. All of these alternatives attempt to pinpoint the significant loci of power, influence and hegemony in the world and the strength and direction in which economic, political or cultural power flows from one part of the world to another through history.

King, 229

How We See Le Corbusier

In most cases we need look no further than Le Corbusier’s complexly simple early villas for a lesson in how to achieve modernity in architecture and in life. These concise textbook examples

82 of high modernism are still taught as idealized pedagogies to understand the modern design process, to teach modern aesthetics and to reify a particular way of being. Along with Corbu’s forms, his narrative and subjectivity are also taught as a by-product and inscribed in student imaginaries. As Corbu’s ideal way of being in architecture is taught, his social systems, rules and embedded ideologies follow along the same disciplinary lines as a very precisely planned and replicated pedagogical system. Corbusiern design methods are also very easy and satisfying to teach. They are clear, rational and easily replicable. Lessons repeated over time become self- evident and automatic. Integrated lessons about structures, programs, formal logic, public and private spaces, etc. all are neatly contained in a pure white cube. This pedagogical foundation insures that whiteness and the white canon remains intact as a hegemonic regime.

As important as their individual buildings was their influence as teachers. At Harvard (a school with both national and international influence) an era of Beaux-Arts-inspired instruction came to an end. The past, once the source of all wisdom, came to be regarded with suspicion.

Curtis, 39–8

To think through the life, work and figuration of iconic modern architect, Le Corbusier, is a very different task than reflecting on how celebrities, like the architecture stars of today, are produced. How it is that Le Corbusier, of all people, became so reified appears in how he embodies a canon that is ambiguously simultaneously universal and generic, as well as very specific. “Le Corbusier wanted to present external reality in terms of some kind of ‘conventional’ knowledge, in such a way that it could be provisionally understood, given the absence of real certainty” (Richards, 110). Le Corbusier gave us the tools we needed to venerate him, and he began the work of constructing his own archive and legacy while he was still alive. The Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris was begun by Le Corbusier himself.

As a result of his forethought and massive ego, Le Corbusier left a large and varied body of work that includes more than 30,000 architectural plans, 7,000 watercolour paintings, 500 oil paintings and 52 books – with each item meticulously cataloged so they could be studied after his death. Additionally, the number of books and articles written about him multiplies year after year. As a result of his own doing, Le Corbusier’s figuration and positioning within the modern canon, was carefully planned and he created a small army of followers over his lifetime as well, who were

83 scattered across the globe. The cult of Le Corbusier still haunts an expansive universe of work, ideologies and pedagogies that all depend on him as a figure to survive.

When Le Corbusier decided that he was destined to become a great architect and appointed to bring a new architecture into the world, with full deliberation, he therefore meticulously kept every shred of documentation of his life, as had Stendhal and Thomas Mann before him…Most of this vast body of information is stored at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris.

Epstein-Pliouchtch, 2004: 5

By teaching Le Corbusier and venerating his legacy, we continue to teach Le Corbusier’s subjectivity. The homogenizing effect of this is now being critiqued, debated and deconstructed by a new generation of scholars and practitioners, fueled largely by the presence of a new generation of racialized scholars on campuses across North America, in particular. But even after years of marginalization and discrimination, these empowered new voices still operate within Corbu’s spectral shadow.

Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complète

Max Risselada writes, “From the beginning of his career, Le Corbusier was aware of the potentially useful function of publications, in which besides the written word, photographic images also played an important part. The reception of his work is, therefore, largely determined by the material selected and revised by him for the issues of the Oeuvre Complète (1953)” (Risselada and Colomina, 8). Le Corbusier’s primary contribution in the field of architecture and architectural thought production today is his lasting influence, as UNESCO has now confirmed and enshrined. However, we also experience his lasting influence in the grand narrative of modern architectural history.

William Curtis, noted Le Corbusier expert and author, structures his seminal architecture history textbook, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1982), by placing Le Corbusier within his narrative as the glue that holds the history of modern architecture together. Each new twist of technological innovation (Bessemer steel, Otis elevators, lightweight poured concrete, rebar, etc.) and each world war is situated in terms of how Le Corbusier placed himself in these

84 histories. As a result, authors like William Curtis (1982) structure their entire texts with Le Corbusier as their protagonists. William Curtis writes, “Although the Villa Savoye must be understood as a relative of Le Corbusier’s earlier designs, it was not like he simply took pieces from old designs and stuck them together. Rather, a vital new image was created, which articulated new possibilities of form and meaning in an unprecedented synthesis” (283).

While Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is historically significant to the history of International Style architecture and integral to understanding the modern canon, it was a house that was lived in for a very short time, which most of us would overlook given the chance. In reality, the uninitiated might find the building cold and confusing or as stated in the following quote: “We might read the moderns’ embrace of glass and metal, its exaltation of anti-ornamental, minimalist form, its anxiety around habit, the individual becoming overly determined, the exterior, social, political, industrial, being too fully inscribed on the body as part of a general nightmare of this womb tyranny” (Rault, 164). So how did we acquire a taste for modern architecture? Why did we need to teach desire for the Villa Savoye?

The first batch of authoritative voices called upon to deal with the question of situating modernity in history were often themselves situated in critical theory, post-structuralism, phenomenology and other interdisciplinary frameworks. The project to position and narrate the history of modern architecture in context was complicated and required masters. This new generation of “modern” architectural historians relied on a select group of modern masters to tell their very specific tales with mass-produced seminal textbooks originating from the most hallowed grounds of academia. Kenneth Frampton (Columbia), Colin Rowe (Cornell), Spiro Kostoff (Berkeley), Vincent Scully (Yale) and Stanford Anderson (MIT) each produced their unique contribution to the modern architectural canon. Each, in turn, also produced a part of a unified canonical vision of modern architecture history for generations to come. Their progeny would repeat and perform their texts and reify their texts. This small group of core texts remains the most widely taught, translated and reproduced globally. In each version, the figure of Le Corbusier looms large.

Corbu’s life and career were far less legendary, or fascinating, than its retelling. Corbu’s life and career were shaped largely by economics, politics and war. The demise of empires in the Orient enticed his orientalizing gaze. The dissolution of Renaissance ideals and the rise of the industrial

85 revolution allowed him to see decoration as evil, as Loos (1913) and others had done before him. In his seminal essay “Ornament and Crime” (Ornament und Verbrechen, 1908), Loos' intersection of the evils of architectural ornament with racialized bodies equated ornament with “crime,” “immorality,” and “primitivism” in a seminal essay that is still read today in introductory modern architecture courses to introduce how modernity positioned ornament and decoration within the modern idiom as something to be loathed and eliminated. Loos introduced his sense that ornament was inherently immoral by describing ornament as “degenerate,” its calling for modernity to suppress its immoral messages to regulate modern society through architectural design. One of Loos’ most salient examples of his racist beliefs appears in his analysis of the tattooing practices of Papua, New Guinea’s indigenous population. These tattoos he saw in the surface decorations of the architecture of Vienna in his day, which he labelled as “degenerate” as the Papuan tattoos. Seen though the gaze of Western man, Loos believed that the Papuan had not evolved to reach the moral and civilized standing of modern man, who, if tattooed, would either be considered a criminal or a degenerate, as well (Ibid).

The inherent racism of Loos’ essay and the merging of buildings with bodies have been theorized and discussed by many as a lasting legacy of the modern era (Long, 2009; Shafer, 2014, et. al.). Among the most articulate critiques of Loos’ racism is the work of Anne Anlin Cheng (2010). Cheng focuses on how Loos fetishizes the figure of Josephine Baker and her “black body” in projects like his fantasy house for her, whose centerpiece is a transparent swimming pool where Baker’s naked body could be gazed upon by her white guests. Therefore, aided by Cheng’s critique, the perception that early modern architects, like Loos, viewed Others through race and gender becomes more plausible and insidious when re-reading Loos' work with Cheng’s guidance, bearing witness to a tradition intertwining race and (Ibid).

Global politics, too, would set the stage for Le Corbusier to spread his version of the modern canon globally by receiving commissions, basing his work in mass production and concrete construction, as well as by being his own one-man self-promotional advertising team. By being active, aware and hungry for commissions from the intelligentsia, institutions and even fascist regimes, Corbu could produce the work needed to in order to progress his own vision. Along the way, Le Corbusier, like all architects, sought clients and commissions wherever they would materialize. As a result of his entrepreneurial quests, Corbu’s moral compass and allegiances were highly pliable, which in today’s context would be seen as dubious. Jerzy Soltan, former

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Corbu protégé and deceased Harvard professor, characterizes Le Corbusier in a very different light:

Most of the people who worked with Corbu had a love-hate relationship with him. A number of factors worked to create this ambivalent response. First, I already knew Le Corbusier well enough to realize that he was not easy to get along with. He was quick to anger and could be quite nasty. Second, there were political objections to him. After all, he did go to Vichy to sniff out the Pétain regime. Nothing came of it, but for those who want to see the worst, the fact remains. These same people forget that some twenty years earlier, Corbu had worked in the Soviet Union backed by the Trotsky group, the more enlightened, artistically receptive milieu in the Russian Revolution.

Soltan, 2011

Telling and Retelling the Corbusiern Saga

Telling and retelling Le Corbusier’s saga carries a number of risks. As new generations of scholars critique the master narrative and Le Corbusier, as a figure, new lenses can only disrupt and deconstruct the canon in time. The notion of modern architecture and the Corbusiern figure will lose its innocence along the way, as it already has. To go beyond a sense of loss and to use critique productively requires new modes of interrogation. Architecture is an instrument of domination. It organizes bodies in space with a varying degree of coercion, from what may appear as voluntary to the most extreme instances of violence. It does not invent racism, but it provides the spatial and territorial conditions for racism to exercise itself (Lambert, 2016).

Le Corbusier's name still creates controversy in some circles today. “Within days, a third book fiercely critical of Le Corbusier’s work hit French bookshelves. Titled ‘Le Corbusier, une froide vision du monde’ (A cold vision of the world), Marc Perelman’s essay slams the architect’s ‘totalitarian’ vision and lays the blame squarely on his teachings for wrecking historic city centers and creating segregated suburban communities” (Dodman, 2015). Dodman also cites Mark Antliff, the author of Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture in France (2007), writing, “Le Corbusier echoed the likes of Pierre Winter and ’s Benito

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Mussolini in his frequent use of surgical metaphors. Thus, the architect and these fascists cast themselves as doctors whose radical urban and social transformations were designed to cure an ailing body politic,” he said, adding that Le Corbusier’s talk of “social hygiene” and his derogatory references to nomadic peoples such as Roma found a ready audience in fascist circles (Dodman, 2015).

Le Corbusier: The Flawed Figure

In the interviews conducted in this project, a number of open-ended questions were asked alongside more specific ones. One question concerned how each interviewees’ own relationship with Le Corbusier had been formed. How had each of these people come to know Le Corbusier personally? More often than not these answers became very personal very quickly. In one case an interviewee had grown up literally overlooking a Le Corbusier project from his childhood home. For this subject, it was only natural that a life devoted to Le Corbusier’s legacy would result. Befriending the local priest who had championed Le Corbusier in the community, this subject grew up watching this priest defend one of Corbu’s controversial buildings and created a personal connection to Le Corbusier as a spectral presence that he carried with him into his adult life (Interview G, 2017).

Others, who may have grown up in the shadow of Le Corbusier or had been employed to maintain his legacy, spoke of acquiring a sense of belonging that came along with the privilege of their position (Interview B, 2017). As one staff member of Fondation Le Corbusier explained, he was neither an architect nor an architectural historian but after working daily in a Le Corbusier villa over a number of years, he had come to appreciate Le Corbusier’s “humanity” by “living in” a Le Corbusier house. His experience taught him to love and respect the modern master. The space, light and “humanity” that the house celebrated continued to amaze him. Likewise, when asked about recent controversial texts that systemically called out Le Corbusier as a Nazi sympathizer, this staff member sadly lamented that whom this claim really hurt the most were those who lived and worked in Le Corbusier buildings, particularly the large housing blocks in Marseille and elsewhere (Interview E, 2017).

Ironically, in roughly half of the interviews the controversial books came up in asides. These texts had been a shock to the French establishment and a number of exhibitions of Le

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Corbusier’s work erupted in demonstrations. In addition to the texts, there was much to read on the internet. However, almost all interviewees discounted these works as reactionary, sensational and far too easy as a thesis. A number of interviewees, when faced with the ugly realization that Le Corbusier had been a Nazi sympathizer, eloquently explained the real problem appeared in the Unites – the mass housing projects Le Corbusier built in Marseille, Firminy and elsewhere. As one interviewee explained, the residents of these experimental housing projects had strong communities and were proud to live in Le Corbusier projects. The idea that they were now living in Nazi architecture was very hard for them to contend with. While the storm from these three books has blown over, the damage has been done. And, as one interviewee explained, it is well known that, “Le Corbusier was very politically naïve,” and inasmuch he had been unfairly persecuted (Interview E, 2017).

Le Corbusier’s First Story Tellers

Kenneth Frampton, author of the first “critical” history of modern architecture, steeped his interpretation of Le Corbusier's oeuvre in the Frankfurt School critical theory and phenomenology. He reframed Corbu within an intellectual milieu that included ideas borrowed from Adorno, Benjamin, Heidigger and others to situate Corbu in the greater modern project as something and somebody more than a mere modern architect of note. Corbu was central to the story of modernity. Le Corbusier remains foundational, as do his villas, his mid-career institutional work and his later spiritually infused work in the Global South. Others also continue to centralize Corbu as a figure, and the modern canon is told and retold in different forms and shapes. The effect of this telling and retelling is that all other stories and narratives continue to be erased and the grand narrative continues. A new generation of historians now sees this phenomenon of critiquing Corbu as an essential method in architectural pedagogy. But still Corbu’s centrality remains, despite the criticism. Attempts to rewrite the canon from a global perspective, or to arrange the history of modern architecture thematically to displace the Western narrative have been unsuccessful (Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, 2007; Bresnahan, Devine, Nay, Shailer and Whyte, 2012)…the canon remains intact, with Le Corbusier at its helm.

The postwar, faceless and functional International style is rooted in the over-simplification of the complex beginning of the Modern Movement. This tendency can be traced to HR Hitchcock and ’s 1932

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exhibition, ‘The International Style,’ held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which excluded all architects who were not engaged with finite, reductive, white or glass cubes. The nineteenth-century steel pioneers, alongside constructivism, expressionism, futurism, naturalism and plasticism were all suppressed.

Rogers in Castle, 21

Indeed, Le Corbusier and others whose work fit the International Style paradigm and aesthetic seemed to be pursuing the same goals, arriving at the same formal conclusions and were producing cohesive evidence of a unified modern movement, which, in turn, produced the canon, which we still teach today. This unified and universalizing frame was presented to the Western world as an ideal system for making architecture in the modern age, and for making architects. Currently, thirty-five states require that architects hold a degree in architecture from one of the 122 schools of architecture accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) (United States Department of Labor, 2018).

This ideology is still central to how architecture is taught and architects are produced. Most importantly, the International Style had been formalized for the public in an exhibition at the MOMA in New York City. The exhibition’s accompanying text would insure that Le Corbusier would be seated within the canon of modernist iconography eternally. The term, “International Style” was ironically originally applied to a small idiosyncratic collection of early modernist architecture from the 1920s and 1930s in Europe. This architecture could be characterized as white cubes devoid of much context and seemingly adhering to a universal set of formal, social and technological rules and principles that revered machines, abhorred decoration and appeared rational and sterile to the outside world. This collection of white cubes would later be seen as the logical by-products of the universalizing methods, practice and ideologies of the Bauhaus that would spread globally as a system for rapid construction and ideological unity, thus forming the basis of the modernist canon. The International Style was coined to categorize and homogenize work that seemed to appear as a spontaneous reaction to new technologies, ideologies and social values associated with modernity without precedent. It would visualize a revolution.

The language of International Style modernity was seductively rational, reductive and abstract. It was therefore characteristically white – both formally and ideologically. It was a remedy for

90 incivility and primitivism. Le Corbusier explained, “We are tired of decor, what we need is a good visual laxative! Bare walls, total simplicity, that is how to restore the visual sense” (Boudon, 9). The apparition of these seemingly benign white boxes in the grand exhibition hall in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) was a sign that we had achieved modernity architecturally, in Europe at least. The exhibition presented modernity as a fait accompli – a neatly packaged and ready to consume system – ready to reproduce and teach. Philip Johnson, noted architect and Harvard-educated socialite, curated the exhibition along with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, who was the primary author of the catalog.

Hitchcock writes, “In writing on modern architecture some few years ago it was possible to accept that the individualists of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, who first broke consciously with the nominal discipline of the revivals, established tentatively a New Tradition, (Hitchcock, 24) The International Style quickly became the definitive form-giving reality for the canonization of the work of modernist icons like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and others” (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1966). The canonical foundation for this “new tradition” entered the academy shortly thereafter fueled by publications and a growing interest in architecture on campuses, in society and globally. This exhibit would also lay the groundwork for how modernity would be framed in the future from a very specific temporality. Le Corbusier’s collection of early modern villas would become the model for how to teach the modern canon. These instructional models are still studied, copied and reproduced today, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to . This formal replication of Le Corbusier’s systems, methods and forms also carry embedded lessons and their past lives are not innocent.

Manufacturing the Corbusiern Self

In Richards’ book, Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (2003), he retraces Le Corbusier’s career from phase to phase to uncover how Le Corbusier’s public and private personas could be so different. Simon’s text, as well as many others, often strays into this territory – looking for deeper meaning in Corbu’s self-contradiction and paradox as a symbolic representation of modernity's own inherent paradoxes. For a man who preached a gospel of high-rise modern towers, yet found human solace in his tiny twelve-foot by twelve-foot “cabanon,” Corbu was bound up in contradictions and complexities, rather than purity and simplicity. Simon, in

91 particular, takes up the task of “interpreting” the massive catalog of raw material that remains as Corbu’s material legacy, which we are still combing through in his massive archive of work, sketchbooks and writing. Simon unpacks Le Corbusier’s method in Corbu’s sketches and poems – a world where images of bulls, for example, project Le Corbusier’s “self-awareness” and his “violently aggressive behavior towards authority” (Simon, 151). The project of unpacking Le Corbusier as a figure continues to tempt, lure and contradict scholarly knowledge about the architect.

So many of the first modern architectural historians (Cohen 2009, 2008; Curtis 1982; Frampton, 2001,1997) began their own projects to shape the modern canon just as postmodernity was replacing modernity ideologically and culturally as a project, with an underlying goal to approach the canon from a new point of view with criticality as a method. These were uncomfortable times. Academic departments bickered, personalities collided and architecture and design theorists proliferated. In the 1980s and early 1990s deconstructing the canon was the central project. The end result is that a few decades later modern architecture could now be framed as a historical project situated in the past. Another new generation of modern architecture historians embraced modernity’s fragmented and pluralistic frameworks as the movement was waning and postmodernity was waxing, to allow new forms of political and regional subjectivity to inflect the new canon.

Kenneth Frampton retold his version of the history of modern architecture using a postmodern mash-up of techno-determinism and critical theory. He drew on unifying themes rooted in discarding a unified historical chronology to deconstruct modernity as a linear project shaped largely by Benjaminian logic (Frampton, 1997). Colin Rowe, the iconic architectural theorist and architectural educator who shaped Cornell’s architecture program and paved the way for the emergent canon and practice of in the 1970s, may have strayed the farthest by re-reading the canonical modern villas of Le Corbusier using deconstructive interpretations of modernist architecture as versions between baroque sensibilities. He also argued that modernism was not quite so modern after all (Rowe, 1982).

However, in each of these interpretive histories the end result is that Le Corbusier is further centralized as the essentialized modern figure within a particular foundational modern pedagogy. Spiro Kostoff may have come the closest to deconstructing the Corbusiern canon by telling the

92 history of modern architecture with a focus on the evolution of human urban occupation as the central theme as method – a method for which there were few celebrity architects or central figures (1995). Dianne Ghirardo, a strong voice among her male architectural counterparts, tried to explain how these iconic white, male historians framed the modern canon. She did this in her far less influential, counter-hegemonic text, Architecture after Modernism (1996).

William Curtis articulates a particularly cogent version of what amounts to a traditional art-historical position in his Modern Architecture Since 1900. Curtis insists on ‘a certain focused interest on questions of form and meaning.’ He selects what he believes to be the masterpieces of modern architecture. ‘I make no apologies for concentrating on buildings of high visual and intellectual quality’ and sets out to write ‘a balanced, readable overall view of modern architecture from its beginnings until the recent past.’ To Curtis, balance implies exorcizing political, social, and ideological considerations of the sort that he finds in the versions of history offered by Kenneth Frampton (1997) or Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co (1979), who ‘emphasized ideology at the expense of other matters.’ This critical position – which is by far the dominant one in America, at most admits only passing reference to any larger cultural, political, and social considerations.

Ghirardo 1996, 111

Manufacturing Hegemony: The Modern Canon

Le Corbusier’s life and figuration became interwoven with the modern canon itself. Texts like Adolf Loos & Le Corbusier: Raumplan versus Plan libre (Risselada and Colomina, 2013) and The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Rowe, 1982) demonstrate how to teach Corbusiern formal methods and how to position the work of Le Corbusier, in particular, within the ideological foundation of modern architecture as idealized universal fantasies that can be taught.

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It is Corbu’s later urban design work that often receives the most vitriolic criticism, with just cause. His large-scale housing projects scattered across Europe presented a particularly insidious view of what modernity could produce. Projects like the Radiant Farmhouse (1935) in which, “Herculean peasants listen to a radio cantilevered from an I-beam” (Jencks, 126) with animal looming in the background of the interior of a . These presented a vision of modernity that is displacing, dehumanizing and a dangerous fiction. In this case a fiction that has come true – corporatized mass farming in service of the urban plan and the urban planners. As Corbu aged and the commissions for villas dried up, he turned his attention to imagining a world far more audacious than that he had represented in his innocent little villas. Anne Anline Cheng writes, “History tells us that these ideal cities – these giant machines – finally failed to address the classed, raced, and gendered realities embedded behind urban developments in America. And Le Corbusier, himself, has been justifiably criticized for his fascination with Harlem without understanding its socioeconomic conditions” (Cheng 2010, 89). But to begin to understand and express how Le Corbusier still haunts the architectural imaginary through his particular hegemonic, institutionalized and performed toehold on both architectural pedagogies and practices requires an understanding of how Le Corbusier is situated within modern architectural history as a dominant figure and force.

Here, for once, is an indisputable founding father and founding moment: Le Corbusier, suffering from poor eyesight since childhood, loses much of the sight in one eye in an accident in 1918. Contemporary lens grinding technology dictates a thick round lens and a robust circular frame. The result becomes an answer to the question “Who is the modern architect?” so tenacious that for decades it managed to stave off the arrival of frameless eyeglasses and contact lenses on the architectural scene. No other object in the modern architect’s tool kit exhibits greater staying power, surviving well beyond the moment when productive modern smoke became postmodern air pollution.

Schnapp, 18

For those gazing into the world of architectural education from outside, it must seem implausible that this one figure could ever have been chosen to embody a pedagogical system. However, the

94 vast literature and obsessive critiques, adorations, and re-evaluations of Corbu’s forms, methods and ideologies are all too accessible and so easily teachable. The symbolic content of the white cube and its emptiness provide an open-ended framework and is used describe an abstract formal approach to making architecture that becomes the modern fantasy embodied. Empty shells filled with only pure abstraction and reason can only produce universalized modern subjects.

The literature of Le Corbusier’s life and the methods are widely varied and often focus more on Corbu’s mysterious inner life than his actual buildings. Authors like Charles Jencks (Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, 1973), Simon Richards (Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self, 2003) and more recently Niklas Maak (Le Corbusier, the Architect on the Beach, 2011) each present a tragic construction of Corbu that is dependent upon enshrining him as a tragic character for whom we should feel sympathy and for whom transgressions should be permitted. “The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns” (Rybczynski, 2008).

Throughout his long career, Le Corbusier was mainly associated with the Unité d’habitation and the Ronchamp church, as well as with the acerbic remarks for which he was never at a loss. As the years passed, his comments would take on and increasingly melancholic tone. In the 1920’s, he was a manufacturer, a painter – even if he reckoned he had been ‘rejected by professional painters’ – a critic and an essayist, a reporter and a decorator. The well-rounded personality that he presented to the public was forever being reinvented.

Cohen 2009, 13

However, whether blameless or innocent, Le Corbusier’s impact on the trajectory of contemporary architecture has been profound and its material results can be seen in North America and globally with more detriment than good as his lasting legacy, manifest through his influence on Others. Much of what was accomplished by Corbu was accomplished, in part, because of what happened over the years in his small studio in Paris. He forged a modern method for mass-producing universal design strategies that were equally humanistic and authoritarian. His Paris atelier would serve as the training ground and career launching pad for hundreds of

95 modern architects, many of whom would become significant contributors to the expansion of the modern idiom as a professors and iconic industry leaders after working in Corbu’s atelier.

Corbu’s famous imprint remains on many places in the world as a result of his systematic tutorship and “influence” of a generation of modern architects in Europe and beyond. These include Mario Botta from Switzerland, Juan O’Gorman from Mexico, Kenzo Tange from Japan, and many others who would seek out a place in Corbu’s historical narrative. These non-Western architects would bring home Le Corbusier’s civilizing methods of rationalized and poetic modernity back to Japan, Mexico and India. Le Corbusier’s unassuming Paris studio would also include women such as Charlotte Pierrand, who was treated as an integral member of his staff according to her historians. Architectural historian, Flora Samuel, has even argued that Le Corbusier was actually a progressive feminist if you analyze his relationships with women (Samuel, 2004). On the other hand, Aaron Betsky wrote about Le Corbusier as a “sexist” (2013).

The myths of the Bauhaus and the figure of Le Corbusier as the ultimate rogue modern figure, still linger in the academy as ideals and with them, the legacies of patriarchy, sexism, classism and colonialism are carried forward. Le Corbusier’s thoughts, systems and forms and are still taught, theorized and canonized through very specific pedagogies and practices, to train students to emulate his forms, ideologies and studio methodologies. The narratives and myths of how this canon survives reaffirm the centrality of the studio master, which provides an ever-present opening for Corbu to enter as pedagogy.

James Kalb points out, “...Le Corbusier (became) a natural ally of the masters of the modern world. He wanted to turn everything into a rational machine, and a rational machine is easy for those in power to understand and control. When he died in 1965, the Soviets said, “modern architecture has lost its greatest master,” while President Johnson commented, “his influence was universal and his works are invested with a permanent quality possessed by those of very few artists in our history.” Leonid Brezhnev and Lyndon Johnson may not have known much about art, but they knew what they had reason to like (Kalb, 2016).

Le Corbusier is difficult to get a hold on. He’s still admired, even worshipped, in architectural circles, but practically forgotten everywhere else. He’s arguably had more of an influence on the form of the modern world than any other architect – you could even argue there was no modern

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world before Le Corbusier – but stop someone on the street and ask them to name one of his buildings and you’re unlikely to get a correct answer. And if people have heard of him, it’s usually in the context of failed 1960s housing estates.

Rose, 2008

However, from those of us on the inside of architectural academia and the industry of scholarly production, Le Corbusier is not a man, but a deity within a pedagogical system. A particular embodied pedagogical system necessary for producing standardized subject to embody efficient Fordist manufacturing ideologies and to reify abstract methods and aesthetics. Le Corbusier is a much-needed specter, needed to fulfill a white fantasy and white desire. The desire is to build a career where independent thinking, personal exploration and shamelessly heroic ideas and cataclysmic failures shaped around the phantasm of Le Corbusier, the figure, can be performed in perpetuity.

Conclusion

Jean Lois Cohen (2012) undertook the most recent attempt to resituate the modern canon. He provides valuable insight into both the desire to produce resistance to Le Corbusier’s dominance as well as evidence of the impossibility of unseating his dominance as a project. Cohen’s book updates the canonical texts of William Curtis, Kenneth Frampton and others, whose texts remain the most widely used texts in architectural education today.

Opening Jean-Louis Cohen’s textbook, the reader is immediately struck by a two-page close-up image of Le Corbusier’s outstretched hand gesturing toward a model of his housing plan for the masses (, 1913), godlike from above. The image requires no titles or description. Cohen understands that his readers will recognize and acknowledge the invisible hand of Le Corbusier as the one that steers the history of modern architecture. Cohen’s book attempts to deconstruct the master narrative by reducing the history of architecture to thematic episodes with titles like “North American Modernities, Architectural Education in Turmoil” and other chapter titles that appear to be purposely depopulated by modern masters. Only one chapter has Le Corbusier in its title. If anything, Le Corbusier is framed as a colonizer and brutalist in Cohen’s revisionist text. Cohen expounds on how Corbusiern models have wreaked havoc in , India

97 and the Americas. He refers to “late Corbusiernism” (2012, 329) as a kind of post-colonial disease. However, Le Corbusier’s presence still haunts each and very chapter in this text, even when he is being chastised. When Cohen discusses the work of Tadao Ando, for example, he cannot fail to mention how Ando is working within a “Corbusiern” paradigm (Ibid, 462). The master narrative remains.

The list of texts, scholars, critics and general “haters” of modern architecture continues to grow. The Failure of Modern Architecture (1976) by Brent C. Brolin points out modernity’s universal failure as a project armed with a body of built evidence. While Bolin easily critiques modern planning methods, identifies failed social housing projects and tackles other low-hanging fruit, he does not acknowledge modern architecture’s many successes such as responding to needs for rapid postwar construction or its many iconic monuments that people do like or modern architecture’s links to the particular social histories of time and place. Palm Springs’ houses in the 1950s, Googie diners in Los Angeles and the modernist “White City” of Tel Aviv all are richly inscribed in social, as well as architectural histories. However, it is modernity’s universality that becomes the problem. “The New Architecture of the postwar period was based on earlier achievements, but it tended to go beyond local and national issues, aiming at the universal” (Jokilehto, 104).

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Chapter 4 Performing Le Corbusier in the Studio Introduction

The architecture studio is the center of architectural student life. While professional programs in architecture require a wide range of support courses, the centrality of the architecture studio as a core experience remains a fixture in architectural pedagogy and practice worldwide. Non-studio based courses may include technical courses like structures and building materials, as well as liberal arts courses like architectural history and theory as well other typical university breadth requirements, but to most students only their studio truly matters and defines them as subjects.

The key difference between architecture training and other fields is how courses are positioned in architecture curricula. The architecture student experience is in a unique pedagogical setting where all aspects of their education, personal growth and identities are drawn into play. The architecture studio is worth many more credits than other courses, and requires much more time and effort. Studio work consists of physical projects that mimic the design process in real world situations, although design problems are often fantasized to provoke abstract thought. Upper year studio projects may involve designing a building in a physical site. However, first year projects may emphasize skills such as abstraction and design conceptualization, and rely on a series of collages, analysis sketches or other less building-centered activities to introduce the process of making architecture at a more rudimentary level.

But what is it that links a discussion of the studio experience to a critique of Le Corbusier? The modern project has been theorized, derided, championed and re-contextualized ad nauseum over the past several decades, as has the work and intellectual legacy of Le Corbusier. It has not, however, been overtly suggested that these separate subjects under critique are intertwined systematically. Nor has it been postulated that the studio system and the omnipresence of Le Corbusier reproduce a particular hegemonic and colonial regime to maintain race, class and privilege through architecture knowledge production and material practice. Le Corbusier somehow remains sacrosanct and innocent. What is it in the telling and retelling of the Le Corbusier as an embodied master narrative that transforms so clearly that is so troubling? Why do we still train students using Le Corbusier to perform as Le Corbusier?

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Disability Studies and Phenomenological Approaches

In this chapter, the work of Tanya Titchkosky and Rod Michalko is used as a methodological model for unpacking how the multi-tiered experience of the architecture studio unfolds phenomenologically and experientially (Michalko, 2002; Michalko and Titchkosky, 2012; Titchkosky, 2011). Their methods uncover how very particular subjects and subjectivities are produced according to an a priori script and set of conditions and practices. While their goal is to unpack the social production of disability, their methods translate well to describe how subjects and subjectivities are produced in the studio as a socio-spatial experience.

Titchkosky and Michalko use sociological phenomenology in their work to understand how disability is produced, which includes analysis about how disability appears in classrooms and learning environments (2012). The apparition of disability appears in the form of socially produced preconceptions, invisible barriers, absent bodies and issues of accessibility as well as in specific educational practices that reproduce ablest norms. Titchkosky has described disability as a space of cultural practice done by and to people in her courses. To build upon Titchkosky’s argument, disabled bodies are spatially and phenomenologically co-constructed through a set of a priori conditions often made manifest through architectural space.

Titchkosky has also examined how the bureaucratization of “access” as a means to produce disability has affected conceptualizations of disability that bear on architectural thought production and practice. For example, in The Question of Access (2011) Titchkosky’s phenomenological methodology allows readers to critically question their positionality relative to disability and non-disability using “access” as framework for a much broader critique of disability as a social product and as a methodology for a more fulsome analysis of disability. This approach to disability studies pays particular attention to the spaces and pre-conditions intentionally designed to produce disability as a “problem” as well.

The much-needed reckoning embedded in the methodologies of Davis, Imrie, Michalko, Jos, Titchkosky, et. al. are intended to critique disability as a social product manufactured as experience in material space. Inasmuch, the field of disability studies and Le Corbusier’s legacy have been taken up in disability studies using one very particular aspect of Le Corbusier’s work,

100 the “,” as a methodology for re-imagining how a-typical bodies and modern architectural space could productively co-exist.

Le Corbusier was obsessed with human proportions and the logic of mathematics, order and rationalism. In his “Modulor” system, he proposed to reinvent construction standards by using a re-imagined ideal human figure as a proportional system centered on human spatial experience, rather than an ideal human body. In much of Le Corbusier’s later institutional work, the “Modulor” would dominate his thinking, both formally and conceptually. The merger of modern space and corporeal experience that the “Modulor Man” would come to represent and provide a very specific means for disability studies to engage in conversation about how architecture and accessibility could be seen less as a problem, and more as a way to re-imagine the normative body as an opportunity. “The famous Modulor Man was originally based on the height of the average Frenchman (1.75 metres, or 5 feet 9 inches) but was later increased to a more strapping 1.83 metres (6 feet)…” (Slessor, 2014). By imaging how the “Modulor Man” could be used to reimagine architectural space the normative body could be re-imagined.

Architectural theorists like Jos Boys (2014) and Rob Imrie (2017) look towards Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man” as a method to challenge universal modernism, ableist ideologies and as a means to reconceptualize the role of the normative human body. Lennard Davis (1995) has been foundational in questioning the social construction of “normalcy” by situating bodies in space to understand how the disabled body is produced in tandem with the built environment. These scholars would use Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man” to provide a useful inroad to begin discussing the intersections of disability studies and architectural thought as a positive and productive legacy of Le Corbusier’s oeuvre and influence. Corbu’s “Modular Man” became the means to acknowledge how the a-typical body could be a positive component for shaping modern space. For example, Jos Boys takes up this argument in clear, material terms when she ponders how the famous ramp in Le Corbusier’s seminal Villa Savoye, when juxtaposed against his spiral stair in the same space, becomes a material tool to re-imagine how the presence of a wheelchair could become a welcome, enriching, presence, rather than a hindrance (2014: 70).

Jos’ argument tracks how Corbu’s early conception of the body as a “machine” changed over time, in his own mond, following the invention of the Modulor, to produce architecture that was more “self-conscious” and “embodied” (Imrie, 2017: 22-32). By resituating the Corbusiern

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“Modulor Man” within disability studies as a critique of the disabling views of the non- normative body, Le Corbusier’s “Modular Man” was able to reinvigorate how the abilities of users and the built environment might deconstruct normalcy and disability together.

…There is an internalized, almost unconscious assumption of able- bodiedness in art and architecture theory and praxis – if the assumption becomes “disrupted” by non-normative corporeal forms, then these forms have historically been rejected, and marked as pathological, diseased, and “other.”

Cachia, 253

If the modern built environment is based on an ableist ideology, then designing for an a-typical body, as Imnrie and Hall (2001) explain, serves to “highlight the dualities of architectural space” rather than center the idealized universal body. This notion is at the core of how many disability scholars have begun to re-frame Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man” and his influence on Others.

Manufacturing Whiteness in the Studio

Le Corbusier also fits a pre-established pedagogical norm in studio that is open to and complicit in the same processes that took place at UNESCO in enshrining Le Corbusier on the World Heritage stage. The studio system produces whiteness and requires Le Corbusier to persist. Architecture is intrinsically white, rather than anti-racist, race neutral or even color blind. The studio system could be blamed for this, as can Le Corbusier, for dominating the methods, forms and imaginaries that dominate the studio system though his omnipresent influence.

To tease out Le Corbusier’s figuration in studio pedagogy, whiteness provides a clear critical framework to understand Le Corbusier from a performative perspective. Intersecting performativity, Le Corbusier and whiteness in the studio is a method that permits seeing Le Corbusier as a figure through which whiteness can be achieved through a particular mode of education within the studio system.

Design teaching in architecture schools often begins with the cube as its first topic. The same on all sides, the cube appears neutral, without

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hierarchies. Its only direction that of gravity, it seems to be free from symbolic content or technical constraints. It is white, pure, available yet autonomous, waiting to be filled or excavated. Like all designed forms, this one is the materialization of an ideology...

Stanton, 10

This imaginary remains in place today when each architecture student encounters their first studio assignment, or cube problem, or is writing their application essay for entry into the world of professional architectural education. As Stanton continues, “Curriculum is presented in abstract problems permitting certain limited ‘moves,’ ensuring an attractive product almost guaranteed by the rules, but at the same time implying an ethos of ‘design as a game that avoids the messy issues that face a troubled discipline” (Stanton, 31). Elijah Anderson (2015), Carla Jackson Bell (2015), Anne Anlin Cheng (2010), Mabel Wilson (2012), et. al. critique architecture using race as a critical methodology, but this remains a marginal practice in academia.

The modern project reached its zenith with the canonical work of the International Style masters in the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the cube matured and the public was taught to learn to love modernism, despite its gut instincts to be repulsed. And it is right to teach this key period in history as the foundational phase of International Style high modernism as a pedagogical system – as architectural history had interpreted it – both materially and as an imaginary.

Visually, the plain white boxes associated with the early modern movement – with their flat roofs, walls constructed out of concrete block with , and their steel strip windows – were a distinct stylistic break from the load-bearing masonry and wood buildings of the past. They were also the visual starting point for subsequent developments, as reflected in many buildings and building typologies that, with their design simplicity, lack of ornament, spatial clarity, new ways of using materials, and abundance of light pouring though large windows, became in many people's minds synonymous with modern architecture.

Prudon, 4

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Furthermore, beyond the formal neutrality of the white cube, the white cube produces and reproduces a certain ideological that is not neutral at all. “The construction of race and identity in and through space is a process and that this process takes place at multiple scales, from an individual body (with it psychological and sensory perception of internal and external and of bodily boundaries), to an urban district, to the nation state and its boundaries with other nations” (Hise, 556). This performance can be repeated again and again, inter-generationally, and now transnationally through global architecture practiced on a planetary scale. By subjecting these practices, imaginaries and pedagogies to a systemic and institutional critique using whiteness as a framework, a discussion about how race, space, power and privilege might be destabilized and resituated can result. A different kind of spatiality might be enacted and a methodology to deconstruct and reframe how raced, classed and gendered imaginaries are forged through pedagogy might be instilled along the way.

Race

How do issues like race appear in the “unconscious pedagogy” of studio as Donald Schön, the foremost scholar on design studio pedagogy, has described it? What modern memories haunt the studio’s methods and affects nearly a century later? The pedagogical canon of modern architecture reveals itself to the student as both a social construct and as a particular set of narratives shaped by the demands to perform a particularly nuanced set of rituals and attitudes, both consciously and not, which will produce a specific subjectivity and a lingering desire to repeat automatically. As the editors of The Discipline of Architecture (Piotrowski and Robinson, 2001) write, “One of the most important aspects (of the discussion of architecture as a discipline) is the existing configuration of the field of architecture and how the knowledge production related to this configuration – what subjects are central to the field, how it ought to be configured, and how it should be structured” (xi).

The answer to these questions is that it may be perceptual. It may be in the imaginary of the architect who remains enshrined in a pedagogical system that disallows other subjectivities to enter to preserve the sanctity of a very particular hegemonic system that depends upon race, class and gender to survive, using figures like Le Corbusier to perpetuate these imaginaries. The universal subject that modern architecture has always described and desired is a white, male,

104 upper-class body that is situated in a very particular genealogical system of knowledge. As one of the few who teach about race in a design school, Dianne Harris, stated:

Students also may feel ill-prepared to engage in conversations about race since they’ve likely been asked to do so little of it in the years leading up to their (graduate) work. Moreover, the vast majority of those engaged in (and especially leading) professional practice in the United States are white. The vast majority of teaching faculty in design schools in the United States are categorized as white. The vast majority of students in professional schools of architecture and landscape architecture in the United States are white. Their white privilege allows them the freedom to ignore racism, to see it as something that is outside the realm of professional practice, and even (and more perniciously) to imagine that we now live in a so-called post-racial society.

Harris, 2013

One of the earliest design scholars to actively take up race, place and design as a subject matter in her teaching was Dianne Harris at the University of Illinois. Unlike what is seen in the quote above, Harris describes how the suburban tract home became the vehicle for Others to achieve whiteness through architecture as a racial and spatial project that was designed intentional and devoid of Corbusier’s idealized and racialized rhetoric (2013). In her case, it was her Jewish parents’ home in the 1950s Los Angeles suburbs that provided the example for how a particular kind of performed whiteness could be designed as an architectural project. The trope of the suburban tract home gave Harris the means to deconstruct how a house could force racial assimilation tied to aesthetic preconceptions, hygiene standards and social performativity – all controlled by the watchful gaze of an empowered suburban neighborhood. Material practices from mowing lawns to performing for others before the plate glass window of the living room became spaces where whiteness was taught and experienced. Harris’ thesis is further explored in other texts such as critiquing how the white, colonial gaze frames the vernacular in architecture as well (2006).

Our relationship with race in the studio, like much of life, is one shaped by benign ignorance manufactured from a white vantage point to preserve whiteness. Humans have not been on the

105 earth long enough to evolve into separate species. In fact, we are among the most genetically similar of species on earth. The external characteristics such as skin color that we use to define race are not reliable indicators of internal variation between any two people. “… the racial/ethnic identity of an individual does not reflect a fixed biologic quantity internal to the study subject, but rather a complex and historically contingent set of social relations that exist external to the study subject” (Kaufman and Cooper, 2001).

While we may be closer to challenging the belief in race as biology, the investment in maintaining a social and economic system that depends upon the artifice of race continues to organize key institutions along racialized lines in the studio as well. The education, practices and production of architects is no different. “Today the race concept is more problematic than ever before…and racial identities also seem to be less solid and ineffable than they did in previous ages. While racial identity remains a major component of individuality and group recognition, it partakes of a certain flexibility and fungibility that was formerly rare” (Winant, 987). Additionally, while many definitions of race exist, most scholars agree that race is a socially constructed category. (Omi & Winant,1994; Haney-López, 2000; Solórzano and Yosso, 2002; et. al.) and that it is critical to take up in pedagogical projects that seek equity and social justice.

We understand ‘race’ to be a constructed category of difference, where phenotypal, cultural, linguistic, and/or other specific characteristics are ascribed to designated groups; these groups are accordingly rendered the subjects of systemic and sustained discriminatory ideas and practices. Racism is the body of ideas and practices that establishes, maintains, and perpetuates such categories of difference, sustained through multiple, varied, and contextually specific social, political, and economic .

Bakan and Dua, 6

Ruth Frankenberg (1993), Richard Dyer (1997) and bell hooks (1992) are among those who recognize that whiteness is not monolithic and is practiced differently in different spaces, and also fluctuates according to class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. The analysis needed is intersectional and multi-tiered. Furthermore, as bell hooks has argued whiteness needs to be critiqued, but from an altogether different angle than the white norm. A key feature of Dyer’s

106 scholarship is his clear indication of the pervasiveness of whiteness, itself, based on the constructions of normativity (1997, 41).

References to whiteness as being ‘marked’ posit whiteness as both a conscious and an unconscious way of being in race. It needs to be noted that whiteness is only (strategically) unmarked to those relationally positioned as white. It is often painfully, clearly marked to those that are positioned as non-white.

Salter, 31

In Ralph Erskine’s “Special Kind of Arrogance: Erskine's White Sweden” the overwhelming whiteness of Erskine, his practice and his products are critiqued simultaneously. The white pedagogy of the Scandinavian university where the paper’s author teaches architecture, the whiteness of the student body and even the whiteness of the walls are seen as being co-produced within the literal and phenomenological space of whiteness as a pedagogy (Ray and Werner 2014). “The place where I am working, the Department of Art History at Stockholm University, must be among the whitest imaginable. All of the professors are white, so are most of the staff and the students. White is also the color of most of our offices, the corridors, the lectures halls, and the doors we hide behind” (294).

What we need is to rethink how history has been constructed as a series of interlinked ideas, and how history has been framed as “a totalizing discourse” based on the white lie that there is a singular “universal history” that governs architectural thought. “Challenging racial inequality can therefore be interpreted as trying to upset a natural order” (Pease 108). Le Corbusier’s interpretations of how he saw race reproduced themselves later in sketches, public housing projects and how he would define architectural practice as being white. Le Corbusier’s failure to grasp his own complicity in all of the aforementioned is reflected in the following quote:

Le Corbusier found it ironic that American modernity coexisted with segregation because racism seemed to contradict the urban environment’s spirit of national progress. He could not comprehend that design in a democratic nation could exclude some citizens from the cultures and spaces of modernity. But the inequities of US cityscapes were not a design

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flaw as Le Corbusier believed; in fact, architectural and urban aesthetics were designed to enforce de jure and de facto segregation. Yet, because the aesthetic field seemed separate from the social realm, aesthetics was not considered part of social problems but rather an applicable solution for them. Le Corbusier, like turn-of-the-century reformists, politicians, academics, and artists, believed that civic-minded aesthetics could provide relief from racial violence, class tension, and political crises.

Shön, 440-1

Master-Slave Dialectics in the Studio

In Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (1968), he revises the master-slave dialectic presented by Hegel to suggest that the white master’s dominance over black slaves in Africa and Europe was much greater than previously considered. Fanon writes, “I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For Hegel, there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (1967, 220). This same dynamic, when performed in the architecture studio, produces a very particular imaginary that is carried forward later beyond the sanctity of the studio into a world of clients, the public and spaces of social interaction where architecture matters most. Contextually, the critique presented in this study of what happens in the studio, as a site of subject formation, has much broader implications. It calls for Gramsci (1971) and Fanon (1968) to assist. The language used to describe the inner workings of the studio are revealing, and accentuate that it is the student that is the by-product of this process, particularly when described by Schön.

The student tries to grasp the meaning of the master’s showing and telling and seeks to translate what is grasped into his or her own performance. Each such performance is an experiment which expresses the sense the student has made of what has been observed or heard and tests the means by which he or she translates that sense into the task of designing. In this sense, the student reflects-in-action… For both student and studio master, the instruction then becomes subject to the demand that it be translatable

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into action; indeed, into action of the sort the instructor had in mind. Moreover, such gaps are revealed in a context in which they can be filled, either through the student’s private experimenting, or through a dialogue (drawing and explaining) with the instructor.

Schön 1984, 6–7

While architectural studios appear in many different forms within professional architecture programs across the globe, there are a number of fundamental practices that appear universally in how studios are taught that need to be explained. A studio is not a lecture course, nor is it a lab. The architecture studio is more of a pedagogical experience that resembles apprenticeship. It requires students to spend long hours making models, producing drawings and other creative products alongside their peers with intermittent interruptions to present and critique work in the studio or in public to debate the merits of the student’s outcomes to learn the process of making architecture. In the studio, learning occurs experientially and informally. The daily activities of the studio include producing, discussing, critiquing and revising work to hone a process that requires students to constantly produce new work and to progress projects following the suggestions of a studio master who guides, but usually does not dictate, outcomes. Complex problems are introduced at the beginning of a term by the studio master, which then require individual creativity to solve using a process of producing work in the form of models, drawing, renderings, etc. shaped by the collective work of a group of peers.

Professional programs in architecture are accredited in almost every country. Successful completion of an accredited program is a prerequisite of licensure or induction into a professional regulatory body to attain licensure or use the title of architect. Accreditation means that, while there are many variations of how studios may be taught, there are standard expectations for technical and intellectual learning outcomes and professional capabilities. The studio remains central as the pedagogical experience where these expectations and skills come to bear.

A studio class might begin with the studio master posing a problem and defining what methods will be used to solve the problems. Using formal and informal methods, the studio master will then assist students to achieve their goals by critiquing student work as it is produced. A typical studio session will consist of an instructor or a team of instructors visiting each student at their

109 assigned workspace to check on their progress, make suggestions for improvement, and helping steer their individual process by analyzing the quality of their work and listening to their intentions. Individual “desk crits” are central to studio pedagogy. Students are also taught to learn from each other and observe the critiques of each other’s work and to value each other’s work.

Intermittently, formal critiques occur in studio as well. In formal critiques, students remove the work from their desks and workspaces and present it in public critique sessions to practice oral and graphic presentation skills, as well as to subject their work and their design processes to broader critiques, often with guest critics in attendance. After the critique, students return to their studios and revise their work according to suggestions brought up in critiques. Expectations are that new work will result and the student process will be advanced through more critique and defense. This process repeats itself throughout their education, and is one of many embedded skills that is taught through studio pedagogy that is more invisible than opaque.

Hierarchy and Studio Structure

Traditionally, Bachelor of Architecture programs and Master of Architecture programs require a year-long thesis, an extended studio course, to graduate. The traditional design studio thesis is slowly going away, as degree types transform to meet new student markets and fill employer needs which have been reshaped by the combined forces of digitization, globalization and consultative employment. The literature supporting this trend is found in pedagogical analyses (Brandon, 2002; Colomina, et. al., 2012; et. al.), as well as professional publications focusing on current trends in architectural practice (Hunter, 2012; et. al.).

It is perhaps no surprise that architectural practice has so far gone much further than many architecture schools to find new ways to operate within the changing realities of the construction industry and the world beyond. Practice has, after all, always had to survive in the marketplace and innovate to do so. The question now for existing architecture schools is what can they do to better prepare their graduates for this new type of life in practice. But there is also a bigger set of questions. Are architecture schools housed within the state-controlled university system really the best

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place to create the next generation of architects? Will their often, ossified structures allow enough flexibility to respond to the speed and scale of the changes in the outside world?

Hunter, 2012

However, a pedagogical system based on the centrality of a core studio remains a fixture in architectural pedagogy. Ultimately, the outcome of many years of studio is to become a licensed architect and to gain entry to an architecture office for an internship, registration and licensure. The use of the title “architect” is usually tied to registration with a professional organization and is often reliant on obtaining a professional university degree, completing some form of required internship and lastly passing an examination that is state regulated and results in licensure. There are many variations internationally, but the centrality of the architectural studio experience remains a constant.

There are hundreds of variations in how such courses are constructed, but each architectural studio course values process, individual experimentation and the evolution of the authoritative control of one’s own work taught as a part of an identity forming system. In a lecture at Yale in in 2015, architect, historian and theorist Leon Krier referred to Le Corbusier as his “first chosen master”. This realization should remind us that for Krier and others, Le Corbusier remains both vital and present in their own architectural identity as an ongoing presence (Krier, 2015).

The pedagogical standards and form of the architecture studio, as described, is well demonstrated in the following excepts from a recent syllabus from an MIT second year architecture studio. In this syllabus, the studio master (instructor) lays out a purposefully ambitious and ambiguous pedagogy based abstract design problems that are solved individually, but discussed, produced and critiqued as method to teach process.

By a series of initial short projects, students will be required to develop attitudes – spatial, contextual, structural, and phenomenological – toward the assigned design problems. By identifying and cataloguing these attitudes and intentions, students will develop a rigorous set of guidelines against which their proposals may be critiqued…The curriculum and evaluation methods

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will recognize design as a process, not a product, and constant evaluation and evolution of that process will be of paramount importance.

Turkel, 2005

The instructor of this particular studio also includes several readings and key buildings to analyze as an addendum in the syllabus. One architect, Le Corbuiser, dominates both categories. Turkel’s students in this course read Colin Rowe’s “Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1987), which analyzes the work of Le Corbusier as a central subject; Louis Kahn’s “The Value and Aim in Sketching” in Writings, Lectures, Interviews (1991); and lastly, Le Corbusier’s The Modular: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics (1971). Case studies analyzed include the Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier, 1929), the Villa Garches (Le Corbusier, 1927) and the Villa La Malcontenta (Andrea Palladio, 1560).

Studio and Process

Architectural pedagogy, as well as pedagogies in many other arts disciplines, rely on teaching methods to deliver a fixed set of values to establish a knowledge regime that relies on narrowly construed norms and desires masked by “learned” aesthetics and acquired “good taste” as a pedagogical outcome. Teaching “the ethos of mass production” as an aesthetic dominated by Europe and America (Woodham, 75) required a significant amount of intellectual and cultural labour. Desiring modernity, for most people, simply does not come easily. Modern aesthetics and mores take work and often, capital, to achieve. The modern project depended upon the deliberate teaching of a particular version of the Western canon through the adoration of a select set of dominant modern figures like Le Corbusier. These figures protect the hegemonic grip of architectural pedagogy as it was taught a century ago and guarantees that the expanding and morphological power structures tied to colonialism, property and space remain central in the built environment as it is practiced, taught, learned and performed. This requires a particular type of knowing and desire.

The ocular bias and visual hegemony in the art of architecture have never been more apparent than in the past thirty years, as a particular type of architecture aimed at a striking and memorable visual image has predominated. Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial

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experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising, of instant persuasion, and buildings have turned into image products detached from existential sincerity.

Palaasma, 19

In architectural education, there are a number of sacred rites and rituals that are perceived to be so integral to the pedagogical process of making architects that they are irreplaceable. A range of scholarship and criticism has always surrounded these ritualized performances, setting and behaviors. Notably, criticism about how these rituals produce and reproduce racism, classism, sexism and a myriad of other systemic complaints have produced demographic shifts, pedagogical reform and a radical shift in professional expectations for those outside of the academy, who will hire graduates. Until recently architecture was seen as a practical applied art that one learned by apprenticing with a “master” in the field. Situating architecture on the university campus allowed it to move to a position where it could be seen as a classed and privileged profession rather than a vocational skill. To frame architectural education within a particular, white, privileged, hegemonic system was the by-product of this shift.

The proper relationship of universities to professional schools, Thorsten Veblen said was that of producers of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. The lower schools should give the higher ones their problems, in return for which the higher would give the lower the theories with which to solve their problems. If professionals were brought into the universities, he thought, they would be embarrassed and caused to put on a specious show of scholarship. Veblen lost his battle, however, and since the time of his writing, professional schools have entered the university in droves.

Schön 1984, 3

Dana Cuff, who has written extensively about architectural practice and pedagogical practice, asks, “What does it mean to become an architect? What are the programs, behaviors, rituals, and knowledge that architects must learn? What is the metamorphic transformation of a layperson into an architect?” (1991, 117) The answers to these questions only appear in the processes by which one becomes an architect, not just in the courses, syllabi and projects. The process

113 produces a specific historical imaginary. The process of enculturating young architects has changed very little over the past century. It is still shaped by the feudal memories of guild-like systems of performance and privilege that appear as an idiosyncratic set of rituals and dogmatically practiced beliefs that rely on a very particular historical imaginary with Le Corbusier most often at its center to produce a very narrowly construed norm. “The architectural form locates the individual practitioner’s actions in a coherent system of meaning, so that those actions become intelligible in the social world. The form is, in this sense, a culture” (Ibid, 155).

The most sacred space, physically and ideologically, in the architectural pedagogical system is the studio. The methodology of the studio is theoretically positivistic, being organized linearly as a rational, systematized ‘analysis’ (problem-defining) stage and a creative, intuitive ‘synthesis’ (problem-solving) stage (Ledewitz 3). However, this system is much more insidious than it appears in terms of subject formation and ideological reprogramming with a deep and profound subtext of defining and designing modern subjects following modernity’s goals of universalization as an outcome. The white cube, so prevalent in architectural studio assignments, is often the end result of a process that strips down and manufactures subjects by emptying them of all content through pedagogical retraining. This stripping away produces unconscious performances that once mastered remain at the core of the architect’s being in their future practice.

The shift towards performance and performativity is not just confined to architecture and is more commonly referred to as the performative “turn,” which loosely refers to the different apprehensions of the performative, as a means to theorise, make, understand or act in the world. The value of this shift towards the performative is that it moves us away from representational and historical ways of knowing.

Smitheram, 56

There is a lack of holistic intersectional critiques of race, class and gender in architectural education today as evident in the standard architectural texts used to reproduce the canon (Cohen, 2012; Curtis, 1982; Frampton, 1997; Kostoff, 1995; et. al.). However, there are methods that exist outside of the discipline to draw from that are producing growing interest among architectural educators and students alike. Consciousness of place, context and history are no

114 longer just taken for granted in architectural education. There are now opportunities for long- suppressed conversations about identity, belonging and race. According to Thomas Dutton, “the hidden curriculum places emphasis on those unstated values, norms and attitudes which stem tacitly from the social relations of the learning setting in addition to the content of the course” (Salama, 13).

It is perhaps ironic that I must travel through White Southern (US) space to reach my place of employment, a predominantly White university where I teach (courses in diversity) to mostly White female pre-service teachers.

Ross, 144

In this passage, Sabrina Ross imagines how race is enacted as a grounded material phenomenon using the literal space and her own particular commute and her own situated-ness to ponder how race bears on her pedagogical methods. Ross’ self-awareness is emerging ever so slowly in architectural discourse and pedagogy as a result of a necessary reckoning with the many negative legacies of a master narrative dominated by a pedagogy steeped in the rhetoric of abstraction, universality and modernism that remains in place today across university campuses globally, and in particular, in architecture studios. This master narrative is more than a mere canon, but exists as a pedagogical method, a practice and a regime of knowledge production. I will focus on the most dominant figure in this master narrative, Le Corbusier, in my analysis and critique to deracinate how this master narrative is taught, performed and ultimately embodied.

Reinforcing Master Narratives

From the beginning of his career, Le Corbusier was aware of the potentially useful function of publications, in which besides the written word, photographic images also played an important part. The reception of his work is, therefore, largely determined by the material selected and revised by him for the issues of the Oeuvre Complète (1966).

Risselada and Colomina, 8

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Architectural historian Peter Blake has spent his career writing about those who have chosen to emulate the “modern masters” in their teaching and practice by redirecting gazes towards the material evidence and millions of “ugly” buildings that modernity has, as a system, produced. (Blake, 1977; 1993; 1996) As far back as 1976, Blake begged for new voices to disrupt the canon when he wrote, “Those like Saarinen, Johnson, Rudolph, and the Detroit architect Minoru Yamasaki, who are struggling with different ways of synthesizing the three great traditions (Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright) passed on to them, are the more important men of the new generation” (1976, 420).

The master narrative is as much of a problem, as are the “faithful followers” (Ibid) as Blake discusses in his text. Likewise, Klaus Herdeg, who taught design studios for years at Columbia and Cornell, wrote a similar damning, self-reflective text based on his own flawed teaching methods. In Herdeg’s version, he tied modernity's failure back to the ossified Bauhaus curriculum he had spent his entire life teaching with what he now reckoned with as dreadful results (Herdeg, 1983). The questions that both Blake and Herdeg asked, remain. How can we move beyond the desires of a white, male progeny to suggest an architectural pedagogy that is both self-aware and critical of its hegemonic, white supremacist and colonial futurity?

Even those who champion Le Corbusier’s legacy, such as Edmond Charrière, president of the Association Maison Blanche and caretaker of Le Corbusier’s early houses, acknowledge that the public still resists modernity in general. Charrière notes that the houses in La Chaux-de-Fonds are not identified with his later work, and therefore are potentially accessible and likable by all. They are adored because they had not yet achieved modernity.

Resistance to Le Corbusier’s work is still strong today; but his La Chaux- de-Fonds buildings are probably more accessible to a non-specialist audience in that they appear less “transgressive,” architecturally speaking, than the later Purist houses or the Housing Units (Unités d’Habitation).

Interview D, 2017

Unpacking the figures that haunt modern architectural imaginaries requires a consistent and clear positioning of the potency and ongoing legacy of modernity’s ossified master narrative. Foundational concepts like phenomenology borrowing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Krell,

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1991) have also been utilized to critique the modern architectural canon. However, these frameworks are also indebted to the same master narrative (Gaston Bachelard, 1969; Alain De Botton, 2008; Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez Gómez, 2006; Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, 1977; Juhani Pallasmaa, 2005; Anthony Vidler, 1992 et. al.).

The stories told about Le Corbusier's life and work have been told by particular voices from within the very institutions that manufacture architectural history and theory as a system and as a discourse, the university. The retelling of master narrative of modern architectural history remains dominated by white, male architectural historians who not so secretly embed their personal narratives within this history as active participants in the history they are retelling. In interviews with several notable architectural historians, when I asked how they saw Le Corbusier’s role in current architecture and architectural education, they often spoke about themselves.

One architectural historian and Le Corbusier expert noted that it was Le Corbusier’s “intellectual tradition” that was still foundational and therefore seminal to teach. This same historian, who was originally Southeast , offered also that ironically his mostly white students at a university in the US West Coast chose to emulate , Le Corbusier’s Finnish equivalent, in practice. He hypothesized that this fantasy was the result of his white students’ Scandinavian heritage and the climate, which fit more closely with Aalto than Le Corbusier. His experience teaching on the US East Coast was the opposite. There, especially in the Ivy League, Le Corbusier remained king (Interview I, 2017).

Beatifying Le Corbusier

The parallels between how the discipline of architecture has treated Le Corbusier and how the Catholic Church has beatified and produced its own saints provides a useful metaphor to see how Le Corbusier is made present in the studio as an all-knowing guiding force. The hegemony of Le Corbusier’s systemic presence, like the Trinity itself, is multi-tiered and manifest finally only through faith in ways that defy rational logic. In Catholicism, the mystery of the Trinity is understood to be how God appears to mortals produced by invoking God as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost in unison. The struggles to rationalize the “essentially mystical doctrines” (Armstrong, 201) of the Trinity using the work of scholars like Peter Abelard (1079–1147)

117 defied reason, but also developed a sophisticated and moving rationale for the mystery of the atonement as well as the Trinity (202–04). Likewise, by centering Le Corbusier in history textbooks and then expecting his forms, attitudes and behaviors to be copied diligently with adoration as a matter of faith in studio work and in studio assignments, Le Corbusier is reproduced as an act of faith.

Just as the Catholic Church required its saints to figuratively bridge the gap between mortals and God, architecture too requires its own beatified figures to operate in a sanctified state, in the realm of its own gods. Criteria one in the UNESCO World Heritage legislation calls upon nominators to seek out and identifying human “genius” as criterion for assessing “outstanding universal value.” This criterion specifically calls for “Human creative genius…to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius” (UNESCO, WHC.16/01, 2016).

In a world where such statements are read by a select few, how is this lesson propagated? The answers are easily found in the architecture studio, where students are led through an accumulation of charrette assignments posed as discrete and abstract problems to solve, using creative original solutions led by the advice and criticism of a studio master, whom students are encouraged to mimic. The master’s voice and methods are meant to encourage students to innovate, experiment and present their work as extensions of their own beings, following a strict formula. Students are collectively forged by the studio master en masse as mutually constituted individuals through the shared experience of the studio in term after term, which results in a unique, but common experience, befitting a Gramscian definition of hegemony. The resulting citizen-architect is a very particular subject.

In his attempts to define how the canon of the design studio as both a process and a method in architectural education is essential, Donald Schön describes the “process” of the studio as an ongoing, unfolding experience made salient in terms of “reflective activity,” “reflective practice,” “reflection-in-action,” and “knowing-in-action” (1988, 1984, 1983). To reflect the master means to become the master and essentialized figures and subjects become the byproducts of this system. This pedagogical system also produces and reproduces race. Craig Wilkins has written extensively about the dearth of black architecture students he has seen throughout his career as another byproduct of this system. He has written explicitly about the

118 social systems in place that prevent racialized students from entering the discipline, let alone thriving in the architecture studio (2017, 2016, 2015).

Wilkins says it’s hard for minorities to break into the field, and once they’re there, it’s harder for them to succeed than their white counterparts. Wilkins attributes that, to a degree, to the nature of the work. Like engineering and other high-skilled, service-based professions, architecture is a patron-based system. Clients of economic means seek out a licensed professional to work for them. But unlike engineering, the majority of clients seeking services in architecture are private companies, not public entities. Someone at one of those companies has to tap you as worthy of their time and money. “More often than not, those folks are looking for folks who look like them,” says Wilkins.

Taubman College, 2017

According to Schön, students learn not by assimilation, but by trial-and-error performance under the watchful eyes of a studio master, guided by the pressure to conform exerted by like-minded peers as a form of behavior shaping that demands increased self-regulation. Thus, the design studio is not really about architectural problem solving but more of “a reflective conversation with the materials of the situation” (1988, 4). Schön describes the kinds of active learning produced in the studio as a “conversation” in which the student and the master come to understand each other so well that they can “finish each other’s sentences” as a pedagogical outcome (Wang, 175). The reification of this system and what it produces is the central problem in architectural education, as Schön describes:

A learning system… must be one in which dynamic conservatism operates at such a level and in such a way as to permit change of state without intolerable threat to the essential functions the system fulfils for the self. Our systems need to maintain their identity, and their ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them, but they must at the same time be capable of transforming themselves.

Schön 1983, 57

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Therefore, the particular ritualized praxis of the studio places the burden of producing knowledge back in the hands of the learner through performance and action that depends upon self- regulation and acquired privilege. “The school upholds the primacy of the autonomous designer by focusing all its attention on the student’s experience as an individual” (Cuff 1991, 81). This pedagogical shift of authority both embodies and empowers learners, but it also further enshrines a master-apprentice relationship which, in turn, depending on the master, can also easily reproduce sexism, racism, classism and colonialism as a by-product. Mastery is always at play. The repeated use of the terms “master,” “mastery” and “primacy” in Cuff’s and Schön’s work is worth noting.

The Studio in Praxis

To critique the architecture studio as a foundational subject-forming experience means the notion of studio must first be unpacked. The notion of “studio,” as curricular class type as it is used on university campuses and in program guides begins to describe how the hegemonic grip of modern architecture has been and remains systemically produced as an ongoing project steeped in race, class, gender through a particularly pedagogical method. This very particular pedagogy also relies on embodied figures like Le Corbusier as tools to haunt studio practices and build imaginaries, which should be subjected to critical methods drawn from critical race studies as well as architectural theory to employ difference and Indigenous epistemologies, among other frameworks rooted in the social sciences, as a method of reform.

The Design Studio has played a key role in the training of architects since the eighteenth century when, for the first time in history, the teaching of architecture was regularized in the French academic institutions. It was during this period when art academies and polytechnic schools created the Modèle Polytechnique and the Modèle Industriel to educate future architects and engineers. Both models blended theoretical instruction (sciences pures) taught by academics (académiciens) at the amphitheater (amphithéatre) with practical learning (sciences appliquées) in the ateliers under the supervision of an architect (the patron)…The atelier system was the core of the curriculum of these institutions. Its main features were: an evaluation system based on competitions (concours), the construction of knowledge through a

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critical reflection between the architect (patron) and students (élèves), the collaboration between students from different disciplines (architects and engineers) and the practical application of theoretical concepts in the ateliers by solving hypothetical design projects. These pedagogical features would become the heart of the Design Studio.

Masdéu and Fuses,7–8

Within the context of a university, the notion of studio becomes even more mercurial, and is often incorrectly translated as a “practicum,” “lab” or “workshop.” But studio is a “process” more than anything else. Therefore, the scholarship of critical studio practice is often couched within the language of “experiential learning,” “reflexivity” and other social science rooted terminology to describe a type of pedagogy that unfolds over time. University administrators rarely are able to grasp what actually happens in the studio. And very few scholars have successfully conveyed how studio learning has been institutionally internally crafted and staged as a performance, and how performativity and such “unconscious” references structure behaviors and practices while defining learning outcomes. Describing learning in the studio as imaginary formation might be a beginning.

The majority of critical writing about architecture, pedagogy and race in studios has historically only appeared in the margins of academic production. Race, class and gender have cautiously crept in through publications such as The Journal of Architectural Education (Bell, 2006; Carranza, 1994; Crawford, 1995; Eggener, 2002; Gürel and Anthony, 2006; Jordan, 2007; Kroiz, 2013) or in obscure conference proceedings or sidebar conversations at AIA (American Institute of Architects) conventions. An upsurge in recent literature that openly and critically discusses architecture and race has only just started to pick up momentum following the recent inclusion of a number of powerful, non-white architectural academics who have critically taken up their own racialization as a method to critique an ongoing regime of white architectural pedagogy and practice (Barton, 2001; Cheng, 2010; Wilson, 2012; et. al.). Likewise, the recent addition of the National Museum of African American History & Culture on Washington DC’s mall by Ghanaian architect, David Adjaye, has produced new conversations by unearthing suppressed narratives and subjectivities, and bringing race and a legacy of genocidal violence to the American narrative, albeit in a more palatable form – the museum. “This is a really important

121 opportunity for us to be able to talk about the other side of American life,” Taylor Branch said “…which is the fact that for many people, change in African-American communities was something they were virulently against” (Taylor 2011).

Contemporary modern studio culture evolved from the romanticized images of artists’ ateliers and the performative experiences of the Bauhaus (performing in theatrical productions and festivals was part of the core curricula for all students) to become more institutionalized by developing clear practices, pedagogies and even spatial standards for what a studio would require as a pedagogical space. Some programmatic repercussions of producing an ideal studio environment might include expectations of working with messy materials like plaster, paint and wood; raw concrete floors; movable partition walls; access to sinks; and other architectural features that would become standard requirements to insure studio culture would define studio space programmatically and spatially. Students were also often given twenty-four-hour access to personal nooks in large shared studios and encouraged to virtually live in their studios as a means to manufacture an alternative community of like-minded peers dedicated to the pursuit of their craft, while also remaining socially segregated from generic students to keep their culture pure and focused as a pedagogical practice. Studio “culture” has lingering after-effect and the essential pedagogical legacy of modernity’s most famous art and design school, the Bauhaus, is carried forward through this embodied legacy.

The Bauhaus was an influential German art and design school in operation from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for its mechanistic and modernist approach to design and design pedagogy. At the Bauhaus both students and faculty lived on campus, structured their lives together including sharing not just classes and studios, but also meals, seasonal festivals and even uniforms. Students studied under the highly charismatic professor, Johannes Itten, or performed in one of the constructivist ballets of Oskar Schlemmer. (Birringer, 2016). To Le Corbusier and the other early modernists, the studio and the Bauhaus pedagogical system was central to maintaining their own figuration and status, as well as a pedagogical tool to train their disciples.

The Bauhaus method expanded and migrated into more conventional universities across North America (Cornell, Harvard, MIT, and the University of Illinois in the beginning) after World War Two in response to the need for more architects in a rapidly modernizing world. The

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Bauhausian architecture studio became the essential unit in a pedagogical system. Thomas Fisher, noted modern architecture critic and former architecture Dean at the University of Minnesota, writes, “The professional associations had considerable influence over the curricula in these early professional (architecture) programs, with faculty drawn from either current or former practitioners. This represented a major intrusion into the territory of the academic guild. As a result, the professional schools occupied and uneasy place in universities tolerated because of the student revenues and outside support that they brought with them, but separated from the traditional academic disciplines” (Fisher, 4).

Ways of Being in the Studio

The studio is a phantasmagoria of subjectivity forming. The studio is spatially organized to insure the master-slave dialectic remains in place. It is both modern and medieval. Studio is a method, perfected and documented by Le Corbusier, which is centered around pedagogical methods that interweave discourse, power, subjectivity and imaginaries in an unalterable and sacred ritual that remains intact today as an ideal. In studio syllabi, in the narratives interwoven into assignments and even in the reified objects produced by students in studio, the formal and ideological residue of white cubes and white imaginaries remain firmly in place, which begs the question, have racialized students written of their experiences in the studio, and have these critiques been theorized.

…In 1995, only 32 African-American students across the United States received a master’s degree in architecture, and by 1999 only 40 had done so. Furthermore, recent figures show a disturbing pattern of racial segregation in architectural education. Of all 1,313 African-American students enrolled in architecture schools in North America, the seven historic black schools with accredited architecture programs – Florida A&M, Hampton, Howard, Morgan State, Prairie View A&M, Southern, and Tuskegee – enrolled 45 percent, whereas the other 96 schools of architecture enrolled the remainder.

Freeman 1989, 3–4 quoted in Anthony 2002, 260

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The answers to what have racialized students written about their experiences, and why is it virtually nothing, is shaped largely by the historical and emerging literature in the field. Since most of this literature focuses only on diversification as a goal, rather than student experiences in the studio and in the classroom, there has been little progress over the years beyond adjusting admissions expectations and processes to meet diversity goals statistically. There is a growing body of noted architectural educators of color and scholars who have been working creatively through how race and design education might intersect, and whom I refer to throughout this thesis (Harris, Wilson, et. al.). But how race is produced in the studio remains under-critiqued and invisibly practiced, and, by extension, racist.

…Furthermore, underrepresented students were more inclined to consider switching to alternative careers. Women are more likely to consider working for an advocacy or nonprofit firm, interior design, a government agency, in business, and historic preservation, programming/evaluation, or elsewhere. More than half the Latino students and almost half the Asian American students considered switching to non-architectural careers.

Anthony, 258

There is growing statistical evidence and qualitative evidence about why so few students of color enter architecture, stay in architecture and ultimately practice architecture who are not white men. Interviews about how a number of targeted groups perceive their future lives rely on perceptions formed in the studio, often invisibly taught perceptions that will shape their future practices and imped their success. These interviews describe a pedagogical system of tiered expectations and unequal performance standards imposed on female and racialized students, in particular, by a pervasive system of architectural education that remains firmly in place, regardless of whom is admitted into an architecture program. However, their actual day-to-day experiences and perceptions in the studio remain undocumented or analyzed, barring a few very notable exceptions.

Mark Frederickson has reported on gender and racial bias in design juries in architectural education. His extensive research, based on videotaped protocol studies of 112 juries at three American design schools, examined issues such as interruption, opinion polarization, idea building,

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advisement, questioning, jury kinesis and proxemics, sexual and racial bias, and verbal participation rates, among others. Frederickson’s results identified several consistently biased practices in design juries that disadvantage underrepresented students and faculty.

Anthony, 258

It is within the studio, individual self-revelation and structured discovery is performed publicly as work appears to be revealed through process. It is in the doing that methods are revealed, and it is here that the master’s lessons are learned. Students, draftsmen and apprentices work away while the master paces, prods and observes. Students are always under absolute control, but are also given the authority to self-determine their own path as they perceive it in this ritualized performance. The attitudes and behaviors of studio instructors who function as professional gatekeepers in the field in their studios might be seen to covertly silence the voices of their racialized students. These silent voices represent a very large body of missing data in dire need of analysis.

The next step in the studio experience is the communal critiquing of work, often before small groups of like-minded peers, all-knowing studio masters and often celebrity visiting experts. The student learns to acquire thick skin and how to present their work in public where at any time the critique might go terribly wrong. The master’s authority is beyond question, and the best defense to survive is to mimic the master’s works, language, intonation and even personal ticks to survive. This ritual is learned through endless and unrelenting repetition shaped by the threat of humiliation, to build the defensive social skills needed to both rationalize work and to boldly produce the kind of work that has never been seen before.

The end result, the office building, apartment block or museum is often a direct result of this process. It too is bold, indifferent and inhumane, like the architect, as a result. Modern architecture is not seen as warm and friendly by the public, and the work of Le Corbusier is often described as cold, impersonal and mechanistic. Instinctively, from outside, modernity is loathed for its detachment from real life and real people. To love modern architecture must therefore be learned as an acquired taste. Le Corbusier, as a figure, facilitates this taste acquisition as a pedagogical outcome.

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This network of precisely chosen actors and scripted performances has been fabricated to reproduce a complex system of power and knowledge production demands that the studio and the studio master are seen as the objective manifestations of a cohesive master narrative based in unquestionable and rational truth. The process that one must undergo to achieve this requires a regime of unlearning and surrendering of previous subjectivities, if we follow the modern method. The masters of architectural education (Gropius, et. al.) and practice (Le Corbusier, et. al.) have created a pedagogical system that appears rational, but interweaves power, fear, shame and delusions of grandeur into student psyches to prepare them for a profession that will teach them to love what they instinctively hate. This pedagogy is passed on from generation to generation, and the few dissenting voices are shoved to the margins, or not invited to the table.

Manufacturing Subjects in Studio

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the modern American architecture studio had become a bastion of “technocratic architectural practice” as Paul Emmons writes. Emmons describes the office of architect, Frederick Ackerman, in relationship to the publication of the essential studio production manual, Architectural Graphic Standards. This manual was originally published in 1932 and has been reproduced many times since (Pressman, 2007). Architectural Graphic Standards was “conceived as a revolutionary architectural treatise” (Emmons, 4) meant to “isolate constructional and functional facts from aesthetic design decisions” (Ibid) so that the lessons of modernity could be replicated efficiently and precisely using a manual that eliminated all potentially irrational decisions.

George Barnett Johnston theorizes that, by using Architectural Graphic Standards, the management of the design studio became the center of the modern project. He describes the architecture office (the studio) as a modern labour system, recounting stories of modern architecture from the perspective of the armies of anonymous draftspersons who populated offices and studios. Architectural Graphic Standards became a post-Fordist method to manage both work and workers as a goal (Johnston, 2008).

Tim Putnam does the same by deconstructing the manuals and catalogs produced by lathe manufacturers at the turn of the century in Massachusetts. He focused specifically on the drafting rooms as a method of place-based ethnography. This reveals a tale quite different from the one

126 told to students about the modern masters, by focusing on the story through the eyes of the invisible labourers who produced the drawings for the lathes and imagining what they were thinking as they worked (Putnam, 1988).

I now think of ethnography as a regulating fiction, as a particular narrative practice that produces textual identities and regimes of truth. Such an approach admits a significant problem ignored by traditional ethnographic narratives, namely the inevitable tensions of knowledge as partial, as interested, and as performative of relations of power. This returns us to the clashing investments in how stories are told and of the impossibility of telling everything.

Britzman, 37–8

In architectural education, the studio is best described as an ongoing pedagogical “process” that is a manufactured fiction performed as a particular fantasy. The goal of the studio is to produce a standardized human subject who can practice architecture according to a clear set of norms, standards and embedded truths. The ritual of the studio has been put in place to produce a standard set of human subjects using modernity and standardization as a method and affect, and a sense of belonging as a behavioral tool. The space and place for potential resistance to this system is limited and the language, methods and ideologies of modernist rhetoric affirm the studio as a cultural project.

At its most general, my subject matter concerns the fragility of the interrelationships between seeing and thinking, for maker and appreciator alike. Considering the confusion that characterizes thinking and production in architecture today, a confrontation with the most recently popular (some would add, still popular) architecture of past years might raise some overlooked questions, even if we can hardly hope that one essay will cause the digestion of a still very lumpy era.

Herdeg, ix

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The studio is a venerated and sacred place; it is the site of a reified process and a time-honored method of instruction integral to manufacturing and preserving the modern architectural imaginary. Historically the studio exists and is spoken about as both a physical space and as a pedagogical method, or rather – a lived process. While studio is an imaginary space by definition, its abilities to embody and intertwine experience, perception and material production around a very precise ideology produces a particular subjectivity. The language spoken in the studio is steeped in the open-ended neutral language of modernity that stresses originality over reproduction and helps students imagine, transform and become a certain subject as a goal. “Openness,” “space,” “formlessness, “conceptual articulations,” “experiential realization” and “other linguistic placeholders” rationally describe what is ultimately a phenomenological experience disguised as a strict pedagogical system dictated by accreditation boards and professional regulations (Levin, 476).

Studio is a term that serves as a generalized placeholder for any kind of pedagogical experience that is not a typical lecture, seminar or lab. The pedagogies of creative writing, theatre and music also use the term studio to describe a shared system where knowledge is co-produced experientially and a material outcome is in the form of a performance or other creative outcome. Studios are often romanticized by educators, professionalized by technocrats or instrumentalized by administrators as idealized places where experiential learning and self-directed pedagogies come into play. By centering the student’s “work” as the primary subject matter, the studio helps reproduce the modern architect as a normative subject. Studio is, in the end, performed following a highly structured set of social rituals and practices that are deeply built into an “unconscious pedagogy” (Schön, 1984). This pedagogical system is delivered unconsciously through gestures, words, attitudes and implicit pedagogies and curated perceptions. The values and attitudes taught in the studio will last a lifetime. These lenses create an essentialized subjectivity. “Instead of careful empiricism and strict rationality, imaginative intuition of knowledge relevant to the problem at hand is what is most valuable in the architecture studio” (Wang, 176).

I ask you to imagine an architectural studio. It has been underway for a couple of months, and the students have been given a program for the design of a school. There is a design review in progress. The studio master, Quist, examines the drawings of a student, places a piece of tracing paper over her drawing and begins to draw over it, and at the same time, to talk.

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His talking is neither an explanation of the drawing, nor a parallel activity. Rather, talking and drawing make up a single language. The drawing is understandable only through the talking, and the talking has no meaning without the drawing. I call this drawing and talking the language of designing.

Schön 1984, 4

The studio is thus repeated, again and again, as a series of continuing performances in which students learn skills and subjectivities by mimicking the methods and attitudes of their studio master until these behaviors become naturalized over time. The mastery they experience allows them to learn while performing repetitively as they “model” behaviors that they will be emulating in real life studios, offices and ateliers once they become masters. Developing work ethics, acquiring thick skin, and being challenged to fight for one’s ideas are at the core of what the studio experiences instills in the student as a subject. They will be masters themselves one day – lording over draftspersons construction workers, engineers and interior designers. These experiences and performances are framed by practical needs and pre-determined by professional accreditation boards with the goal of professionalizing students through rituals that will directly prepare them for life outside the academy. The odd thing is that the basic pedagogical structure of this experience was formalized nearly a hundred years ago at the Bauhaus in Germany in a very particular place, at a very particular time.

The language, methods and imaginaries that this environment produces, appears to be empowering, but is ultimately constricting and pre-determined to produce the same results time after time. The process of being taught to design is not technical, but rather an imaginary project. The completion of this enculturation process is left to industry to complete as a project, which allows the architecture schools to claim responsibility for forming the architectural imaginary while professional competency is left for internship and professional practice to complete. Earnest Boyer and Lee Mitgang have written extensively about this in Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice: A Special Report. (1996) In the end, the studio is a fierce competition for the attention of the studio master, for the privilege of achieving the status that a professional education brings and for the mobility that surviving such a hierarchical system affords. The studio is an embodied hierarchical system.

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One way to understand the hidden socialization that occurs in architecture school is to examine the studio, the sine qua non of design education. In the studio, an architect – teacher provides students with guidance on design problems far removed from the untidy, awkward problems that many real clients have… Students are rarely encouraged to work in groups on design problems specifically intended to help them learn about the social construction of architecture, about collaboration skills, mutual satisfaction, and the like.

Cuff 1991, 44

Conclusion

Architectural educators have been battling to dislocate architecture and architects from the stifling legacy of a white, male, classed privileged narrative for some time, with little lasting effect. However, the right tools and desired outcomes have been elusive, and the statistics about who practices architecture still support a normative patriarchal, white, male, elite class of practitioners. The numbers of scholars from within the academy that have been rallying against the universal modernist canon from a position of social justice is increasing. Early adopters include Thomas Dutton (1991, 1996), Keith Eggener (2002) and many others. The Journal of Architectural Education is filled with thoughtful critiques of the modernist canon situated in the desire to teach difference and teach differently.

The notion that formal education is a prime site for acculturation is not particularly new or contested. It has long been recognized that there are two aspects of any curriculum. Firstly, there is the explicit or declared curriculum that maps out the cognitive student learning (that is to say the knowledge, skills and abilities) to be acquired. Secondly, there is the tacit or ‘hidden curriculum’ that is concerned with inculcating non-cognitive dispositions such as values, tastes, beliefs.

Dutton 1991, 265

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As Craig Wilkins, who is among the most respected, productive and prominent black architectural educators and critics today, has stated, “Almost from the moment the Royal Academy in Paris – more famously and accurately known as the Académie des Beaux-Arts – established its Academy of Architecture to provide for the formal education of architects, there has been tension between the academic and practice branches that make up the discipline of architecture” (Wilkins, 62). This pedagogical gap had been engineered and designed to provide a layer of invisible screening to maintain race, class, gender and privilege in the studio and in the classroom.

“Studio culture” is indeed a dangerous term, and is far too often used to define a set of behavioral expectations that has less to do with the hands-on pedagogy of making models and drawings than perpetuating a pedagogical legacy that produces an individual using intuitive knowledge to reproduce the universal, white architecture that the modern project demanded. Studio culture allows this project to persist, and the making of architects through the invisible mechanisms and performances that structure the studio, permits a willful, collective form of amnesia using highly regulated environment that supports capital, whiteness and privilege by design, and through design.

Perhaps the only answer is to refocus student interests away from the modern masters, to prioritize practitioners who have begun to see themselves more as social activists operating outside of the institutional constraints of practice and academia. Perhaps these figures might be better situated to serve as role models for students, particularly in light of how the profession is changing and jobs are vanishing. Recognizing Others in architectural practice is potentially transformative in terms of anti-racism, decentering whiteness and producing class equity.

Most graduating students today are more concerned with individual success than with making long-term contributions to society. We seem to have done a good job in preparing our students for contemporary practice, particularly with regard to computers and electronic media. Where we have been less successful is in inculcating values dealing with community planning, historic preservation, and urban design. Few studios deal effectively with issues regarding the public domain.

Glasser, 251

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In the past few decades, new discourses and discursive pedagogical methods have been permitted to enter the reified sanctity of the studio. These include design-build exercises, community-based planning experiences and shared interdisciplinary studios structured around multiple intelligences and knowledge types. The entire enterprise of architecture and design education is in a state of flux; a state which architectural educators will need to confront in the studio. Including issues such as social justice and design activism into curricula is already well underway. While many of these experiences successfully deconstruct the modern master myth, and these experiences allow non-universalizing issues into the studio such as social equity and socio-spatial topics, they seem to stop short of a radically canonical way of knowing and practicing architectural knowledge creation.

The creative navigation of this ambiguous line between science and architecture in turn offers up a unique model for collaboration across disciplines that defines a new future for architecture and the role of the architect where authorship is horizontal, giving way to interiorities, elastic networks, fabrics, and topological meanders that are pliable, plastic, ecological, and open – where geometry and matter are steered and specified by the flexibility and sensitivity of the human body.

Sabin, 71

The history of architectural education and practice remains a tale of white privilege and class. Whether retelling the story of architectural education and practice from the vantage point of social history and class mobility (Stevens, 1988) or from the point of view of the modern architect’s indebtedness to capital (Willis, 1996), most tales of the actual profession are stories about privilege and what it takes to be desirable to clients to succeed. Alternative and “transformative practices” posited by young, cutting edge theoreticians/practitioners like Cornell’s Jenny Sabin still rely on antiquated obsessions with new materials and technologies as paths to transformation, which only supports the abstract, raceless, classless myth of modernity.

Only in very recent times have national accreditation boards, professional organizations like the AIA and clients began to demand otherwise. Architectural scholars of color are beginning to push back against the white canon by writing about black architects and their histories. Piotrowski and Robinson write, “The profession of architecture, formerly a bastion of upper-

132 middle-class white males of European descent, has a growing number of people from different classes, genders, nationalities, and even ethnic backgrounds.” (xii). However, “The concepts, methods, and professional practices developed by the original group are often irrelevant and even destructive to the interests and values of the new members,” (Ibid), but these subjects remain marginalized and discounted.

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Chapter 5 Manufacturing Le Corbusier Through Texts Introduction

To begin to understand and express how Le Corbusier still haunts the architectural imaginary requires an simultaneous understanding of how Le Corbusier has been positioned within the modern architectural history text and in studio practice. Situating a critique in how architectural education produces race and gender through the most widely taught architectural history texts has already been taken up in the work of Gürel and Anthony (2006), and the choices of which texts I have decided to analyze draws upon their research.

Architectural history books play a significant role in conveying the culture, norms and values of the architecture discipline to newcomers. In recent years, numerous publications have spotlighted the importance of women and African Americans as critics, creators, and consumers of the built environment. Yet to what extent is this recent discourse on gender and racial issues included in architectural history texts?

2006, 66

By the early twentieth century, European modernism had evolved into a clear “ideological social project, seeking to remake social institutions” (Davidson, 9). Le Corbusier is a central character in every one of the classic narratives used to tell the tale of modern architecture (Curtis. 1996; Frampton, 1997; Kostoff, 1985; Trachtenberg and Hyman, 2002; et. al.). Le Corbusier also remains central in every new narrative that appears on bookstore shelves and in classrooms, even when the project at hand is intended to deconstruct the white, male, Western canon as a project (Cohen, 2012; Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, 2007; Ghirardo, 2003). Le Corbusier’s presence within the canon is inevitable.

During a sixty-year-long career, which started in 1907 in his hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Corbusier built some seventy-five buildings in a dozen countries. Many of these structures are well preserved and protected, an increasing number is restored, a certain number are in a

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danger, and the condition of a small batch is unknown. However, in the changing context of UNESCO’s policies for the World Heritage, reaching a new level of international visibility was considered necessary by scholars and Le Corbusier supporters alike.

Cohen 2006, 43

The literature of Le Corbusier’s oeuvre is vast, and the importance of studying his life, work and ideological foundations remains central to most classic modernist teaching practices for a number of reasons. The teachability of the Le Corbusiern canon cannot be underestimated. In a book review of three texts on Le Corbusier released almost simultaneously, the reviewer describes the combined impact of these texts as “reinforce(ing) the didactic import of Le Corbusier’s works, which makes them a basic reference in teaching architecture” (Gubler, 210). “(Le Corbusier's) prolific personality as theorist, painter, sculptor, architect, urban planner, researcher, disseminator, thinker, and provocative activist, helped to make him a universal author. His dual and inseparable theoretical and practical activities represented a source for LC’s balanced inspirational and systematic method” (Tostões, 3).

However, Le Corbusier does have his critics. Meltem Gürel and Katheryn Anthony (2006), have written about architectural history as a specific systemic method put in place to maintain patriarchal regimes situated in architectural history texts. By analyzing the cabal of key history texts used to teach modern architecture, while critiquing their overtly patriarchal agendas, Gürel and Anthony prove that this project maintains and enshrines whiteness, maleness and privilege. Gürel and Anthony conclude that the master narrative in this textual regime remains intact today largely due to the limited number of options available to do otherwise, because of the dominant voices of the historians who control the master narrative, which is colonial and hegemonic.

Le Corbusier’s Textual Presence

Le Corbusier’s textual presence is much more insidious. He dominates the majority of historical texts as a constant datum. For example, in William Curtis’ Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1996), one of the texts singled out by Gürel and Anthony, Le Corbusier, as a subject, dominates Curtis’ index as well as the entire narrative trajectory of modern architecture in his retelling.

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References to Le Corbusier in Curtis’ text, account for more than two full columns of references. This is far more than any other modern architect.

A more qualitative and holistic analysis of Curtis’ index reveals that Le Corbusier dominates the narrative of the text structurally, with chapters devoted solely to Le Corbusier appearing frequently and at regular intervals throughout the text as a regulatory and dominating system through which the history of modern architecture is produced. Le Corbusier’s life, career and stylistically changing building phases are the bases of Curtis’ chronological trajectory, and Le Corbusier, along with his view of the world from Paris, set a standard by which all other architects and the entirely of modern architecture is measured as a project.

The major texts that we consider iconic staples in the modern teaching repertoire today include: William Curtis’ Modern Architecture Since 1900, Kenneth Frampton’s Modern Architecture: A Critical History, Spiro Kostoff’s A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals and Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman’s Architecture, from Prehistory to Postmodernity. These texts represent the most widely used modern architectural history texts today in classrooms across the globe. In each of these texts Le Corbusier remains the central actor, and his words and ideas permeate each of these texts in every chapter, translated and repeated with reverence, respect and awe.

In Modern Architecture Since 1900 and in several other essays, historian William J. R. Curtis wrote of the “complexity of a dissemination” that gained momentum in the 1930s as the modern movement began to spread globally, noting that too often a primary focus on the modernism of Europe and the northeastern United States has made a casualty of other developments.

Ochsner, 312

But how do we really come to truly come to “know” Le Corbusier through history texts? The history of modern architecture is a manufactured fiction, of course, but it is a fiction that serves a specific social and political purpose, with pedagogical goals and subtexts, which produce subjects who will follow this same narrative path, wherever it may be taught. Le Corbusier is the perfect figure to serve this purpose. Among Le Corbusier’s greatest assets but is his ability to be

136 seen as a revolutionary who could straddle classes to facilitate the “intellectual break” with tradition (Gündoğan, 50) that modern subjects and young architects are taught to desire, without sacrificing their positional privilege as members of an intellectual poloteriat.

The proletariat, as a class, is short of organising elements; it does not have its own layer of intellectuals and it will only be able to form such a stratum, very slowly and laboriously, after the conquest of State power. But it is also important and useful that a break should take place within the mass of intellectuals: a break of an organic nature, historically characterised. It is important that there should be formed, as a mass formation, a left tendency in the modern sense—that is a tendency oriented towards the revolutionary proletariat.

Gramsci 1994, 336, as quoted in Gündoğan 2008, 50

If one were to only “know” the history of modern architecture by reading the select list of reified texts most often used in classrooms today, what can be learned? The literature is often deliberately centered on Le Corbusier's life and work as a methodology. By resurrecting his messages in lectures as central in texts Le Corbusier’s followers can easily expand Corbu’s “intellectual legacy” in faraway places and exotic lands to prove his methods have always been the only correct ones. Le Corbusier is reproduced as a canonical truth. The stories told about Le Corbusier's work and life have been told and retold as a particular kind of cultural industry, which continues to persist today, and perpetuates colonial ideologies and practices, particularly when taught outside of Paris.

H. Allen Brooks’ chooses to know Le Corbusier by relying on primary sources and reconstructing Le Corbusier’s life as a series of childhood experiences and pivotal journeys to locate when and how it was that Corbu became a modern icon. This narrative quest is recreated largely by analyzing the sketchbooks that Le Corbusier used to chronicle his travels juxtaposed with the words he used to capture his thoughts and perceptions. Le Corbusier’s growing modern consciousness and his colonial desires are often captured in his drawings. Sketches gathered by the Fondation Le Corbusier demonstrate Le Corbusier’s colonizing and predatory gaze in his preliminary trips to sites in Buenos Aires and Algiers that focus on drawing individuals in site that reveal sexual fantasies, Othering as well as white desire. (See Appendix B).

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While very little has changed on the ground or in textbooks, the academy is changing. Bodies and subjects who had been marginalized now have voices as well as presence on campus and in architecture studios. But as I will explain, these voices are too often constrained by the limits of whiteness, which still can be seen in the centrality of Le Corbusier in the forming of young architects. Furthermore, what do these imaginaries produce mean when they become realized in the material world of spaces, places and day-to-day lives lived in houses, buildings and institutions?

Therefore, the telling and retelling of the history of modern architecture using Le Corbusier as a central figure carries a number of risks as new generations of scholars re-look at the canon and Le Corbusier as a figure through new lenses. It is worth noting that “Architecture is an instrument of domination. It organizes bodies in space with a varying degree of coercion, from what may appear as voluntary to the most extreme instances of violence. It does not invent racism, but it provides the spatial and territorial conditions for racism to exercise itself” (Lambert, 2016).

The Corbusiern Saga

How to situate Le Corbusier’s positionality within the canon of modern architectural thought and a historiography of story-telling means to tell his life story as if it were the very embodied story of modern architecture, as in the tradition of the Icelandic sagas, which interweave narratives that are acknowledged as being both fictional and essential simultaneously. The Icelandic sagas represent one-thousand-year-old narratives “told by skilled narrators as a means of instruction…”(Craigie, 19) who are also “masters in the delineation of character.” (Ibid, 33) These settler narratives have been interwoven into the Icelandic notion of identity and belonging, and have been uniquely tied to a very particular chunk of land that allows critical subject- forming narratives to persist today. These land-based narratives remain materialized in nearly every aspect of Icelandic culture, and are still written about by historians from many different perspectives and vantage points, while acknowledging these tales as essentialized subject- forming settler fictions (Craigie, 1913; Jones, 1961; Ibn Faḍlān, Lunde and Stone, trans. 2012).

… The Sagas still influence the way we tell and read stories today. Homer's tales may have pre-dated The Sagas, but his are fantastical works that

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concern mythical creatures, Gods and unbelievable reckonings. Though trolls and ghosts feature, much of The Sagas remains grounded in reality. They tell stories of farmers, families and fighters, lovers, warriors and kings, of betrayal and dilemmas, and which are, for the most part, believable and credible.

Myers, 2008

Brooks and others rely on such myth-building methods when describing the various phases in Le Corbusier’s life. From using a young Le Corbusier’s “journey to the East” (Le Corbusier and Žaknić, 2007) as narrative to describe his Homeric transformation towards “modern” thought or when studying his state of mind later in his career, Le Corbusier is still studied and his imaginary recreated by analyzing his sketchbooks, reading his words and imagining what he was able to see and perceive.

Majestically. Corbusier placed his own edifices of the Capitol Complex at the tip of the gridiron plan. In the verdant plain of Chandigarh, visually closed off by the distant mountains. Le Corbusier revisited the epiphany of his beloved Acropolis in Athens, which from the beginning of his career had embodied his ideal of the relationship between architecture and context. The Siwalik (sic) Range was the perfect backdrop against which to juxtapose the city and its noblest element: the Capitol Complex.

Wattas, 130

Le Corbusier would ultimately be revered as the most “influential” architect and city planner of the entire modern era, whose pioneering early modern villas and later commercial, institutional and religious buildings would be revered as the penultimate examples of the embodiment of the ideologies and practices used to define modern architecture. His methods, practices and ideologies are still taught as models today. Le Corbusier's unique ability to “influence” Others lies chiefly in his unusual ability to combine the functionalism of the modern movement with his own bold, sculptural and painterly formal expression – but it is in how he was systemically reified through architectural pedagogy, and architectural history texts, as a figure, that is the most telling.

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Standardizing Modernity’s Myth

We now know that these early modernists were never authentic, nor even realistic in their aspirations or results. As Johannes Birringer writes, “Large-scale technical reproducibility of the objects designed at the Bauhaus was never quite achieved, contrary to the reputation the school was able to build up for its modernist aesthetic” (Birringer, 41). Modernity became more of a metaphor than a reality in architectural thought. The “machine aesthetic” was just that – a way of making something look like a machine, and little more. The modernist fantasy was, in retrospect, also a very particular white colonial fantasy. Zeynep Çelik writes,

…Le Corbusier’s Algiers projects were expressions of the French “colonial consensus,” which developed from the common French experience based on a shared perception of France’s role in contemporary history, and which protected the French “economic, moral, and strategic” interests in Algeria. As such, they must be situated in a broad time frame. They do not belong solely to the 1930s and to modernism’s response to colonialism; they also “speak” the idiom of other periods – nineteenth- century Orientalism as well as the colonial discourse of the first decades of the twentieth century. Çelik, 74

In William Curtis’ text, Modern Architecture Since 1900, which is still among the most widely used history of modern architecture textbooks, Le Corbusier appears not just throughout the text as a subject, but structures Curtis’ entire argument as unconscious pedagogy shaped by the figure of a white, European man who has come to represent the modern architecture “revolution.” As a renowned Le Corbusier scholar, Curtis centralizes and essentializes Le Corbusier in his particular version of the history of modern architecture. He does this in such a way that the flow of the narrative is shaped by the objective themes of technological “progress,” global expansion and the increase in appetite for the aesthetics of universal modernism. This is achieved by injecting chapters solely devoted to Le Corbusier as a benchmark. Curtis’ method relies on the Corbusiern figure to consolidate a range of disparate and often disconnected trajectories in one easy package to produce a logical and rational path using Le Corbusier as a navigator.

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What makes Le Corbusier count so much in Curtis’ story? Methodologically, by measuring the frequency with which Le Corbusier’s name appears throughout Curtis’ text, it would be easy to compare this number with the one solitary sentence in which Curtis mention’s female modernists like Eileen Grey (once) or how many Canadian architects are mentioned (Moshe Safdie is the only Canadian mentioned) or how many Indigenous architects like Douglas Cardinal are mentioned (never). Le Corbusier’s presence as the foundational modern icon structures Curtis’ entire text, which is the norm in the majority of modern architectural history texts used today.

We also have framed the grand narrative of modern architectural history around Le Corbusier as a central figure to achieve standardization as an outcome. William Curtis, noted Le Corbusier expert and textbook author, structures his seminal architecture history textbook, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Phaidon, 1982), by placing Le Corbusier in his narrative as the glue that holds the history of modern architecture together as time, technology and desire shape the canon. Each new twist of technological innovation (Bessemer steel, Otis elevators, lightweight poured concrete, rebar, etc.), each world war and even the global phantasmagoria of the dissolution of colonial empires is situated in terms of how Le Corbusier placed himself within this particular history of modern forms, materials and methods.

As a result, authors like William Curtis structure their texts by placing Le Corbusier within history as an active and defining participant to make their texts alive and to populate the narrative with subjects and figures who are as idiosyncratic as the movement they came to embody. Careers punctuated by affairs, divorces, bankruptcies and even murders are far more interesting to read about. This literary device is, of course, a highly constructed fantasy. (Curtis, 1982) with Corbu’s positionality as modernity’s flawed white knight yielding a very particular pedagogy and producing desire. For example, William Curtis gushes about Corbu’s seminal 1929 masterpiece, the Villa Savoye, writing:

Although the Villa Savoye must be understood as a relative of Le Corbusier’s earlier designs, it was not like he simply took pieces form old designs and stuck them together. Rather, a vital new image was created, which articulated new possibilities of form and meaning in an unprecedented synthesis.

Curtis, 283

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However, Curtis’ use of Le Corbusier is much more systemic and insidious. Le Corbusier is not only peppered throughout the text as a reference to everything, thus establishing him as the universal modern norm, but also Curtis strategically places chapters devoted solely to Le Corbusier at regular intervals to insure all other architects will be compared to Le Corbusier as a standard. This structural method is also, as a result of such clarity, easy to teach and easy to learn. There are very few grey areas as a result. Students come to “know” Le Corbusier as the embodiment of modernity as a result of this narrative method and his unchallenged authority. “Le Corbusier wanted to present external reality in terms of some kind of ‘conventional’ knowledge, in such a way that it could be provisionally understood, given the absence of real certainty” (Richards, 110).

The Resulting Le Corbusier Effect

How Le Corbusier has been produced and reproduced through architectural history texts appears as an interwoven, and largely unconscious system where architectural studio teaching practices and architectural history texts work together in hegemonic unison to manufacture a very particular type of subject, with Le Corbusier as a central figure

Hitchcock writes, “In writing on modern architecture some few years ago it was possible to accept that the individualists of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, who first broke consciously with the nominal discipline of the revivals, established tentatively a New Tradition, (Hitchcock and Johnson, 1996: 24). The International Style quickly became the definitive form-giving reality for the canonization of the work of modernist icons like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and others” (Ibid). The canonical foundation for this “new tradition” entered the academy shortly thereafter fueled by publications and a growing interest in architecture on campuses, in society and globally. This exhibit would also lay the groundwork for how modernity would be framed in the future from a very specific temporality.

We continue to teach Le Corbusier and International Style aesthetics nearly a century later as the ideal modern method because it is easy, because it is convenient and because it is effective. By teaching Le Corbusier as modernity’s most sacred figure, we continue to teach Le Corbusier’s subjectivity as a by-product, which in turn supports the basic mechanisms of mass consumption,

142 capital, etc. “...Le Corbusier (became) a natural ally of the masters of the modern world. He wanted to turn everything into a rational machine, and a rational machine is easy for those in power to understand and control” (Kalb, 2016.)

The homogenizing effect of the Le Corbusier effect is only now being critiqued, debated and deconstructed by a new generation of scholars and practitioners from their own positionality, but this too often further enshrines Le Corbusier’s centrality and places them at the margins. While many years in the making, this rewriting has been fueled largely by the presence of visible non- white scholars on campuses across North America. After many years of exclusion, the new experts are ready to deconstruct the master narrative from within. But even after years of marginalization and discrimination, these empowered new voices still operate under Corbu’s spell out of deference or as a result of their debt to the modern canon and methods they too were taught. The insidiousness of the modern project is that its appeal is still disguised as neutrality, rationality and clarity – all attributes beholding to universal modernism.

Indeed, Le Corbusier and others whose work was deemed to “fit” the International Style paradigm and minimal white aesthetic of high modernism seemed to be pursuing the same goals, seemed to be arriving at the same formal conclusions and could be seen to spontaneously be producing a body of cohesive evidence of a unified modern movement on a global scale emanating from Europe and spreading east and west from Paris, and Vienna. This unified and universalizing frame was presented to the western world as an ideal system for making architecture in the modern age, which would liberate the remainder of the world in due time. This ideology is still central to how architecture is taught and architects are produced. It is a colonial argument. This temporal and subjective framing would also pre-determine the “industry” of modern architectural pedagogy is inextricably rooted in its own origin myth (Nesbitt 1986). Le Corbusier’s collection of early modern villas would become the model for how to teach the modern canon. These instructional models are still studied, copied and reproduced today, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Dubai.

Continuing Variations on a Theme

Among the many scholars who have devoted so much of their careers to maintaining Le Corbusier’s centrality are scholars like William Curtis, Charles Jencks, Jean-Louis Cohen,

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Kenneth Frampton and Simon Richards. In Richards’ book, Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self (2003), Richards retraces Le Corbusier’s career from phase to phase chasing a thesis to uncover how Le Corbusier’s public and private personas could be so different. Simon’s text, as well as many others, often strays into this territory – looking for deeper meaning in Corbu’s self- contradiction and paradox as a symbolic representation of modernity’s inherent paradoxes.

The task of the postmodern architectural historian, however, is to uncover both the universality and the particularity of the Corbusiern figure and its saga, with all the risks that this entails. The modern architecture text is particularly fraught with pitfalls because it simultaneously desires universality and rejects specificity. This same paradox underlies much of the debate around how to assess the “outstanding universal value” of Le Corbusier’s work at UNESCO and ICOMOS. How to represent Corbu’s overall lasting “influence” on a global scale, while ignoring individual works of art, is a colonial project.

So many “modern” architectural historians (Cohen, Curtis, Frampton, et. al.) began their own projects to reshape the modern canon just as postmodernity was replacing modernity ideologically and new critical lenses were becoming more valuable. The new desire to tell a story centered on revolution was shaped by an underlying goal to approach the pre-existing canon from a new vantage point using criticality, inter-disciplinarity and much more discursive methods. Modern architectural history would be positioned as a critique.

As a result of this canon-bashing, these were uncomfortable times on many university campuses. Academic departments fought, personalities collided and architecture and design theorists proliferated. In the 1980s and early 1990s deconstructing the canon was the central project for many (Rowe, Vidler, Wigley, et. al.). As a result, a few decades later modern architecture would be framed as a historical project comfortably situated in the past. Another new generation of modern architecture historians embraced modernity’s fragmented and pluralistic frameworks as the movement was waning and postmodernity was waxing, to allow new forms of political and regional subjectivity to begin to inflect the new canon (Fletcher and Palmes, 1975; Pevsner, 1960; et. al.). Le Corbusier’s resulting virtual dominion over taste, power and privilege could be dematerialized in design studio assignments, in history courses and later in offices and ateliers.

My core argument is that this hegemonic system centered on Le Corbusier dictates a particular aesthetic and ideology that carries with it additional baggage that goes beyond mere formal

144 reproduction to produce pedagogical systems that support and maintain racism, classism and foreclose non-compliant epistemologies and ways of being in the world as a project. This situation persists and resists critique because of Le Corbusier’s centrality. We can understand why and how this condition has been produced, but we have yet to come up with a method for how to replace it.

The postwar, faceless and functional International style is rooted in the over-simplification of the complex beginning of the Modern Movement. This tendency can be traced to HR Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s 1932 exhibition, ‘The International Style,’ held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which excluded all architects who were not engaged with finite, reductive, white or glass cubes. The nineteenth-century steel pioneers, alongside constructivism, expressionism, futurism, naturalism and plasticism were all suppressed.

Rogers quoted in Castle, 1999: 21

Internal Pedagogical Critiques

Dianne Ghirardo, another strong voice among her male architectural counterparts, tried to explain how damaging the views of a body of iconic white, male historians in charge of framing the modern canon was in her own counter-historical text, Architecture after Modernism (1996).

To Curtis, balance implies exorcizing political, social, and ideological considerations of the sort that he finds in the versions of history offered by Kenneth Frampton or Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co (1979), who ‘emphasized ideology at the expense of other matters.’ This critical position – which is by far the dominant one in America, at most admits only passing reference to any larger cultural, political, and social considerations. Instead it involves extended visual analysis, concentrating primarily on a few ‘important’ buildings – the Robie House, the Villa Savoye, and the Kimball Art Museum…Set like jewels into the diadem of architecture, they become aesthetic objects par excellence and above reproach.

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Ghirardo 1996, 111

A new generation of historians now sees critiquing Corbu as an essential method to situate critical architectural methods of critique in pedagogy, but still Corbu’s centrality remains. Attempts to rewrite the canon from a global perspective, or to arrange history thematically to displace the Western narrative, have simply not worked as pedagogical methods. Several deconstructed architecture history texts are on the market (Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, 2007; Bresnahan, Devine, Nay, Shailer and Whyte, 2012; et. al.), but they are challenging to teach and to defend, when not supported by studio practices. International Style modernism remains the default as a result as an operative master framework for seeing the architecture of Others and perpetuating colonialism, sadly.

The question should not be why are more instructors not taking up alternative texts in their survey courses, but, rather, why are these texts more challenging to teach? Where are the moments of discomfort? What tenets do these alternative texts threaten? A new generation of critical architectural historians, who understand and articulate their own relationality to the modern architectural master canon and want to effect change are writing, teaching and practicing architecture, but the studio-driven impetus of architecture and design education demands the canon remain and that we continue to teach Le Corbusier within a system that is hegemonic, colonial and ossified. The literature studying this question is just beginning to emerge in architectural pedagogy (Gürel and Anthony, 2006, et. al.) and the seminars and studios being authored in architecture schools provides the evidence that change is desired (Harris, Dianne (University of Illinois); Wilson, Mable (Columbia University), et. al.) The real change that needs to occur needs to happen earlier, in the introductory history of modern architecture surveys, as these revisionist survey texts suggest. And this needs to be reinforced in studio practices to deconstruct the modern master narrative in theory and in practice.

Conclusion

Le Corbusier’s life and the methods by which his scholars continue to choose to reproduce him as a subject are widely varied. Corbu’s mysterious inner life now seems to be as studied as his actual buildings. Authors like Charles Jencks (Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture, 1973), Simon Richards (Le Corbusier and the Concept of Self, 2003) and more recently, Niklas

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Maak (Le Corbusier, the Architect on the Beach, 2011) each chase an often, tragic construction of Corbu as a mysterious figure, whom we have only just begin to understand. Was Le Corbusier an occultist, a feminist or a fascist? “The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns” (Rybczynski 2008). We should, perhaps, worry more about why we care.

Much of what was accomplished by Corbu in his life and work was accomplished, in part, because of what happened over the years in his small, but legendary, Molitor studio in Paris. His Paris atelier would serve ideologically and practically as the training ground for a generation of modern architects, many of whom would become significant contributors in the extension and expansion of the modern idiom across the planet. Corbu’s famous Le Corbusier’s stamp remains on so many places in the world as a result of his systemic and nearly generational tutorship of a generation of later modern architects in Europe and beyond.

Jean-Louis Cohen has written the latest installment of the grand narrative of modern architectural history for another generation of architecture students (2012) by scrambling the tyranny of historical chronology and using organizational themes like globalization, regionalism, Indigeneity and even sustainability as methods to deconstruct the master narrative and decenter Le Corbusier. Likewise, Vikram Prakash, Mark Jarombek and Francis Ching (2007) have taken up the grand project of rewriting the modern architectural history canon by decentering the West and retelling of this history of modern architecture from a more global and equitable perspective. In their texts, the gaze of the all-knowing historian is not white and does not emanate from Paris, but rather appears spontaneously and transnationally. And while we all may agree “the era that witnessed the prevalence of Western canons in art history has come to a close” (Belting and Buddensig, 2013), I still fail to see much progress to dethrone the masters of modern architecture in the classroom or the master narratives that are reproduced though such a narrow band of foundational texts.

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Conclusion Towards a Post-colonial (Re-)Imagining of Le Corbusier Introduction

In The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design written by Nicholas Pevsner in 1968, there are numerous signs that the Western imperial canon had failed to produce a modern revolution. The work of Banham also reflected this ethos. Under the guise of modern progress tied to social reform, architecture had, indeed, failed miserably to achieve its promises for better social housing and higher standards of living for all. These same failed promises haunt Le Corbusier’s figuration as well. In my interviews, many expressed their regret for Le Corbusier’s “blame” for modern public housing by defending him and his influence as something he had never foreseen or intended (Interviews B, E, H). The buildings, particularly his housing projects for the masses and grand public urban design projects for cities like Algiers, had not produced the social change that Corbu had promised, but their precedential legacy lingered. Le Corbusier’s city-planning work legendarily represents the horror of what modernity could have produced in projects like the Ville Radieuse, which were later incorporated into the Athens Charter (1973). These Lewis Mumford described as “buildings in a parking lot” according to art critic, Howard Kunstler (1993). It is in Le Corbusier’s state of understood failure that his own colonial presence must be seen to persist. It is here that the work of critical race scholarship is most applicable as a critical methodology.

To consider the colonial processes of embodying placelessness specifically as colonial processes, we must recall the colonial city’s routines of governance, including law and policing, that are deeply embedded in the theft of the land and the management of Indigenous populations. Native peoples are simply not seen as real people; what distinguishes them is that they can be violated with impunity. If this relationship is extended to other marginalized populations, its specificity in the case of Indigenous peoples remains connected to the theft of land and the ongoing displacement this theft both requires and produces.

Razack, 2015, 45

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Indigenous scholars, social activists and pedagogical theorists offer the very real possibility of proposing a pathway to re-engage architecture with human history and place in ways that could productively disrupt the hegemonic grip of the white architectural canon and architecture’s pedagogical role in society, with the added caveat that, as Edward Said reminded us, “The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about” (Said 1993, 93). In re-centering the land in architectural discourse, the possibility of re-engaging Western architectural thought with traditions, memories and histories rooted in place that have been systemically eliminated opens up new possibilities for the discipline of architecture to reposition itself.

Identity through occupation first, representation later. In making contemporary Aboriginal architecture, new places containing Aboriginal identity are created which did not exist prior to their design, construction and occupation. Whether a place has recognized cultural significance as an existing sacred ancestral site or whether it has cultural significance as a place newly constructed from other shared histories and identities – such as a cultural centre – the process of place recognition necessitates that its meanings must be socially constructed through a continuity of practices over time.

Fantin, 2017

The figure of Le Corbusier is part of this same vast system in which he serves as an embodied figure meant to represent and carry colonial pedagogical systems forward. While modernity and the canon of modern architectural thought have run their course, it still persists. Modernity’s critiques, both past and present, have produced openings for new frameworks for new critiques, opportunities for previously silenced voices and even permitted the inclusion of overlooked epistemological ways of framing architecture to enter academic discourse and popular imaginaries. This critique is centered on how reframing pedagogies, practices and texts in myriad ways might deconstruct the hegemonic grip of the master narrative by focusing on how we, as a system of educators, produce architects, and thus reproduce colonialism through pedagogy.

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Taking up Other Knowledge Systems as Critique

The subjugation of Indigenous knowledge and occupation of Indigenous land structures all architectural thought and action. Similarly, the practice of framing the traditional architecture of Others as a form of “universally valuable” and “shared” heritage curated from the vantage point of cultural capitals like Paris, only reaffirm the ongoing colonial agenda that modern architecture reproduces. To think through the life, work and figuration of iconic modern architect, Le Corbusier, and his insertion into UNESCO World Heritage policies and discourse permits yet another view into how colonialism and modern architecture are intertwined, and will remain intertwined. This becomes even more problematic, when considering how Western university models replicate and reproduce in the Global South, thus reproducing “a global realization of the contentlessness of the American national idea, which shares the emptiness of the cash-nexus and of excellence” (Readings, 35).

Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Kimberly Crenshaw (1989), bell hooks (1992) and others have argued that intersectionality could be a useful methodological framework to deconstruct the limiting and closed binaries of how the colonial imaginary imagines the Indigenous and the non- Ingenious as a method. Critical race theory and other forms of critique of “domination and subordination” (Pease 2010, 23 in Land 2015, 89) might be repositioned to trouble the interplay of “multiple levels of privilege” (Ibid) as a project within architectural thought. In architectural education, in our studios and in our ways of telling the narratives of modern architectural history, we might (re-)imagine the modern architectural landscape as a site of ongoing colonialism and as a site rich with narratives and subjects otherwise neglected as a means of pedagogical reform. This is the kind of reckoning that might acknowledge historical and ongoing regimes of social injustice practiced pedagogically and hegemonically using architecture as a method.

The settler’s town is a strongly built town, all made of stone and steel. It is a brightly lit town; the streets are paved with asphalt, and the garbage cans swallow all the leavings, unseen, unknown, and hardly thought about. The settler’s feet are never visible, except perhaps in the sea; but there you're never close enough to see them. His feet are protected by strong shoes although the streets of his town are clean and even, with no

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holes or stones. The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settler’s town is a town of white people, of foreigners. Fanon 1968, 38-39, as quoted in Çelik 1997, 4

In this project, my intentions were to discuss how architecture, heritage and modernity (as well as patriarchy, white supremacy and Eurocentrism) intersect using UNESCO’s (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) 2016 decision to enshrine Le Corbusier on the World Heritage List as a key case study. Methodologically I chose to look at and critique how one particular modern architect could be seen as possessing “outstanding universal value” to investigate how we see and use Le Corbusier pedagogically to systematically frame architecture in the settler colonial context. The lasting effect is the perpetuation of a pedagogy and culture that is colonial, hegemonic and ossified. As Beatriz Colomina has so articulately expressed:

Architectural pedagogy has become stale. Schools spin old wheels as if something is happening but so little is going on. Students wait for a sense of activist engagement with a rapidly evolving world but graduate before it happens. The fact that they wait for instruction is already the problem. Teachers likewise worry too much about their place in the institutional hierarchies. Curricular structures have hardly changed in recent decades, despite the major transformations that have taken place with the growth of globalisation, new technologies, and information culture. As schools appear to increasingly favour professionalisation, they seem to drown in self-imposed bureaucratic oversight, suffocating any possibility for the emergence of experimental practices and failures. There are a few attempts to wake things up here and there but it’s all so timid in the end. There is no real innovation.

Colomina, 2012

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Resisting the Colonial

As stated in “The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015),” “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic,’ there would be no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights.” The key outcome in this thesis centers on how Indigenous epistemologies and voices could reframe the subjectivity of the land to subvert the colonial gaze and describe a path going forward for deconstructing how “dominant American-European thought has conceptualized (modern architecture) in hegemonic material terms” (Craith, Böser and Devasundaram, 2016). To achieve this goal, the discourse of anti- colonialism and decolonization needs to be taken up in architectural critique using the voices and methods of Indigenous scholars and settler scholars who work with decolonization and pedagogy at the forefront of their own imaginaries (Kovach, 2009; Kuokkanen, 2007; Land, 2015; Tuck and McKenzie, 2015; Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 1998; et. al.). The idea is that these voices can provide not just a road map for positioning future resistant architectural practices, but also provide clear methods for how architecture, heritage and culture might re-see itself as a method of critique to destabilize master narratives and to reframe an architecture that values places and narratives over property and white supremacy.

As Mishuana Goeman has suggested, this is the time for a “disrupting a settler-colonial grammar of place” (2014). Institutions and “ideological projects” such as UNESCO’s World Heritage program remain ossified by their own colonial agendas, which continue to reify the master narrative and reaffirm the centrality of the canon of modern architectural pedagogy – all shaped by the ongoing presence of a very select group of “modern masters” like Le Corbusier. This regime of reification and domination, is further materialized through the apparition of Western architectural forms, methods and spatialities situated offshore, which perpetuates architectural thought and production as a form of “ethnocentric tunnel vision” (Porter 16).

Martin Cannon, whose work in settler colonialism (2017, 2011) and pedagogy has focused on the complexity facing educators charged with decolonizing education today and how to deal with colonial dominance and racism as a pedagogical problem, is among those whose voices might provoke an architectural response. Cannon asks, “How might we work in collation with

152 privileged learners – and especially with new Canadians – to consider matters of land, citizenship and colonization? an approach to teaching that disrupts the binary of self/Other?” (2011, 21). What would we like to happen in architectural education today that might do this work? The interests and attention of a new generation of architectural students may not be fully invested in seeing architecture as either critical or political, as was the case in the late 1960s, or even in the deconstructivist days of the late 1980s. But students are interested in how architecture can be framed as social justice through activism and community-based initiatives. They want their work to matter to someone other than themselves.

Kevin Kumashiro, whom Canon uses in his own work, has suggested, “The first approach to addressing oppression focuses on improving the experiences of students who are Othered, or in some way oppressed, in and by mainstream society” (26). A project like decolonizing Canadian curricula might be presented in a number of ways, ranging from art practices (Nagam et. al. 2014), the retelling of missing social narratives (Byrd, 2011; Daschuk, 2014; Madden 2009; Simpson, 2014; et. al.) or by simply permitting foundational epistemological concepts like framing the land as a subject in architectural discourse as a beginning.

Canada: Decolonization and Architectural Futurity

The Canadian government is officially working towards institutionalizing systems of reconciliation between its First Nations population and the Canadian state. While there is as much well-placed criticism as there is praise, as Cannon suggests, the conversation has just begun and settlers must now recognize Indigenous voices. While the project of decolonization is not uniquely Canadian, Canada has drawn much of its strength and cultural currency from the landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission report that is now being read across all educational institutions in the country, particularly at the university level, where administrators and educators confront and act upon very clear criteria laid out in the report (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).

While the grand project of decolonizing architectural education remains a highly fraught and aspirational project, the project of decolonizing curricula is perhaps more conceivable as both a conversation and as a critique of past pedagogies using settler colonialism to facilitate a critique of colonialism, quite literally on the ground, using the land as a method. The best method to

153 facilitate decolonization in architectural pedagogy may be to shift the discourse from the discussion of decolonization, which may remain abstract in the settler imaginary, to the need to reckon with “settler decolonization” (Lowman and Barker, 2015). Lowman and Barker specifically address the impacts of settler identification and reckoning as a critical step in enacting “settler decolonization” (Ibid, 123). By taking up “active identification as a Settler Canadian” the effect could be to “signal to others that we are ready and committed to honestly addressing settler colonialism in Canada…” (Ibid).

Edward Said, the late Palestinian intellectual, Columbia university professor and author of Orientalism (1978), presented a method for performing a structural analysis of post-colonial theory in his work that differed from Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, et. al. Said merged literary theory and Foucauldian discourse to situate a method to view how culture is produced within ongoing colonial systems. Said asked how is culture made and for what purposes, by focusing on the historical discourse that produced colonialism. The historical reality of European colonial domination and imperialist exploitation required that a pedagogical system be in place to deliver this message through European scholars who situated themselves in the position to gaze upon and, therefore, primitivize the exotic Other, according to Said. To be in a positon to study this alien Otherness for purely one’s own colonizing purposes produces problems. Said traces the production of “the Orient” in the Western imaginary as an extension of the colonial project. This gaze continues using the architectural heritage of Others tinged with a desire to observe how the lessons of pure modernism also becomes bastardized as it travels to more remote locales.

Said’s Marxist and poststructuralist influenced edifice can be reduced to that classic postcolonial equation, expressed most lucidly by Aimé Cesaire: “colonization = thingification. Said’s formula became the material and symbolic means which ultimately endowed the subordinated heterodoxic scholars in the field with the means to speak truth to power. It became a critical intervention and a methodology, which challenged and consequently, weakened the institutionalised position-takings and strategies of exclusion that ensured the reproduction of power’s hegemonic discourses.

Azeez, 711

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By inviting settler colonial critiques of institutions and practices, such as UNESCO World Heritage constructions, conversation and pedagogical practices can change. Methods that inform how land is part of a colonial practice can alter architectural education, and produce the demand to reckon with settler colonialism and settlers. Reckoning with settler emplacement could change the view that settlers are comfortably grounded and at home in their new worlds, and force them to recognize that colonialism is an ongoing condition and that the violence, dispossession and occupation attached to settler colonialism is ongoing. Settler colonialism is not historical, nor will it end anytime soon. Indigenous activists and scholars continue to demand that settler colonialism must be reckoned in the present tense to acknowledge settler complicity and responsibility as a fundamental framework for viewing actions, conditions and pedagogies as a research methodology situated in the present in lived lives in material spaces dominated by colonial structures (Land, 2015; Smith, 1998; Tuck, 2015; et. al.).

Of course, colonization itself is spatially practised and the processes by which Australia was colonized – its dispossessing, violent and profoundly disruptive force – were pointedly concerned with moving Aboriginal people off land where they were not desired, and locating them either by intent or by default in contexts amenable to particular forms of surveillance and physical and social control. The construction of towns and cities involved the organization of space in ways that marginalized Indigenous people, and perpetuated Eurocentric narratives of settler superiority (physically and morally, as well as politically) and Indigenous erasure.

Potter, 133

Rather than seeing colonialism as a historical project situated in the past, settler colonialism needs to be reframed within a regime in the present, as evidenced by ongoing practices and belief systems that perpetuate settler colonialism in order to reproduce and perpetuate racist, classist and marginalizing projects and to uphold a colonial social order. Texts, too, in this sense, can produce occupation. The colonization of the architectural history text often manifests itself in later appended revisions and appendixes meant to add multicultural content to colonial narratives. For example, the third edition of the text, Modern Architecture Since 1900 (Curtis, 1986) has been radically revised and expanded, incorporating much new material and a fresh

155 appreciation for regional identity and variety. Seven chapters have been added since the original publication, including expanded coverage of recent world architecture.

Methods for recognizing the value of the architecture of Others appear in hastily added on chapters and appendices as last chances to redeem and remarket stale texts, always from a colonizing or Orientalizing perspective. Within each of these retellings, Indigenous architecture, like Indigenous bodies and presences, are rarely acknowledged and assumed to be both meaningless and transient, which provides a viable excuse for their exclusion. Paul Memmot laments that “only a few examples (of Indigenous architecture) seem to have been recorded in the ethnographic literature, of architecture having specific semiotic references” (1996, 82).

There is also an established body of writing about (Aboriginal) architecture containing representations and abstractions of ideas of Aboriginality (authors include Paul Memmott, Kim Dovey, Mathilde Lochert, Rory Spence, Cathy Keyes, Joe Reser, Catherine Chambers, Mike Austin and myself)…In contrast, this essay draws on another emerging body of built work to explore architectural processes and projects that might imbue architecture with Aboriginal identity through client involvement and authorization, through respecting Aboriginal social practices and revering existing places and histories, without attempting to abstract them into semiotic devices in form, plan or section.

Fantin, 2017

Challenging the Canon

Architecture is a complicated field and there are many deterrents to decolonizing architectural education that are practical, theoretical and economic. Authors like Rebecca Henn (2013) have argued that even by using such newly acquired critical lenses, centuries of building traditions and construction standards cannot simply be erased without understanding the co-evolution of human and building performance socio-culturally as a project. As a non-Indigenous scholar (and architect), I readily acknowledge that this work requires a reckoning with my own privilege and positionality as a first step, and I acknowledge that this project must be rooted in

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“understand(ing)...engagement with Indigenous people within a broad moral and political framework” (Land, 203) as well as a consideration of listening to what Indigenous architects have asked non-Indigenous architects to consider, and using this as a framework to critique how we teach architecture today in the absence of decolonization to support a hegemonic program that maintains architecture’s colonial underpinnings.

Douglas Cardinal, who is of Métis and Blackfoot heritage, and is known for his flowing curves and canon-rupturing modern buildings such as the First Nations University of Canada, in Regina, provides this kind of voice. However, his voice is noticeably absent from every major architectural text used in classrooms across North America today. Cardinal’s work is an exercise in methodology, which becomes apparent in how he speaks about his works, his clients and how he sees himself. Andrea Smith writes, “Our goal may not be to ‘understand’ the Native but to challenge the grid of intelligibility under which the Native is known” (Smith, A., 2013, 270).

Huot, himself of Huron-Wendat decent, says he did not want a concrete- and-glass square, an architectural form that Cardinal has shunned his entire career. “It’s not just a function of a building, it’s a function of a home that means something to our clients,” he says. Cardinal, who has yet to begin technical work on the project, says he’d like to create a structure that can promote healing through a design bonded to the natural rhythms of his native sensibilities. “I think it’s a real opportunity to show the true beauty and value of the First Nations philosophy and to be able to express it in the design of the building . . . to show an alternative to (Anishnawbe Toronto’s current) buildings that I don’t feel really have an empathy for people at all.”

Hall, 2014

Laurentian University, located in Sudbury on the ancestral land of the Rama Nation, was the first new Canadian architecture program established in over forty years. Its program is framed as having a curriculum centered on the “architecture of the North” including acknowledgement and curricular responsibility for teaching in place, and in relationship to its responsibility to the land, the people and the epistemological traditions of the people’s whose land the university occupies. The end result is a deconstructed curriculum, that satisfies the legal requirements for achieving

157 architectural licensure by the Canadian state, but without compromising the school’s pedagogical intent. The methods employed to achieve these goals in the classroom include: “exposing students to real community issues and hands-on building experience…including the design and construction of ice-fishing , canoes, saunas, and other northern artifacts;” “understanding of the importance of collaboration and interaction with other students, faculty, and community groups;” and learning “how to work with northern communities and help shape your own community upon graduation” (Laurentian University, Architectural Studies, 2018).

The enduring problem in the grand project of settler colonialism, settler reckoning and decolonization requires that a certain relation to power must be reckoned with to critique how and who gets to decide where it is that Indigenous critiques might enter discourse. The ways in which settler colonialism systemically and habitually destroys to replace is significant to my project. It also underscores the necessity to understand a broader context for how settler emplacement is enacted. Drawing from Sherene Razack’s recent text, Dying from Improvement, the legacy of settler emplacement can be seen in how Indigenous deaths are treated by the Canadian state as evidence of ongoing and violent, colonial regimes. This regime reproduces the Indigenous body and Indigenous land, in conflation, as something that is diseased and unworthy of acknowledgement and preservation in the settler imaginary according to Razack. As Razack states, “…the most pernicious myth that inquests and inquiries install is the idea that Indigenous peoples possess a mysterious incapacity for modern life” (2015, 19).

The activity of clearing settler spaces of Indigenous bodies becomes morally defensible if Indigenous people can in fact be turned into debris, a transformation that is accomplished by viewing the Indigenous body as sick, dysfunctional, and self-destructive.

Razack, 2015, 17

The production of contemporary World Heritage sites also demands the conflation of bodies, places and narratives. Yet, also represents another settler reality, settler emplacement, which requires a death of the Land of its Indigenous peoples to succeed.

The relation between place and language in settler literature is already a thoroughly studied question. Usually, attention is paid to the act of naming

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or renaming places and phenomena, with reference to the entire range of implications from Adamic assumptions of baptizing empty space and uninscribed land, to the question of linguistic intrusion and dominance (e.g., questions of the capacity of European languages to describe or represent radically other climates and landscapes, and questions of the connotative baggage of the language of the old country and the possibility of appropriating or indigenizing English for it to establish non- contradictory cultural links to the new landscape). Within this complex range of perspectives, the question of identity has by far been the biggest theme of interest, circling around concerns with the productions of cultural and national identities and identity hierarchies within the settler nation, representations and assertions of native and non-native identities, and cultural differences and hybridizations.

Moslund, 154

The power and politics of naming grafts colonial landscapes in place. Place names (or toponyms) use a single word or series of words to distinguish and identify one place from another. According to Kearns and Berg (1996), place-naming plays a key role in the social construction of space and the contested process of attaching meaning to places (Alderman, 196). Furthermore, “Much of the critical place-name research recognizes that naming can be used as a tool of control, a means of inscribing and reifying certain cultural and political ideologies” (Ibid, 204).

Given this context, the seemingly benign colonial acts of naming and interpreting heritage sites should be seen as requiring a more expanded set of “ethnographic approaches in the critical study of (world) heritage to shift the focus from the reified objects and places that occupy the Western colonial imaginary to ponder how heritage values and meaning function, including everyday life, and in particular on the complex global-to-global deliberations in which they are formed and expressed.

Salazar, 148

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In the Australian Aboriginal context, Aileen Moreton-Robinson approaches property by focusing on whiteness’ historical preoccupation with slavery and migration as a means to achieve a continuing regime of “white possession,” which remains forever tied to the “disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty” to support an ongoing settler colonial regime that is alive and well today. (2015) The transformation of land into property is the central intellectual task of colonialism, and it is the protection of property that becomes the basis for law in many ways. This use of the law of property renders that land as a fixed resource to be exploited and used, rather than perceived as beloved relative (1993,1715).

The colonizing, and patriarchal, grand gestures embedded in the colonial logic of architectural regionalism, too, demonstrates colonial desires, centered on white desire to possess and manage the material culture of Others using the neoliberal notion of “shared” cultural value for all as a justification for, often violent, action. These grand gestures, based in the colonial knowing and naming of places, allows settlers to remain innocent, at least in their minds.

Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all. In fact, settler scholars may gain professional kudos or a boost in their reputations for being so sensitive or self-aware. Yet settler moves to innocence are hollow, they only serve the settler.

Tuck and Yang, 10

Following the precedent of continental thinkers such as Heidigger, the Western canon acknowledges that place and “situatedness” play a critical part in our human understanding of existence, and because all bodily experiences are spatially situated, this situatedness remains unstable and unfixed. This concept is explored in Heidigger’s concept of Dasein, and is still taught by having architecture students read Building Dwelling Thinking (1977) and Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1969) in their entirety or in excerpts in edited volumes like Kate Nesbitt’s Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture (1996). De Certeau (1984) also explores how people actively construct knowledge of the world by moving through places (Van Dyke, 46).

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However, in each of these examples, phenomenology fails to truly place us outside of the normative discourse of the modern architectural canon despite good intentions. “Buildings, shrines, rock art, and tombs are likely to be symbolically charged in the construction of social memory...Sometimes places are no longer inhabited by the living but become the residences of mythic or remembered ancestors” (Van Dyke 46). The result is that, “One serious problem with any phenomenological interpretation, however, is that spatial perceptions emerge not only out of bodily experiences, but also out of situated cultural knowledge” (Ibid, 47). Therefore, if terra nullius seems like an archaic and distant practice, it is important to recognize that this notion can serve as a critical framework for reflective architectural practice today. This emulates the premise of Donald Schön’s work (1984), but with a new focus and new demands on an expanded framework that might draw upon Indigenous epistemologies centered on the land as a subject. These practices, if left untended or un-reckoned with can only be re-enacted to ensure that settler emplacement continues.

Critical Methods: Narratives Told Through Place

One effective method to consider confronting settler colonialism, racism and other forms of architectural oppression is the teaching of a “pedagogy of place.” Pedagogy of place follows the arguments of many Indigenous scholars who propose that such a pedagogy depends upon a disassociation with the critiques of white critical geographers. Cynthia Chambers writes about the possibilities of “a curriculum of place” as a method going forward by drawing from her past and her identity as a method.

So what is this notion of being positioned in place that is so foreign to settler-colonial minds? Cynthia Little, again, explains by referring to yet another Indigenous scholar, Keith Basso, who describes his experience with understanding place using a Western Apache epistemological framework (Basso, 1970) slowly started to understand that the morality of the people resided in the landscape and that particular places and sites, rocks and river beds had Apache names and Apache stories.

Little, 32

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A more thorough contemplation of what land means might provide an entirely disruptive epistemological foundation to derail how the land has been positioned and imagined in the architectural imaginary that only knows land as property and raw material to be exploited and developed. Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie write, “Relational validity prioritizes the reality that human life is connected to and dependent upon other species and the land” (2015, 636).

I wish I could address this matter from an elevated moral plane or a politically neutral space where I'm not implicated, or complicit, in that about which I am critical but that is another myth, one I believed for a long time. After a decade of working for aboriginal governments – as a teacher, researcher, community development worker, curriculum developer and administrator – I turned to the university as a place where I believed – ironically – that I could speak with authority regardless of race and gender- where it didn't matter that I wasn’t Dene or Inuit or that I didn’t grow up on the trapline. This is the naive fantasy of a white person.

Chambers, 27–28

Reframing social histories through the eyes and experiences of another, including seeing the land as another subject, is an important means to critically re-read human narratives otherwise left untold or undervalued by dominant story tellers. Cynthia Chambers refers to this as a form of “visiting” places, that has nothing to do with tourism, but has everything to do with seeing and renewing relationships through a practice of “place-making” (2006).

As a material example, Paula Madden’s retelling of how African Nova Scotians and Mi’kmaw social histories were intertwined is unearthed by revisiting the richness of stories told in place, by retelling untold stories through multiple lenses and frameworks that unearth erased narratives by re-centering place and the land as a methodology. (2009) Similarly, critical race scholars like David Goldberg (2006) and Sherene Razack (2002) have told their own stories of racial and spatial injustice to produce moments of uncomfortable, but productive reckoning with a purpose by situating narratives in space and place as a method to deconstruct the modern notion of space and place as fixed ontological objects.

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Space is not a kind of pure, given form, but is a set of structures and relations that have to be learned, absorbed into what is taken for granted, and constantly acquired in everyday life. These structures and relations may be highly codified and defined very strictly in social terms, or very flexibly, or both at different times and seasons. As the rhythms and activities of a society change through the day and the year, so the use and meanings of space that are appropriate for a given phase or moment will shift as well.

Gilsenan 187

When Renisa Mawani (2005) performs an analysis of the “genealogies of the land” to unearth layers of erased narratives, bodies and spatialities in the land or when Derek Hook’s (2005) analyses focuses on the haunting of figures who are ever-present by their own erasure, new methods emerge. Hook explains how situating the uncanny presence of “haunted” figures present in both real and imagined space in narratives can become a methodology for reckoning. Hook states, “The uncanniness of monuments operates not only in how they evoke a sense of presence, but also, so it would seem, by the way they evoke certain kinds of absence” (699). Scholars like Sherene Razack suggest that “ghosts take up space and exploring haunting is a form of un-mapping.” (2002). Furthermore, Razack (2002) advocates spatialization as a strategy to “dislodge naturalized racialization and spatialization processes to reveal (the) settler mythologies underpinning them” (Baloy 213).

If one understands Europe’s modernity—a long process of five centuries— as the unfolding of new possibilities derived from its centrality in world history and the corollary constitution of all other cultures as its periphery, it becomes clear that, even though all cultures are ethnocentric, modern European ethnocentrism is the only one that might pretend to claim universality for itself. By the early twentieth century, European modernism had evolved into an ideological social project, seeking to remake social institutions…which formed a clear ideological project.

Davidson, C., 9

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Reckoning is a critical methodological tool. Sherene Razack writes, “When we view ourselves as innocent, we cannot confront the hierarchies that operate among us” (Fellows and Razack, 335). Taking Razack’s warning to heart, I must acknowledge that here are numerous risks involved in taking up such a project, including reaffirming the white canon, reifying the colonial gaze and further marginalizing Indigenous peoples by trivializing their traditions and practices as a form of knowledge reduced to a commodity. The “settler colonial project,” as Razack has stated is highly fraught, and my own “positionality” is something I must too reckon with to be permitted to even enter this work.

Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests that the links between race, sovereignty, and “white” possession are always centered on “property.” And if the quintessential framing of land in the Western capitalist lens owes its legacy to Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and the project of the Enlightenment that we all live with today, then Moreton-Robinson’s analysis of the “white possessive” (2015) that follows on Cheryl Harris’ foundational legal argument that “whiteness” is itself legally a form of property (1993), allows Moreton-Robinson to expand Harris’ argument by intertwining notions of owning property, human beings as property, and dispossession from the land as part of a larger more insidious settler colonial project that is ongoing with the assault of the figure of the land at the epicenter of colonial dispossession and settler conquest

Patrick Wolfe, too, reminds us, “Settler colonialism was foundational to modernity” (Wolfe, 394). Likewise, “the insatiable dynamic whereby settler colonialism always needs more land” (Ibid, 395) is foundational to the rift between how Indigenous people and settler colonists are able to see the same body of land using altogether different epistemological lenses. The land remains central in discussions of Indigeneity, sovereignty and settler colonialism (and heritage too). As Cole Harris writes, “For 150 years a contested division of land between Natives and non-Natives has underlain the Canadian province of ” (Harris, C. 293).

Others have seen how modern networks and systems – like food security, air quality and the futurity of work – remain permanently condemned by an unfettered human desire to over- consume as an irreversible by-product of modernism with the goal of replacing fair trade and green consumerism serving only those in wealthy first world nations (Davidson and Hartt, 2005). Others like Hilton (2009) and Grimes and Milgram (2000) look towards “the vibrant but

164 unknown movements” of localized forms of informal consumerism that exist outside of Western prototypes, but always on the shadow of an ongoing colonial project.

Postmodern Reform: The Failure of

Postmodern architecture and design historians and theorists (e.g., Pallasmaa, 2012; Rossi, Aldo 1966; Rowe 1978; Venturi 1966; et al) had tried to resituate the architectural concepts of space and place in Other places for some time. They did this in an effort to displace universal modernity within an expanded geographical context and moreover a geopolitical context that more perceptively considered the social, economic and political circumstances of peoples’ lived experience and the very real human narratives that both haunt places and produce memorable architecture.

Since the nineties, both material and experiential space have been resituated using temporality and culture by applying a variety of critical lenses ranging from politics and ideology to architectural criticism as a by-product of late capitalism (e.g., Lefebvre 1992; Tafuri 1976) and other phenomena. As Stefan Kipfer and Richard Milgrom (both urban planners) point out, “Since the late 1980s, and the publication of Edward Soja’s postmodern geography, Lefebvre has mostly been interpreted as a forerunner of poststructuralist and post-colonial currents in urban studies. In both cases, Lefebvre’s writings on cities, urbanization, and space have thus been a key source for the ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences…” (2002, 38).

Other architectural theorists have also chosen to view architectural space using the frameworks of phenomenology or metaphysics (e.g., Otero-Pailos 2010; Pallasmaa 2011; Tuan 1977) as methods to capture or conceptualize the ephemeral qualities of place and space within a broader historical framework by focusing on human occupation and urban settlement patterns (e.g., Kostoff 1995; Scully 1993). Jean-Louis Cohen (2012) and Francis D. K. Ching, Vikramaditya Prakash and Mark Jarzombek (2007) attempted to rewrite the modern canon by re-orienting the authoritarian gaze of the colonist and underplaying the primacy of the West as a method.

Architecture has tried before to reckon with its colonial past, its colonizing gaze and its privileged positionality. One method framed as a form of critical modern architectural practice, made famous by Kenneth Frampton over two decades ago, is critical regionalism. Critical regionalism was a form of critique that could be taught and practiced as a form of resistance to

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Corbusiern and Bauhausian modernity. Rooted in the work of Paul Ricouer (1965), Frampton’s critique of modernity drew from traditions that seemed to defy the colonial constructions that modernity depended upon, both literally and ideologically. Stone, wood, , arches and regional crafts were championed as a way to regain the local. Frampton did not invent the theory of critical regionalism, he merely made it palatable and popular, as Keith Eggener reminds us in his own critique of the theory, which he likened to a post-colonial fantasy (Eggener, 2002).

Critical regionalism first appeared in the work of Liane Lefaivre and Alex Tzonis in an article interpreting the work of Greek architects Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis (1985). Lafaivre’s and Tzonis’ approach was later expanded in successive articles, and once critical regionalism finally appeared in books like Tropical Architecture, A Global Regionalism (2003), the theory became widely accepted and established as part of the postmodern canon. “Critical Regionalism has to be understood as a marginal practice, one which, while it is critical of modernization, nonetheless still refuses to abandon the emancipatory and progressive aspects of the modern architectural legacy” (Frampton 1997, 327). Critical regionalism “was said to eschew both the placeless homogeneity of much mainstream modernism and the superficial historicism of so much postmodern work” (Eggener, 228) to describe a new form of critical practice that might be situated in place, in social narratives and in respecting Indigenous traditions, at least materially.

By popularizing the term “critical regionalism” in the modern architectural community in the 1980s, the iconic modern architectural historian Kenneth Frampton used his own manufactured postmodern theoretical framework to define a new form of modernity-inflected architectural preservation as a system to reposition postmodern critical praxis. Frampton’s initial historical methodology was to curate a body of global modern architect whose practices were not universal, nor European, nor white – but infused with place, time and tradition – as a form of paradoxical anti-universal modernism. Frampton’s theories were revolutionary and deeply flawed, but were among the first fulsome efforts to broach the idea of a modern architecture embedded in place, albeit from the framing of Western epistemologies of place as the only ones of value. Frampton’s theory of critical regionalism thus artfully creates a sanitized race-neutral version of material culture without any recognition how this framing reproduces race, gender and class, and reaffirms the colonial power of the modern architectural canon and the modern masters as part of the process. The universalizing tendencies that critical regionalism was meant to critique and even eradicate are merely reproduced as Frampton applies his theory to architects

166 and architectures across the globe using his privileged positionality in a way that merely reproduces the colonial project and reintroduces settler colonialism as a critical frame

Frampton’s methods were touristic, colonial and steeped in privilege. However, his methods appeared to be diverse, inclusive and multicultural. To achieve his goals, Frampton often sought out and identified architects who had been trained in the modernist Corbusiern tradition (very often in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier) who then reframed their own practices by rejecting their European masters and returning home to Mexico, Portugal, etc. to establish their own offices where they could practice “locally inflected” versions of mostly Corbusiern architectural practices. Their methods were linguistic, and inasmuch, could be critiqued using local idioms, materials and craft to assess value. Others (Eggener, et. al.) have seen critical regionalism as a postmodern colonial practice, and Frampton, too, has always recognized its limits. However, despite Frampton’s attempt to deconstruct universal modernism and the centrality of Le Corbusier, the colonial and orientalizing tendencies of the modern project remained in place, as does the centrality of Le Corbusier as a figure, in his version of critical regionalism. Ultimately this narrative and all other master narratives still relied upon the Western modern canon and the colonizing gaze as a foundational and pedagogical norm.

The subtext of critical regionalism is a story that repeats colonial themes of conquest, assimilation, erasure and racism. Keith Eggener bluntly reminds us, “Insufficiently recognized is the fact that critical regionalism is, at heart, a post-colonial concept” (2002, 234). “Critical regionalism has to be understood as a marginal practice, one which, while it is critical of modernization, nonetheless still refuses to abandon the emancipatory and progressive aspects of the modern architectural legacy” (1997, 327). It was, however, Kenneth Frampton’s invocation of critical regionalism as a corrective place-based method for how to design in context that made the most progress and stuck within the academies and offices. His theory was also a call to arms against the hollowed-out shells of inferior modernism that he saw more and more, every day across the global landscape, and more often in places outside of Paris, New York and Berlin.

Architects practicing in this mode of consciousness would overcome their colonial and Western cultural biases and deconstruct the artificial binaries of modernist thinking like seeing forms as being either being “imported” or “local” as either “good” or “bad” by observing and questioning their own architectural decision-making processes in site and in place. These processes might be

167 expressed through materials, fabrication methods, historical references or symbolic meanings using this form of culturally reflexive practice, but in a practice that is marginal by definition. Others preceded Frampton in this kind of thinking, and many shared his concerns about modernity’s banality, as well as its colonizing affects. The desire to search for answers in architectural practices outside of Western Europe and America was also a factor. Lewis Mumford’s thinking was, like Frampton’s, deeply phenomenological. However, he went beyond making “the best use of local resources” (1941, 31) to embrace “the regional element” (Ibid, 51) as an embodied “consciousness” that surpassed the geographical and the technological to “transcend the local” (Ibid, 52), in his quest for a meaningful architecture, as early as 1941.

In his later work, Frampton returns to similar ideas in his follow-up text, Studies in Tectonic Culture, the Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (1996). Frampton states, “Utzon’s short stay in Morocco in 1948 was already indicative of his affinity for the Orient. There he became involved with designs for a gravity-fed paper mill and a stepped housing scheme, both being inspired by indigenous prototypes” (1996, 253). The colonial imaginary survives and thrives in modernity, and architectural heritage persists as a method to enact colonialism and further settler emplacement, which now includes the modern architectural heritage of the colonized as well, with the assistance of UNESCO and the World Heritage Committee.

Le Corbusier: Unending Empire and Chandigarh

There is insidiousness to modern architecture that remains palpable. It is revealed in modernity’s dark side – the desire to conquer, commodify and marginalize despite the “outstanding universal value” of a shared global civilization it seeks to identify. When Kenneth Frampton wrote about Le Corbusier’s work in India, he acknowledged Corbu’s racist limitations. He also noted how Le Corbusier “misread key aspects of the Indian vernacular” somewhat deliberately as a right afforded to him by virtue of his intellectual and social privilege, remarking how Le Corbusier was somehow convinced that only he was capable of capturing the “monumentality of the Mughal empire.” Indeed, guided by his singular vision, Le Corbusier believed he, alone, would channel “cross cultural resonances” as a perpetuation of the settler colonial fantasy, the modern project and the legacy of the grand tour (2001 198).

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As far as the residential fabric is concerned, it has to be conceded that the Corbusiern design team failed to anticipate how Indian society would develop under the impact of modernization and how, where prosperous, it would also begin to demand air conditioning, not to mention the other accouterments of the consumer society, all of which have led to a departure from the traditional way of life for which the dwelling units had been originally designed.

Frampton 2000, 199

Others too, have found the chinks in Le Corbusier’s methodological armor. “What we find is that Le Corbusier follows and repeats architectural conventions or standards that attempt to control (the image of women and nature) through privileging the position of men/architecture over women/nature,” and in so doing,

Le Corbusier reveals traces of himself and the role he envisioned for women (and others) as well as their position within his architectural and artistic production; in other words, the representations of architecture reveal the classical structure of patriarchal oppression working within traditional architectural representation.

Carranza, 71

Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh, India represents a number of seminal flaws in the architect’s ideological and personal trajectory, and exercises his colonial fantasies to imagine a build a modern democratic state abroad in an orgiastic frenzy of intentions and white fantasy. This project was an important commission. By this phase in Le Corbusier’s career, he had moved far beyond the making of precious objects, like his Parisian villas, to explore architecture as a lasting mark on the world that would serve as his legacy. The material expression he chose used far more brutal rough concrete and simpler, consciously primitive forms. The machine was no longer the metaphor, nor were the modern utopic fantasies of his youth. While much has been written about Chandigarh from a colonial perspective, this work also represents his personal struggles with his mortality, his unrealized legacy and other delusions that led him to believe he was indeed building for the gods.

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To finally and successfully include Chandigarh in the third attempt to achieve UNESCO World Heritage listing for Le Corbusier was crucial. In 2016, the third attempt to include Le Corbusier in a transnational serial nomination was successful, but there had been much work behind the scenes to achieve this. One senior official noted that the reasons for India’s lack of support for the nomination were complicated and tied to the nature of Indian bureaucracy. For example, the Chandigarh complex actually straddled two Indian states and the layers of government included these states, the city and other organizations.

As one interviewed expert explained, World Heritage produces a threat that real estate values will plunge and, in the minds of many in Chandigarh, development will be controlled by outside forces (the West) (Interview I, 2017). Thus, the critical inclusion of Chandigarh, its unruly behavior towards its colonizers and the forces of global capital produced difficulties for the experts in Paris to get their job done. One of my interviewees candidly explained that Chandigarh was seen as a “rogue nation state…a former colony gone mad.” This same expert spoke to me at length about the problems of UNESCO World Heritage inscription and the ongoing “colonial project” it represented (Interview E, 2017). To guarantee that Le Corbusier’s now sized-down oeuvre (seventeen projects in total) would indeed pass, there had to be a project in India to represent Le Corbusier’s work as an urban designer and as a critical component to demonstrate his global legacy.

The vision that shaped Chandigarh is under fresh scrutiny in the wake of Le Corbusier controversy. Haaretz, Israel’s left-liberal newspaper, noted that the principles of urban planning that Le Corbusier championed dismantled and undermined the (idea of) traditional city…And those principles, at once subversive and totalitarian, are written all over Chandigarh. Epitomised by its hierarchical structure with the oddly-named Capitol Complex, the hub of political power comprising the State Secretariat, the Assembly and the High Court, designated as the “head” of the city; the commercial centre its “heart”; and housing and other facilities as “arms.” People took a backseat in Le Corbusier’s scheme of thing.

Harretz, 2016

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After reading stacks of reports that were commissioned to analyze the range of management risks that Chandigarh presented (risks that simply did not exist in Paris or Marseille), a clear image of the occupation of Chandigarh became clear. One report detailed the unique upkeep and maintenance needs of the aging concrete at Chandigarh, which was spalling and cracking as well as alive with mold and algae. These problems were due to the hot moist climate and the utter incompatibility of Le Corbusier’s concrete techniques for that part of the world. Additional reports stressed needs for adequate security and tourist management, once UNESCO World Heritage status was achieved. Report after report presented dangers and risk that none of the properly managed European, Japanese or Argentinian sites had.

The story of the numerous attempts to nominate Le Corbusier’s oeuvre was described again and again as being “complicated” and “difficult” each time as the “rogue state” of India was framed using the language of the colonizer. This language, in interview after interview, was repeated as being rooted in India’s inability to “manage its own affairs.” In the end, only the Secretariat Building in Le Corbusier’s vast Chandigarh project was nominated, which one architectural historian lamented devalued Le Corbusier’s overall legacy as an urban designer and presented and “incomplete picture” of his legacy (Interview I, 2017).

While the Chandigarh administration has been pushing the city’s case since 2006, its dossier on the proposed nomination did not cut ice with the Culture Ministry earlier. In 2006-07, Chandigarh featured on a tentative list drawn up by UNESCO but in 2010, decision on it was deferred again. India along with France, Belgium, Argentina and Switzerland will send a transnational nomination for the architectural works of Le Corbusier.

Vishnoi, 2013

When combing through the nominations at ICOMOS’ headquarters in Paris, and looking at files filled with reports, email exchanges and documents produced in support of all three Le Corbusier nominations, Chandigarh is revealed as a very necessary colonial conquest. It was expressed that largely because Chandigarh appeared again and again as a “rogue state,” the limits of World Heritage site-management capabilities were in doubt. (Interview A, 2017) The language and messages repeated in the reams of Chandigarh correspondence and in interviews demonstrated a fantasy of continuation of post-colonial rule and white supremacy centered on acquiring the

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Chandigarh site as an essential conquest to fulfill the edges of an ever-present ongoing empire as viewed from Paris.

Remedies: Imagining Place-based Heritage and the Burra Charter

Drawing from Australia’s reckoning with its own Indigenous peoples and the centrality of the land began a conversation about how to reframe conceptions of self, time and place, with the land as the primary subject in the Burra Charter. “The narrative of national hegemony was replaced with one of inclusivity. Places of cultural significance reflect the diversity of our communities, telling us about whom we are and the past that has formed the Australian landscape, and us they are irreplaceable and precious” (ICOMOS 2013, 1).

How can modern architecture and architectural heritage ever not be seen from a colonizing perspective? How can architectural heritage be rephrased from an anti-colonial perspective? UNESCO World Heritage had failed; Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism had failed; and a burgeoning world of heritage industries fueled by “architourism” seemed to set the stage for more colonial abuses facilitated by commodifying the cultural heritage of Others. Stories of countries being “overrun” by tourists permeated the news in late 2017. From Machu Picchu to the most remote corners of Iceland, the tourism industry has taking its toll on the land and its people. Blaming the West, and films like Disney’s Frozen and television series like Game of Thrones and Vikings for producing Norther neocolonial desires to invade Iceland en masse have produced a strong anti-tourism narrative that demands reckoning.

The meteoric rise of tourism in the small Nordic country has prompted the Icelandic government to consider introducing a series of measures to limit arrivals, including imposing a “nature tax” on tourists to help preserve the country’s raw beauty…With just 340,000 residents spread across a 40,000 square miles, Iceland has witnessed an exponential rise in the number of visitors in recent years, sparked by appearances of its otherworldly landscape in the ever-popular Game of Thrones television series and various Hollywood blockbuster films from Star Wars to Interstellar.

Kim, 2017

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There must be more thoughtful alternatives to UNESCO World Heritage that could protect and honor the land, the people and their stories by foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies first. The Burra Charter is just such an alternative. The Burra Charter is framed quite differently from UNESCO’s World Heritage List. Its criteria are positioned to address Indigeneity, the subjectivity of land and native sovereignty, and it recognizes that settler colonialism is an ongoing reality.

The Burra Charter was first issued by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)) in 1999. It was put in place to make actionable a new definition of “intangible heritage” that was a welcome point of entry for a new form of subjectivity informed by a combination of phenomenology and Indigenous epistemologies unique to Australia as a geopolitical context. The Burra Charter shifts the emphasis from UNESCO’s precisely and materially defined criteria of “outstanding universal value” to a broader and more open definition of “cultural significance” as a key criteria. While seeming simple, this shift provided an opening for Other ways of being in the world and conceptualizing architecture to be considered, with notions of place and space, rather than monument and property to situate and define architectural value in opposition to colonial regimes informed by terra nullius, biopolitics, universal modernism and settler emplacement.

British colonisation policies and subsequent land laws were framed in the belief that the colony was being acquired by occupation (or settlement) of terra nullius (land without owners). The colonisers acknowledged the presence of Indigenous people but justified their land acquisition policies by saying the Aborigines were too primitive to be actual owners and sovereigns and that they had no readily identifiable hierarchy or political order which the British Government could recognise or negotiate with.

Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, Briefing Papers. Art. 1

European settlers in Australia acquired land on the basis of terra nullius, even though they recognized that the land was in fact inhabited. But because settlers were able to view the Aboriginal inhabitants as “backward hunter-gatherers who had not developed productive or efficient farming practices and had, therefore, not established a defensible claim of ownership over the land” their occupation was a benign, not a violent act. (Braun 2014). However,

173 differences between Indigenous sovereignty in the Canadian context and the Australian context must be acknowledged. As Angela Pratt writes,

The paradox is that Australian governments have refused to negotiate treaties because that would constitute a recognition of Indigenous nationhood within the “nation”-state, yet the governments of British Columbia and Canada seem prepared to engage in treaty negotiations precisely because treaties are not a recognition of First Nations’ sovereignty. To put this another way, Australian governments have refused to engage in any treaty negotiations with Indigenous people, whereas Canadian governments have engaged in negotiations with First Nations which are treaties only by name.

Pratt, 58

By framing the land as a replacement for the white gods as the central figures, the white colonial gaze might be subverted. The Burra Charter proves that land-based consciousness can critique colonial architectural regimes, and that celebrating difference and particularity might call into question the compliance and erasure that architecture facilitates. Likewise, these methods of imagining land might address the validity of notions of space and place, as well as Indigenous sovereignty on an architectural level in settler imaginations. “Coming from the Australian context, the (Burra) Charter stated that ‘[p]laces of cultural significance enrich people’s lives, often providing a deep and inspirational sense of connection to community and landscape, to the past and to lived experiences’” (ICOMOS 1999, 436).

Reversing Erasure and Replacement

Minuru Hokari asks, “Is the project of ‘unfocusing’ to reconsider space, place and time as co- generative of other histories what is needed?” (Hokari 12). If universal modernism can be seen as an architectural problem that reproduces colonial gazes, attitudes and pedagogies with Le Corbusier and his “lasting influence” at its helm, then the need to teach Le Corbusier may still be worthwhile, but perhaps more as a dangerous prophet than as a white savior. The “urgency of place” as Dorreen Massey explains, requires “the unavoidable challenge of negotiating the here- and-now...and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and

174 nonhuman” (Massey 2005, 140 as quoted in Tuck and McKenzie 2015, 637). We must confront architectural thought as the central battlefield in a quest to decolonize colonial pedagogies and practices to preserve more than just the reified monuments that we associate with lasting universal value.

Among the most useful methods for redress, reform and reckoning is critique. In her book, Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (2011), Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts liberates her black subjects from being defined by white subjectivity by presenting a historically grounded narrative of Harlem as a living and evolving community suffering from far too much re-imagination by architects, developers and architectural colonists. Architectural photographer, Dawoud Bey, also takes up this approach by using a camera to capture the ongoing erasure of Harlem’s rich, black past to tell the stories that developers, which to erase.

Intentionally or otherwise…the tourist invoked the rhetoric of a colonialist who viewed yet-to-be conquered property as a “no man’s land” despite the presence of established — black — residents. In this context, Mr. Bey’s barren cityscapes (large-scale color photographs) read as wistful meditations on absence, memory and loss, on the vanishing of a people who made the neighborhood the Mecca of black America. Berger, 2016

Craig Williams has written a fulsome critique of architectural education and its relationship to race in his most recent text, Diversity among Architects: From Margin to Center (2016). In this text, Wilkins adds to his arsenal of publications that have addressed the failures of architectural education centered on the field’s manufactured ignorance of how race and equity are produced in the teaching of the profession. Wilkins’ latest contribution states very clearly that the homogeneity of architecture practitioners, who remain overwhelmingly male and Caucasian, should be replaced by practitioners who not only are representative of the population they serve, but also who might offer alternative services in lieu of traditional architectural service to upset the status quo.

Within social justice education, there are numerous voices who have suggested that one of the very real possibilities for decolonizing pedagogy is to approach architectural education intersectionally by seeking out potential alliances with those on the periphery of the canon to

175 affect change. Scholars, who have had a strong voice in this project (Bakan, Cannon, Razack, et. al.), have suggested that thinking through intersectionality and alignments between marginalized populations may be the clearest path forward for destabilizing the master narrative with assistance from Foucault, Gramsci and Marx alongside contemporary Indigenous scholars.

Methodologically, among the most challenging contemporary architectural theorists working today in critique is Eyal Weizman. Weizman has written extensively about the “spectacular” uses of architecture. He describes a method of analysis he refers to as “forensic architecture,” to produce a critical methodology intent on unpacking the often unconscious and insidious ways that architecture dominates and oppresses others using the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as an architectural case study. (Weizman 2017, 2007). If Weizman’s hypotheses are correct, the lived lives, mnemonic experiences and material places needed to support a post-colonial state require architecture as a militarized framework to continue to actualize the desires of the state and reproduce colonialism. This means an architecture steeped in racialized military violence.

Although the very essence of the Wall is the obvious solid, material embodiment of state ideology, and its conception of national security, the route should be understood as the direct top-down government planning at all. Rather, the ongoing fluctuations of the Wall’s route spatially registers a number of technical, legal and political conflicts over issues of territory, demography, water, archaeology and real estate, as well as over political concepts such as sovereignty, security and identity.

Weizman 2007, 162

Enacting Architectural Dissent

To read Indigenous authors and to debunk the authority of western canon by re-centering the land, listening to Other narratives and displacing the dominant narrative by writing new texts is a project that is underway. However, we all suffer modern architecture’s consequences, but have not yet grasped how to critique the architecture that shapes our daily lives. “Today, racially exclusive neighborhoods, segregated suburbs, and gated communities comprise the privileged moral geographies of the contemporary landscape” (Lipsitz 15). What is the contemporary

176 architectural landscape and how do we learn to critique it? This may have been a simpler research question, as is the question, how is architecture white?

It is worthwhile to note that there are examples of resistant architecture that aspire to an anti- racist white subjectivity, but they are beyond the scope of this project to survey. Architects and social activists have begun to work towards framing anti-racist design processes, to resist and protest racist building practices and to forge new practices as a form of resistance to the status quo. Brian C. Lee, Jr., an young architect of color working in Louisiana, uses his professional status as an architect to protest the structure of the architectural profession by leading the Design Justice Platform, “a work-in-progress, crowdsourced code of ethics that launched in late 2016, (which) incorporates how the built environment perpetuates injustice” (Schwab, 2017). Architect Teddy Cruz operates another kind of anti-racist architectural practice through his research-based political and architectural practice. Based in San Diego in partnership with University of California, San Diego, he focuses on working with communities on the margins of architecture by designing and building housing in unregulated housing developments on the United States- Mexico border. The project is architectural and aims to deconstruct the privilege and whiteness, even in the slums.

Scholars like Shirley Ann Tate and others write about “building the anti-racist university” as an ideological project. However, there is little mention about how the building itself will be realized, nor what will be done to reverse white subjectivity and the manufacturing of racialized subjects architecturally (Tate and Bagguley, 2016). Far too often, the actual material reality of building is undervalued as participating in the production of race, class, gender and spatial injustice.

The critical work of scholars like Dianne Harris, who writes specifically about how architecture produces race, needs to be considered and needs to be taught. The default processes by which we make architecture and architects following Le Corbusier’s model, are never benign. They carry their own spatial, racial and colonial baggage to perpetuate a particular hegemony that architecture concretizes. This needs to be acknowledged and reckoned with in the studio, in textbooks and in the imaginary. The evidence is all around us, and modern architecture is to blame.

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In reality, very little has changed on the ground. Bodies and subjects who had been marginalized now have voices in many fields and disciplines, but these voices are still foreclosed from entering architectural discourse and practice by design. Whether retelling the story of architectural education and practice from the vantage point of social history and class mobility (Stevens, 1988) or from the point of view of the modern architecture as capital (Willis, 1996), only in recent times have alternative narratives been written. Architectural scholars of color like Craig Barton (2001), Darrell Fields (2000) and Mabel Wilson (2012) are just now pushing back against the white canon by writing the stories about how black architects have also shaped the American landscape using social histories as a method.

This very specific generational cohort of gifted black architectural scholars have taken up the challenge of deconstructing the whiteness of the architectural canon as a project (Barton, 2001; Davis, Daniels and Wilson, 2015; Lokko, 2000; Wilson, 2012, et. al.). They do this by methodologically telling the suppressed architectural stories of non-white architects that interweave architectural history and racialized injustice using material case studies such as the building of Tuskegee University's campus by an entirely black workforce of architects, craftsmen and contractors working in the interstitial space and racist culture of the Jim Crow South (Armstrong, 2015). Other narratives are told by retelling the same stories we have been told, but by not erasing black architectural contributions (Wilson, 2012).

Ghanaian architect David Ajaye recently built the National Museum of African American History and Culture on Washington, DC’s National Mall (2016) and is currently designing a Cape Coast Slave Museum in Ghana. He is producing work, which in turn, is producing critical literature willing to take up architecture and race as subject matter to imagine an anti-racist architecture (Fields, 2000; Gooden, 2016; Shabazz, 2015; Wilkins, 2015; Wilson, 2012; et. al.). Cornel West has even pondered why all architectural critics had to be white in his own assessment of the profession (West, 1994).

Conclusion

Reform and resistance is manifest in numerous ways, but mostly, it is produced and reproduced in how the centrality of Le Corbusier still dominates architectural pedagogy and forecloses conversations about reform and redress. Ana Tostões, chair of Docomomo International,

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(International Committee for Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites and Neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement) writes, “(Le Corbusier’s) prolific personality as theorist, painter, sculptor, architect, urban planner, researcher, disseminator, thinker, and provocative activist, helped to make him a universal author. His dual and inseparable theoretical and practical activities represented a source for LC’s balanced inspirational and systematic method” (Tostões, 3).

Calling for a shift in the conversation around architectural history and practice to include Indigenous voices as a pathway to disrupt the modern architectural canon might be paved using the notions of place, sovereignty and the land to deconstruct dominant colonial voices and practices that frame land and occupation through place-making. Linda Tuhiwai Smith states, “The critique of Western history argues that history is a modernist project which has developed alongside imperial beliefs about the Other” (1998, 31).

The imperial beliefs and systems that produce such subjective deaths of land and people as one unified subject, is always centered on eliminating the Indigenous population and Othering as a method. Jonathan F. Vance recounts the tales of how modern Canada was built within the framework of the settler narrative which situates the edges of the frontier on the Prairies and is materially described using the railroads, the grain silos and the telegraph lines as the material matter that brought civilization to the untamed West. This method of “building Canada” demonstrates how settlers built “the projects that shaped the nation” (2006) with little recognition for the land, traditions or people who occupied an altogether different landscape, that remains in place today, To place Douglas Cardinal in conversation with canonical figures like Le Corbusier, Mies van de Rohe, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright in history texts and in studio pedagogy would be an easy and productive method to shift discourse immediately and to recognize the recommendations of the TRC.

Few texts acknowledge Indigenous Canadian architecture, let alone Indigenous modern architecture. Canada remains an architectural colony unable to have an architecture of its own, if I read the texts that tell the stories. As a result, the architectural forms, spaces and building types that belong to colonial imaginaries are used to mentally prevent notions of Indigenous architecture from being considered in relationship to modernity. And when they are, these architectures are situated in the distant past and populated by , and other building

179 types that remain in the past. This results in a lack of appreciation for the “consistent integrity between structural forms and cultural values” as well as how “building-forms were often seen as metaphorical models of the cosmos, and as such they frequently assumed powerful spiritual qualities which helped define the cultural identity of a people over hundreds or even thousands of years” (Kalman and Mills, 2007). Respectful accounts of Indigenous architecture written by settlers remain colonial and dismissive (Mainar and Vodvarka, 2013).

Any theorization about modern Canadian architecture, particularly in the North and on reserves, is often tainted by critiques of the layers of systemic social injustice that housing strategies and house forms have produced as by-products of neglect by the state as measured in mold (Optis, et. al. 2012), respiratory disease (Carriere, 2017) and other forms of ongoing architectural abuse. The only optimistic accounts for resolving housing crises on reserves (MacTavish, et. al. 2012, et. al.) draw on the kinds of inclusive community-led design processes that architect-scholars like Sam Mockbee helped establish decades ago (Dean and Hursley, 2002).

“Design has been used here (on reserves) in a way to control a population and force them to live a certain way,” said Shelagh McCartney, whose team of urban planners from Ryerson University has for the past two years been assessing the community's housing needs. “This isn't a marketplace where there's, like, lots of people coming and building different types of homes.”

Hutter, 2017

As we continue to teach Le Corbusier and ignore Others, the primacy of a specific colonial pedagogical system is reinforced and reinvigorated as hegemony. To achieve this pedagogical goal, we must reproduce and resituate Le Corbusier through forms of ritualized and embodied knowledge production to perpetuate the modern project and extend colonialism. As has been demonstrated, enculturating young architects has changed very little over the past century, and the process appears as a rigidly ossified pedagogical system that relies on a particular historical imaginary with Le Corbusier at its center that produces a particular culture. “The architectural form locates the individual practitioner’s actions in a coherent system of meaning, so that those actions become intelligible in the social world. The form is, in this sense, a culture” (Ibid, 155).

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This culture has lasting colonial, as well as racist implications. Even the far right has understood architecture’s subject-forming implications, as the following quote demonstrates:

Contemporary architects professing to be atheistic champions are in fact promoting an ideology with religious overtones. Their buildings, we are told, are “iconic,” and the attempt to reshape the built environment in accordance with pure concept, as Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for Paris, is an attempt to reshape the world in which we live into an expression of will and inhuman rationality.

Kalb and Salingaros, 2012

The invisibility of Indigenous architects like Canada’s Douglas Cardinal within the master narrative serves as further evidence that reform is needed to subvert the willful ignorance of a practice that is in denial of its oppressive tendencies and ongoing colonial methods and intent. Including Cardinal’s story and his work, in critique of the universal canon and as a productively oppositional voice, would force a reckoning with a system that requires iconic masters, like Le Corbusier, to survive. Opening up the modern canon to Other voices and Other epistemological ways of imagining architecture and ways of being in the built environment might also describe a means to lay out a critical architectural pedagogy that does not exclude and marginalize Others by design, nor continue to damage and dominate the planet. This project was intended to serve as a critique, which could be taken up by those who teach studios and write architectural history texts, as well as by those who shape how we see modern architecture and its legacy in more productive and honest ways with the understanding that the next generation of architectural scholars and practicing architects need to find their own paths.

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Appendix A – Interview Questions

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Appendix B: Le Corbusier’s UNESCO World Heritage Projects

Fig. 1. Le Corbusier, Petite maison au bord du lac Léman, Corseaux, Suisse, 1923. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 2. Le Corbusier, Immeuble locatif à la porte Molitor, Paris, France, 1931 – 1934. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 218

Fig. 3. Le Corbusier, Cabanon de Le Corbusier, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, 1951. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 4. Le Corbusier, Cité Frugès, Pessac, France, 1924. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 219

Fig. 5. Le Corbusier, Couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, Eveux-sur-l'Arbresle, France, 1953. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 6. Le Corbusier, Immeuble Clarté, Genève, Suisse, 1930. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 220

Fig. 7. Le Corbusier, Maisons La Roche-Jeanneret, Paris, France, 1923 - 1925. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 8. Le Corbusier, Musée National des Beaux-Arts de l'Occident, Taito-Ku, Tokyo, Japon, 1955. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 221

Fig. 9. Le Corbusier, Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France, 1950 - 1955. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 10. Le Corbusier, Maison de la Culture, Firminy, France, 1953. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 222

Fig. 11. Le Corbusier, Unité d'habitation, Marseille, France, 1945. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 12. Le Corbusier, Manufacture, Saint-Dié, France, 1946. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 223

Fig. 13. Le Corbusier, Maison du Docteur Curutchet, La Plata, Argentine, 1949. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 14. Le Corbusier, Maisons de la Weissenhof-Siedlung, Stuttgart, Allemagne, 1927. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 224

Fig. 15. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye et loge du jardinier, Poissy, France, 1928. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017).

Fig. 16. Le Corbusier, Complexe du Capitole, Chandigarh, Inde, 1952. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 225

Fig. 17. Le Corbusier, Maison Guiette, Anvers, Belgique, 1926. “L'oeuvre architecturale de Le Corbusier. Une contribution exceptionnelle au Mouvement Moderne.” Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed September 18, 2017). 226

Appendix C: Sketches from the Fondation Le Corbusier Archives

Fig. 18. Le Corbusier in Brazil. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017).

Fig. 19. Le Corbusier in Brazil. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017). 227

Fig. 20. Le Corbusier in Brazil. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017).

Fig. 21. Le Corbusier in Algeria. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017).

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Fig. 22. Le Corbusier in Brazil. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017).

Fig. 23. Le Corbusier in Algeria. Fondation Le Corbusier, http://fondationlecorbusier.fr (accessed July 11, 2017).

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Appendix D: Le Corbusier and UNESCO Timeline

1907–1965

Between the time of his first building in his hometown of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland in 1907 and his death in 1965 in Cap St. Martin, France, Le Corbusier would build seventy-five buildings in a dozen countries with a notable collection of accompanying drawings, paintings, books, etc. as his oeuvre.

1919–1933

The seminal modern German art and design school known as the Bauhaus (Staatliches Bauhaus) is in operation.

1945

Upon the proposal of CAME, a United Nations Conference for the establishment of an educational and cultural organization (ECO/CONF) was convened in London, November 1945, thus laying the foundations for UNESCO’s formation.

1946

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is officially established in Paris, where it will be headquartered.

1958

UNESCO Headquarters or Maison de l'UNESCO was inaugurated on November 3, 1958 at number 7 Place de Fontenoy in Paris. The design of the UNESCO Headquarters was the combined work of a team of international architects (Zehrfuss, Breuer and Nervi), guided by a master planning committee that included world renowned architects that included Le Corbusier as well as other modern masters (Aalto, Costa, Gropius, Markelius, Rogers and Saarinen).

1960

UNESCO’s entree into architectural preservation, the landmark Nubia Campaign, is launched in response to requests from the Egyptian and Sudanese governments for UNESCO’s help to save 230 the 3,000-year-old monuments and temples of ancient Nubia from an area that was to be flooded by the Aswan Dam project. The campaign would last for twenty years and would establish the power and potential of UNESCO’s role in historic preservation.

1968

The Fondation Le Corbusier is established in Paris in two adjoining Le Corbusier villas.

1972

The success of the Nubia Campaign inspired the development and adoption of UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention and the beginnings of inscription of sites on UNESCO’s World Heritage List as a method.

1978

UNESCO publishes its first list of officially inscribed and protected monuments including the Galapagos Islands (Equador), Aachen Cathedral(Germany), Yellowstone National Park (US), et. al.

1996

The iconic German modern art and design school known as the Bauhaus, founded by Walter Gropius, is selected as a World Heritage site, thus establishing a precedent for including modern architecture on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

1998

The World Heritage Committee meeting is held in Kyoto, Japan, and it includes on its agenda preparatory assistance for the nomination of the architectural work of Le Corbusier, with Argentina, Belgium, France, Germany, India, Japan, and Switzerland participating in the discussion.

2004

In Paris, an international seminar is held in June with officials from the Fondation Le Corbusier, the French national UNESCO Commission, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication 231

and the France UNESCO Convention for Heritage, as well as other external experts to establish a provisional list of Le Corbusier buildings to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a transnational nomination. Gilles Ragot, art historian and professor at the Bordeaux school of architecture, and Pierre-Antoine Gatier, architect-in-chief for historic preservation, are chosen by the French government to lead this cause. The goal is to include as many Le Corbusier buildings as possible on the list in the largest possible number of countries as a strategy.

2004

In Suzhou, during the summer of 2004, the World Heritage Committee earmarked the work of Aalto, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright as upcoming eligible candidates for the World Heritage List. This positioned modernity and the modern European masters within UNESCO World Heritage in a privileged and preferential position.

2006

The Paris-based Fondation Le Corbusier, whose mission is to protect the architect’s archive and its moral and cultural legacy, takes the initiative of organizing a collective program for the inclusion of a cluster of his work on the World Heritage List.

2006

At the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, Le Corbusier’s first and most comprehensive serial nomination is rejected.

2008

Two buildings by Le Corbusier are granted World Heritage site designation via the enshrining of the “housing estate project” of the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, Germany in 2008.

2009

At the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Meeting in Sevilla, , Le Corbusier’s serial nomination receives a “referral,” meaning major modifications are expected before the Le Corbusier dossier can be taken up again at future World Heritage Committee meetings. 232

2011

At the UNESCO World Heritage Committee Meeting in Paris, Le Corbusier’s serial nomination returns once again. This time the dossier is put forward with fewer buildings and no Chandigarh sites, which proved fatal to the nomination. At this meeting, a report by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) on the architect’s work is also reviewed. In this report, it is stated that the groupings of buildings presented did not “clearly demonstrate remarkable universal significance of the modern architectural movement” and “Le Corbusier was not the only architect who promoted the modern architectural movement in which many architects participated.” The ultimate decision was “non-inscription.”

2011–2015

During this period, many of the early decision-makers in the Le Corbusier dossier move on to other causes, leave their positions or resign from working on the Corbu nomination in frustration. The UNESCO World Heritage Unit moves forward to internationalize its portfolio and on efforts to dematerialize World Heritage through the broadening definitions of intangible heritage and exploring non-European options. Others continue the work towards achieving serial nomination for Le Corbusier.

2016

In , the World Heritage Committee meets and successfully nominates and approves the inclusion of seventeen of Le Corbusier’s building on the World Heritage List. This includes the previously missing Capitole Complex at Chandigarh and a much more deliberate list to support a transnational serial nomination spread out over seven countries. The nominator in this decision is not France this time, it is a delegate from the Middle East.

2017

Asmara, Eritrea is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List as a “modernist city.” Asman consists of a large collection of Italian rationalist buildings based on early 20thcentury urban planning principles within an African colonial context, which signals a new era of interest in colonial modernism and a movement away from dominant European icons, like Le Corbusier.