Canonizing Le Corbusier: the Making of an Architectural Icon As Colonial Hegemony
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Canonizing Le Corbusier: 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 Ontario 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 buildings, 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 architecture 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 modern architecture today, using Le Corbusier as a figure, as well as the legacy of the Bauhaus 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 Fondation Le Corbusier and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) in Paris; Association des Sites Le Corbusier in Ronchamp, France; and the Association Maison blanche in La Chaux-des-Fonds, Switzerland 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, Canada 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 History of Architecture, New York 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 Landscape Architecture, adjunct professor of Urban Design 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, Europe 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. iii 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 iv 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 v 1 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, architectures 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 United States 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. 2 After completing my Bachelor of Architecture degree, I found work as an intern architect in New York City. 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.