Re-Thinking Things Through Photography and the Austere Philosophies of Le Corbusier

Home , Radka Donnell

Re-thinking Things Through Photography and the Austere Philosophies of Le Corbusier

Vanila Netto

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Media Arts College of Fine Arts University of New South Wales

2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS Pages

Title page 1

Table of Contents 2

Acknowledgements 4

List of illustrations 5

Abstract 11

Preface 13

Introduction 15

Chapter One – Realising Form Through Excess: Poeticising Ergonomics

– Studio Practice 18 • Introduction • Work Methodology • Photography and the Staged Sculpture • Collaborative Models • Influential Practices The Modern Avant-Garde More Contemporary Influences • Conclusion • Illustrations (Plates 1.i-xix)

Chapter Two – Un-leashing the Domestic in Le Corbusier’s Habitats 47 • Introduction • Bare and Dare Confronting Comfort – Embracing the Self • Thinking Matter(s) Preserving Ephemera • Case Studies Villa Savoye Villa La Roche • Conclusion • Illustrations (Plates 2.i-xiv)

Chapter Three – ‘Loosing’ Weight 91 • Introduction • ‘Ergonomic’ Living Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau • Recycled Fashions • Pure Consumption • Equity Design – Socialism of Vision • Conclusion • Illustrations (Plates 3.i-xv)

Chapter Four – A Postmodern Critique of Modern Architecture 125 • Introduction • The Anti-Corbusian Cult • The Functional Debate • Conclusion • Illustrations (Plates 4.i-xi)

Chapter Five – Indulging Nations, Bulimic Notions –The Economy of Waste 151 • Introduction • Streamlining Disorder • Cheap Thrills Time Kills • Happy? • Aping the Celebrity • Illustrations (Plates 5.i-vi)

Chapter Six – Wasteland 178 • Introduction • Shadowaste • Digestive Tract Bypass • Conclusion • Illustration (Plate 6.i)

Bibliography 191

Illustrations Credits 206 Appendix

Acknowledgements

First thanks to Thomas Chung, Akiko Myazaki, Jo Bosben, Margaret Blackmore, David

Gasch, David Wills, Melissa K. Lee, Uros Cvoros, Nadja Mott, Nicholas McColl, Bic

Tieu, and Maro F. Alwan, the friends who through the period of this research process have given their time to become the models in my photographs.

For their professional assistance, I am grateful to the librarians at the College of Fine

Arts Library who were also wonderfully friendly and supportive. I also would like to thank the staff at Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris for their civility and assistance, which made my study in Paris productive and very enjoyable.

I am appreciative of the intellectual and moral help that I have received from supervisor

Ross Harley in the final stages of my thesis. This thesis completion owes to my dear friend Samantha Ferris who edited it in its early stages. I am also indebted and thankful to Min Dark, who has tirelessly helped through reading, editing, and commenting on various aspects of my writing as well as being genuinely supportive of my entire art practice.

Thanks to all my friends for the intellectual discussions and exchange of ideas. Thanks to the College of Fine Arts and University of New South Wales who found my research worthy of support. I am thankful and should express my endless gratitude to my mother whose encouragement and advice through all the different stages of this journey has been incommensurable.

List of Illustrations Plates

Chapter One

Figure 1.1: Vanila Netto, Camaski, 2004 1.i

Figure 1.2: Vanila Netto, Site-geist, 2006

Figure 1.3: Vanila Netto, Breaking the Frozen Pattern (Rampage), 2004 1.ii

Figure 1.4: Vanila Netto, Beyond Fission Lies Fusion (Untamed), 2004 1.iii Figure 1.5: Vanila Netto, Freezing to Death (Transcommunication Pack), 2004 Figure 1.6: Vanila Netto, Desert State (Mountain), 2003 Figure 1.7: Vanila Netto, Aerodynamic – Existential Technique (H + C) and

Atomic – Existential Technique (H2 + C), 2004 1.iv Figure 1.8: Vanila Netto, Look, No Hands, 2004

Figure 1.9: Vanila Netto, Rocking Well, 2004 1.v Figure 1.10: Vanila Netto, Metal Skelter, 2006

Figure 1.11: Vanila Netto, Bricklaying, 2006 1.vi Figure 1.12: Vanila Netto, The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 1-Contraption),

2006 1.vii Figure 1.13: Vanila Netto, The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 2-Expansion),

2006 1.viii

Figure 1.14: Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, c. 1920 1.ix Figure 1.15: Vanila Netto, The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 3-Collaboration),

2006 1.x

Figure 1.16: Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917 1.xi Figure 1.17: Constantin Brancusi, View of the studio, 1925

Figure 1.18: Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1915 1.xii Figure 1.19: Vanila Netto, Milestone Frontier: Brancusi Emaculated Here, 2006

Figure 1.20: Constantin Brancusi, Self-portrait, c. 1933-34 1.xiii Figure 1.21: Constantin Brancusi, sculptures in the studio Figure 1.22: Constantin Brancusi, Hand, 1920 Figure 1.23: Lygia Clark, Structuring the Self, 1976 1.xiv Figure 1.24: Lygia Clark, Dialogue: Goggles (Diálogo: Óculos), 1968 Figure 1.25: Lygia Clark, Relational Object – Stone and Air, 1966 Figure 1.26: Vanila Netto, Lumbar Hi-Fi Receivers, 2004

Figure 1.27: Vanila Netto, Little Rugged Red Rocking Roof, 2004 1.xv Figure 1.28: Lucy Orta, The Unit, 1996

Figure 1.29: Vanila Netto, Two Hands, One Head, Twice, 2004 1.xvi

Figure 1.30: Lucy Orta, Collective Wear Survival Sac, 1992-94

Figure 1.31: Vanila Netto, Sobremanta Sol, 2006 1.xvii Figure 1.32: Anni Albers, Black-White-Red, 1964, reproduction of 1927 original Figure 1.33: Anni Albers, Wall Hanging, 1925 Figure 1.34: Ruth Hollos-Consemüller, gobelin tapestry, c. 1926

Figure 1.35: Vanila Netto, In Metal We T(rust), 2004 1.xviii Figure 1.36: Archigram (Michael Webb), Cushicle, 1966-7

Figure 1.37: Vanila Netto, In Curiosity We Fit, 2004 1.xix Figure 1.38: Superstudio, Continuous Monument, New York, 1969

Chapter Two

Figure 2.1: Billboard advertising, Paris, 1925 2.i Figure 2.2: Posted wall (advertising), Paris, c. 1908 Figure 2.3: Dentclair toothpaste. Advertising, France, 1925

Figure 2.4: Cover of L’Esprit Nouveau journal issue number one 2.ii Figure 2.5: Advertisement for Solomite in L’Esprit Nouveau journal Figure 2.6: Le Corbusier, diagrammatic sketch of his ‘essential joys’

Figure 2.7: The liner Paris, 1921 2.iii Figure 2.8: Le Corbusier, Villa à Garches, 1927-8. Entry and main hall

Figure 2.9: Le Corbusier’s sketch of a cell of the Monastery of Ema, 1911 2.iv Figure 2.10: Cabin in a ship, c. 1920 Figure 2.11: Raoul La Roche’s bedroom at Villa La Roche, 1923-5 Figure 2.12: Vanila Netto, Normal Distractions from Good Conversation (Part 1),

2001 2.v Figure 2.13: Vanila Netto, Normal Distractions from Good Conversation (Part 3), 2001

Figure 2.14: The Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-30. Façade seen on arrival 2.vi Figure 2.15: The Villa La Roche, Paris, 1923-5

Figure 2.16: Villa Savoye. Ground-floor plan 2.vii Figure 2.17: Villa Savoye. Entry foyer (detail) Figure 2.18: Villa Savoye. Entry foyer (detail)

Figure 2.19: Villa Savoye. Living room 2.viii Figure 2.20: Villa Savoye. Living room (detail)

Figure 2.21: Villa Savoye. Internal stair and view to terrace and ramp (detail) 2.ix Figure 2.22: Villa Savoye. Coloured cabinets (detail) Figure 2.23: Villa Savoye. Kitchen

Figure 2.24: Villa Savoye. Main bathroom (detail) 2.x Figure 2.25: Villa Savoye. Main bathroom (detail) Figure 2.26: Villa Savoye. Main bathroom (detail)

Figure 2.27: Villa Savoye. Living room terrace 2.xi Figure 2.28: Villa Savoye. Roof top terrace (detail)

Figure 2.29: Villa La Roche. Picture gallery in present conditions 2.xii Figure 2.30: Perspective view of the La Roche gallery Figure 2.31: Villa La Roche. Picture gallery in present conditions (detail)

Figure 2.32: Staircase and metal doors at Ozenfant’s House, 1922 2.xiii Figure 2.33: Staircase and metal doors at L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, 1925 Figure 2.34: Metal doors at Villa La Roche, 1923-25

Figure 2.35: Villa Savoye. Boudoir aspect and integrated storage 2.xiv Figure 2.36: Villa Savoye. Son’s bedroom aspect and integrated storage Figure 2.37: Villa Savoye. Living room (detail)

Chapter Three

Figure 3.1: J. Jucker and W. Wagenfeld, table lamp, 1923-4 3.i Figure 3.2: Peter Behrens, AEG electric fan, c. 1908 Figure 3.3: Victor Horta, Hotel Tassel, Brussels, 1893

Figure 3.4: The Parthenon, 447-434 BC 3.ii Figure 3.5: Delage ‘Grand-Sport’, 1921 Figure 3.6: Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1908-09 3.iii Figure 3.7: Walter Gropius, Fagus Works Factory, Alfeld, 1911 Figure 3.8: Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-6 Figure 3.9: Le Corbusier, Ozenfant House Studio, Paris, 1922

Figure 3.10: Amédée Ozenfant, Accords, 1922 3.iv Figure 3.11: Le Corbusier, Red Violin, oil on canvas, 1920 Figure 3.12: Commercial glassware and crockery

Figure 3.13: Maison Pirsoul bidet 3.v Figure 3.14: Innovation storage trunk Figure 3.15: Illustrations from catalogue merchandise, 1925

Figure 3.16: Light fittings from Electrical Review, 1927 3.vi Figure 3.17: Plaster workshop of G. Jackson & Sons Ltd, 49 Rathbone Place, London W1, circa 1928 Figure 3.18: Entrance lobby of New Oxford Street Corner House, London, 1920s

Figure 3.19: Jaap Gidding, foyer of the Tuschink Cinema, Amsterdam, 1918-21 Figure 3.20: Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann salon, 1925 International Exposition of

Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris 3.vii Figure 3.21: Le Corbusier, pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau, 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris Figure 3.22: Le Corbusier, proposal of ‘hanging gardens’ in vertical units for

the urban development Contemporary City (Plan Voisin), 1922 3.viii Figure 3.23: Le Corbusier, ‘hanging gardens’, L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion, 1925 Figure 3.24: Le Corbusier, Pavillon L’Esprit Nouveau, Paris, 1925. Living room

reconstruction, 1987 3.ix Figure 3.25: Le Corbusier, Pavillon L’Esprit Nouveau, Paris, 1925. Living room (detail)

Figure 3.26: Le Corbusier, Plainex House, Paris, 1922. Interior detail 3.x Figure 3.27: Le Corbusier, Cook House, Boulogne-Sur-Seine, 1926. Entrance and garage Figure 3.28: Le Corbusier, Cook House, Boulogne-Sur-Seine, 1926. Living room (detail) Figure 3.29: Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-30 Figure 3.30: Vanila Netto, Geometry (No Buttons, Considering Pressures),

2004 3.xi

Figure 3.31: The Lamoriciere ocean liner, c. 1920s 3.xii Figure 3.32: Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye. Roof garden and ramp (detail) Figure 3.33: Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye. Roof garden and ramp (detail)

Figure 3.34: Walter Gropius’ study, Director’s Office, 1923, Bauhaus, Weimer 3.xiii Figure 3.35: J.J.P. Oud, Café de Unie, 1924-5, Rotterdam, demolished (1940) Figure 3.36: Gerrit Rietveld, Schroeder House, 1923-4, Utrecht (detail) Figure 3.37: Gerrit Rietveld, Schroeder House, 1923-4, Utrecht, axonometric view

Figure 3.38: Le Corbusier, Villa à Garches, 1927-8 3.xiv Figure 3.39: Le Corbusier, Two Houses at Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927, axonometric view

Figure 3.40: Le Corbusier, House at Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927, (detail) 3.xv Figure 3.41: Le Corbusier, House at Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927, (detail) Figure 3.42: Le Corbusier, Guiette House (detail), Anvers, 1926, (detail) Figure 3.43: Le Corbusier, Villa Jeanneret, Paris, 1923-25, (detail)

Chapter Four

Figure 4.1: The blowing up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing block, St Louis, US 4.i Figure 4.2: Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, 1954-8, New York,

Figure 4.3: Robert Venturi, Eclectic House Series (Elevations), 1977 4.ii Figure 4.4: Robert Venturi, Gothic Revival Chair for Knoll, 1978-84 Figure 4.5: Michael Graves, Portland Building, 1980, Portland, US Figure 4.6: Frank O. Gehry & Associates, Nationale Nederlanden, 1991-6, Prague, Czech Republic

Figure 4.7: Charles Moore, Plazza d’Italia, New Orleans, 1976-1979, US 4.iii Figure 4.8: Hans Hollein, Austrian Travel Bureau, 1978, Vienna, Austria Figure 4.9: London County Council, Roehampton Housing Estate, 1952-5, London Figure 4.10: Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, Park Hill, 1961, Sheffield, Uk Figure 4.11: Minoru Yamasaki, Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate, 1955,

St Louis, US 4.iv Figure 4.12: Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, city of Brasilia (detail), 1958-60, Brazil Figure 4.13: Oscar Niemeyer, Super Squares, residential blocks in Brasilia, 1956-60, Brazil

Figure 4.14: Callum Morton, Gas and Fuel, 2002 4.v Figure 4.15: Callum Morton, International Style, 1999 Figs. 4.16-20: Le Corbusier, Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès, 1924-26,

Pessac, France 4.vi Figure 4.21: Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand,

Grand Confort, Model LC3, 1928 4.vii Figure 4.22: Vanila Netto, Mini-Flex Super-Comfort, 2004

Figure 4.23: Vanila Netto, Detergent Cells, 2006 4.viii Figure 4.24: Adolf Loos, Steiner House, 1910, Vienna, Austria

Figure 4.25: Tom Sachs, Nutsy’s Unité d’Habitation, 2001 4.ix Figs. 4.26-27: Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation Marseilles, 1947-52, Marseilles, France

Figure 4.28: Vanila Netto, Blueprint 1, 2006 4.x Figure 4.29: Harry Seidler, Blue’s Point Tower, 1961, Sydney, Australia Figure 4.30: Horton Plaza, San Diego, 1985, US 4.xi Figure 4.31: The Trafford Shopping Centre, 1998, Manchester, UK Figure 4.32: The Jerde Partnership, Universal CityWalk, 1990-1993, L.A., US

Figure 4.33: Group Ciputra, Citraland Mall, 1993, Grogol, West Jakarta, Indonesia

Chapter Five

Figure 5.1: Vanila Netto, Feedback, 2004 5.i

Figure 5.2: Petrolagar laxative ad, 1937 5.ii Figure 5.3: General Electric, Model T-7 refrigerator, 1927-38 and General Electric, Model V-7, 1936

Figure 5.4: Raymond Loewy, pencil sharpener, 1933 5.iii

Figure 5.5: Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II (detail of diptych), 2001 5.iv Figure 5.6: ‘Out with the old, in with the takeaway’: Newspaper article, Photograph by Dallas Kilponen

Figure 5.7: The Gate Retail Entertainment Centre, Newcastle, UK, 2002 5.v Figure 5.8: The Galleria Shopping Mall, Houston, Texas, USA, 1970 Figure 5.9: Canal Walk Century City, Capetown, South Africa, 2000

Figure 5.10: Paris Hilton and Guess, 2004 5.vi Figure 5.11: Dolce & Gabbana ad, 2004 Figure 5.12: Jessica Simpson, cover of Cleo Magazine, April 2007

Chapter Six

Figure 6.1: BPay advertisement, Sydney, 2006 6.i

Re-thinking Things through Photography and the Austere Philosophies of Le Corbusier

ABSTRACT

This studio-based PhD in Fine Arts considers alternative modes of existence and thought to challenge the embedded passive-aggressive over-consumptive ways ubiquitous in the world today. Excessive consumption has posed a legitimate threat to our future, and perhaps worse, to our understanding of it. This research is suggestive of the belief that individual de-accelerating, less compulsive initiatives are more sustainable and positive creative choices than conforming to a life of compulsive consumption (a contemporary phenomenon, which is compared here with the bulimic habit). Bulimia has been mostly considered by society in ways that encompass the psychological aspects of the individual, however rarely it might be used as a metaphor for the economic lineage and its cultural repercussion in late capitalist society.

In this context, this study seeks to reconsider the often-neglected utopian underpinnings sustaining Le Corbusier’s architecture and design of the 1920s, interrogating the Postmodern critique and rupture with the Modern from the perspective of current environmental awareness. It focuses on the depths of Le Corbusier’s concerns in regards to human living and basic needs, posing questions to a dominant view that tends to regard his work as a despotism of ‘style’ (along with all the negative outcomes of mass housing projects that he and his followers have been blamed for).

This examination is intended to highlight the importance of Le Corbusier’s quest for developing thoughtful ways of living by placing his insights against the backdrop of high

turnovers of fashion, excessive consumption, and the consequential ecological disasters of our present. Using the reductive philosophies of Le Corbusier to re-think things through photography, this thesis aims to consider new ways to negotiate objects, materials and space via photographic means.

The studio component of this thesis involves investigations with found objects whose utility is no longer requested. They become crucial components for the artworks, being reinvested with unusual functionality and nobility. Studio arrangements generate photographic images proposing situations, which hint to a moving away from the fast and neurotic movement from consumption to waste that we are undergoing today. The production-consumption-waste cycle evoked through the artworks is subsumed into investigations of forms implying a personal sensibility in relation to lifestyle. This brings the principles of creativity and adaptability to the forefront of personal economies, and places the eventfulness of excess waste inside (as well as beyond) aesthetic discussion.

Preface

In my undergraduate degree in Fine Arts, commencing in 1998 at the College of Fine

Arts, Sydney, I often listened to negative opinions from peers and academics regarding

Modernism, Modern architects and designers and their canonical bodies of works. The

Modern avant-garde artists, designers and architects, who adopted a formally reductive vocabulary, more or less engaging with Mies van der Rohe’s famous or infamous dictum “less is more”, have greatly influenced my research. I became interested in revisiting some of the intellectual and material production that was labelled ‘austere’ and utopian through the Modern period, and also seen by many Postmodern cultural specialists as being visually poor, technocratic, simplistic and indifferent to people and context. My attention turned to those practitioners, whose ‘trashed’ practices I linked with notions of redundancy akin to the objects we constantly discard due to being outmoded and no longer ‘attractive’ or ‘fashionable’ for us to be associated with.

Growing up in Brazil in the 1960s and 70s, I was heavily influenced by the hopeful

Modernist housing block dream of the 1950s and 60s that erupted in Brazil following the foundation of the country’s new capital city, Brasilia. For most Brazilians, it was a period when Modern architecture was not only reflective of material or of technological progress. It was thought and experienced as something predominantly positive and most importantly, symbolic of artistic and intellectual stimulation, and therefore cultural enrichment.

The research and life of Le Corbusier, the architect, the artist, and philosopher, exerts an enormous influence in my practice. My interest in Le Corbusier grew as I noticed a generalised aversion towards him. Whenever I mentioned to colleagues and fellow artists that he was a major subject of my investigations, the usual response was: “Why

Le Corbusier? Did not he do terrible things to humanity? The continual failure of mass

housing projects, was not that his fault?” There were more myths surrounding Le

Corbusier’s arrogant, un-politically-correct public persona and his technocratic impulses, than there was information about the rigour, dedication and passion with which he approached his research.

I support my argument with Le Corbusier’s thoughts extracted from various literary sources including books, articles, lectures, and poetry. I was extremely fortunate to be able to personally explore his paintings, drawings, films, photographs, and residential architecture of the period in study while undergoing an artist residency at the Cité des

Arts in Paris. This close and physical experience of Le Corbusier’s work has immensely contributed to the unfolding and enrichment of my research.

Introduction

This is how cultures grow; they are based on personal effort, on ingestion and digestion. When digestion has taken place, then we have acquired a feeling for things. And this very feeling is nourished by what has been ingested.1

Considering the eternal state of flux associated with history and with the system of values built up by each subsequent period, something puzzled me: why has the anti-

Corbusian canon been transmitted from one generation to another and why has it become an accepted cultural convention? Noticing the existence of a general negative view about Le Corbusier amongst the dominant scholarly voices in the fields of art, architecture, and design, I felt compelled to inquire and to respond to his life and practice in a more personal and perhaps “biased” way. I became interested in disclosing what I thought to be the most inspiring aspects of his practice. Le

Corbusier’s repudiation of excesses (in decorative terms as well as in consumptive habits) influenced the unfolding of my studio practice, which is the focus of Chapter

One.

The major concerns of Chapter Two and Chapter Three are to lay the grounds for a reasonable understanding of Le Corbusier’s practices of the 1920s, proposing a more positive reading of his ‘austere’ creations. The focus is on the cultural and economic context that influenced his aesthetic approach and social ideals. By reconsidering established notions of warmth and coldness, my positioning refuses to frame Le

Corbusier’s visions and outcomes as inconsiderate to humans.

1 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, translated from the eighth French edition of Urbanisme by Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Press, London, 1947, p. 51.

My research sprung from a refusal to passively accept the Postmodern negative reaction to Le Corbusier’s works and persona, and in particular to the critics’ attack on his production during the decade of the 1920’s, emphatically and conventionally known as his ‘austere’ period. The reading of expressionless ‘silence’, and of ‘muteness of forms’ regarding Le Corbusier’s architecture of his ‘austere’ period (also referred to as his ‘purist’ phase, much discredited by critics from various periods) is re-examined in

Chapter Four of this thesis. This chapter also examines the role and the impact of photography in disseminating and in many times distorting Le Corbusier’s ‘ideas for living’.

Chapter Five and Chapter Six articulate the analogy between bulimia and the market- driven, excessively consumerist life of today (without necessarily going into particular cases and interiorities of the bulimic self). Bulimia has been mostly discussed in medical terms, which encompasses the psychological, pathological, and sociological aspects of the individual. However, as a metaphor for the economic and cultural order/disorder of this late capitalist world, the bulimic notion is rarely acknowledged. My interests surrounding these two realms of economy and pathology focus on the space where the areas of body regime, obsessive compulsion, and consumption for consumption’s sake have perversely intersected.

In this thesis, Le Corbusier’s productions and philosophies of the period in question are considered to be worth of being revisited and revitalised, especially when consider this in contrast to the present context of chaotic excess (material and visual) that is the living experience in a globalized world. It is my intention to demonstrate that Le

Corbusier’s thoughts and works of this period are able to inspire the awakening of more humane structures within people and architectural practice. In light of the present context of disproportional emphasis on consuming to the detriment of thinking,

reflecting, and transforming lived structures, his propositions continue to have some positive, enduring, and insightful aspects. If we pay them due attention, they may offer oblique alternatives to the ‘dumbed-down’ state of existence that we presently endure as mass consumer subjects. Some of Le Corbusier’s ideological contributions may be considered, revitalized and reconfigured in parallel with the realization that we must create sensual space and attempt to regain a more humane awareness of the self, of other peoples, and of the physical environment. This actual time lag (1920-2006) leads one to assume that the argument presented here reflects phenomena too far apart in time and in evolutionary scope, and that those matters have no significant relationship.

In fact, the very idea of refashioning is common to both periods, past and present, and is common to Le Corbusier during the 1920’s as well as within the core of our current

‘economy-shaped’ life experience (although each of the discourses involve distinct sources of stimulation and purpose).

This thesis concludes suggesting the importance of a self-generating system of values allowed by the embracing of an inherently human, but presently avoided, space for thinking and reflection. A willingness to look into past experiences where notions of reduction were believed to be catalysts for the heightening of human existence in its physical and metaphysical aspects, cannot only be intellectually exciting and liberating, but may also discourage the “bulimic” culture, with which the world is presently engaged. My interest in Le Corbusier does not dwell on elevating his character and career to an exemplary status, but rather reveals his contribution through the lens of the present moment. This particular approach privileges the importance of cultivating a system of values with utopian underpinnings, instead of unquestionably following the formulaic cultural, social and economical dictates and conveniences of today.

CHAPTER ONE – Realising Form Through Excess – Poeticising Ergonomics

Studio Practice

Introduction

This chapter concerns the drives, passions, and the philosophical and artistic background history informing my research process, as well as the practical explorations comprising my work methodology. The experimentation and questioning initiated during the course of my undergraduate/honours degree has influenced me to an increasing commitment and involvement with my research into the questions of limits and shifts related to social and economic activities, and the volume of consumption.

My thinking and process for making artworks is stimulated by our age of excess, the overarching phenomena of acquiring, owning and discarding things in increasingly shorter cycles. The mindset where freedom equals consumer choice bothers me as it has generated excessive consumption attached to neurotic/compulsive consumptive habits. My research places importance on re-use and on an attitude of care for things that have already been produced to challenge society’s constant desire for the new, and disregard for the likely exhaustion of the planet’s natural resources. We are entering a post-fossil economy where we have to come to terms with the fact that natural resources are finite, that we are running out of nature. I am overwhelmed by the experience of living in the 21st century where enormous amounts of stuff are produced, consumed, and trashed. Human impact in the world is excessive and rapidly getting

worse. The globalised consumer-crazed lifestyles are causing severe environmental crisis. Today, much more than in the 1920s, our world is overflowing with available commodities alongside with the neurotic widespread habit to consume purposelessly.

Economic production also disregards human cost.

An enormous variety of products and information are produced incessantly and at a rapid pace. Not surprisingly, they reach obsolescence rapidly too. I share with environmental researcher Mark Roseland the ecological insight that,

In order for the developed countries to contribute to global sustainability, the most important adaptation is a drastic reduction of our present levels of materials and energy consumption.2

Waste products are the raw materials of my artmaking. They are placed back into another productive cycle within a process that aims at increasing the longevity of products giving a more elastic existence to obsolete hardware in substitution of supporting the idea of producing exclusively from unused raw materials. In doing so, I am drawing attention to the contemporary status of material resources, their fate and meaning within our present discourse, and to the artificial (as in fickle) value that we are growing accustomed to attach to things.

My artworks are embedded with references that crossover the realms of architecture, design, consumer culture, and the fantastic worlds of science fiction. Art writer and fellow artist Tanya Peterson has noted the interdisciplinary nature of my practice. In her view, my use of photography opens up and affects a dialogue through other

2 Mark Roseland, ‘Ecological Planning for Sustainable Communities’, in Doug Aberley, Futures by Design – The Practice of Ecological Planning, Envirobook Publishing, Sydney, 2000, p. 71.

contemporary forms of artmaking and culture.3 I look into the past as well as to the present to explore the realm of other possibilities for contemporary existence.

Research trips to Brasilia in 2003 and to Paris on two occasions, each for three months in 2004 and 2005, were invaluable not only to investigate and later reinterpret Le

Corbusier’s works for this paper, but also to develop ideas for my studio practice.

These international cultural experiences greatly influenced subsequent sculptural assemblages and bodies of photoworks presented here. The artworks supporting this thesis were created between the years 2003 to 2006 and were all exhibited within that period in various solo and group shows. The works produced during the early stages of my research were first shown in the solo exhibition titled Cushion: Do not Crush

Insulation, in 2004 at Sherman Galleries, Sydney. The later works were exhibited in national survey exhibitions, such as the Adelaide Biennial – 21st Century Modern, in

2006.

Work Methodology

Material things have a short life-span in contemporary society; produced goods are not intended to be useful to us for very long as our economy-driven and ultra-commodified lifestyles make things redundant and unwanted rapidly. We keep purchasing new things and trashing them incessantly so the world continues to grow economically.

Consequently, our material culture has been developing a problematic relationship with the natural world. Through experiencing this excess, I became increasingly interested in the ‘no longer wanted’.

3 Tanya Peterson, ‘Working Backwards’, Broadsheet Contemporary Visual Arts + Culture, vol. 36, number 2, June 2007, 129-131.

In 2000, I started to create staged photographic works triggered by the found object.

The sculptural arrangements that I build and later photograph are made out of contemporary waste4. These discarded items with no feasible market value are made important through a process of revitalisation, in which they become visible again while taking new roles in unexpected scenarios. I feel compelled to restore the dignity of manufactured goods that have not been used to the fullest.

I move from finding, selecting, gathering, and transforming by assembling objects, to finally photograph the various arrangements in the studio. Objects are usually found in my immediate surroundings, never hunted. They lay around where I walk and where I work, which seems a limited source, but in reality it is so abundant that most of the time

I feel overwhelmed with material. I stumble into plastics everywhere, PVC5, PET6,

Styrofoam, etc. Plastic is ubiquitous in its many hybrid versions. Stuff like silicone, perspex, polypropylene, parkesine, polyester, acetate, vinyl, and many others, have become the invaders from outer micro-molecular space, the artificial others we humans have to share our planet earth with. While some are almost friendly, as in recyclable bottles and dissolvable films, most are ‘die-hards’, as in car tyres. At the same time that we mould plastics, plastics mould us, by which I mean we are depending so much on this versatile entity. In the depths of our Information Age,

Plastic(s) provide us with the material prerequisite for information storage and retrieval, both analogue and digital. From photographic film to audio and videotape, from computer discs to CD-ROMs and CDs, plastic not only imitates natural materials, it allows us to recreate an entire new world of the visual and aural imagination and record it for instant replay, as well as for posterity.7

4 “Waste is the name that is given to all that is other than valued, useful material.” Abby Mellick gives a definition of waste in Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis’ Waste Not Waste, Eco Design Foundation, Australia, 1996, p. 27. 5 Polyvinyl chloride. 6 Polyethylene terephthalate. 7 Stephen Fenichel, Plastic - The Making of a Synthetic Century, HarperBusiness, New York, 1997, p. 5.

Containers, which are designed to house and protect items such as computers and their accessories, and other products like electronic appliances are the most appealing to me. The ubiquity of plastics has made these types of objects almost invisible, unnoticed. My passion for the obsolete is a driving force for expanding the visual language of styrofoam packaging, cardboard boxes, plastic stuff, and other discarded industrial objects whose value has been deleted by our fast paced economy and the uncaring ways we relate to the world of things. I find the outdated, ‘dead’, dumped object interesting in their non-artistic background of rejection. Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1920s that,

The more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious can be the mind which contemplates them.8

My artmaking process is labour intensive. Much time is dedicated to inventing new forms intuitively trying different possible combinations, arrangements and compositions to photograph. A lot of the time, arrangements manifest themselves unexpectedly and happy accidents are warmly embraced. My whole attitude towards my practice is very loose. I go to the studio to explore the latent possibilities in redundant matter. Even at the stage of photographing when I use technical skills and precision equipment, the process is unfussy and reliant on improvisation and flexibility. I see the potential for endless possibilities mixing objects with objects, and objects with people. Imaginative simplicity, economy of means, and versatility are staples in my practice. I have been committed to looking at things and questioning what they can possibly be instead of wanting to arrive at a clear-cut definition of what they are. In this light, I see the work I do as ‘considered possibilities’.

8 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, NLB, London, 1979, p. 16.

The way I stage the reconfigured objects for the photographic tableau is based on mental reconstructions of things and places seen in real life, via mass and specialised media, or dreamed. They may be seen as a formal materialization of the impact that the signs of visual culture past and present have on me. It is not my intention to reflect or literally emulate past realities, but to envision other realities following a personal process of re-invention and re-use.

I intend to say through my works that material excess is undesirable by suggesting that leftover ready-mades and raw materials can endlessly have their shape and functionalities renewed if there is human intention and convicted action to do so. I believe that formal and functional logic comes from each one’s own poetics of perception through processes involving material and cultural transformation. My utopia is to see the existing material reality of abundance as the open space to reconfigure the manufactured landscape of market prescriptions, which includes our moving away from the most accepted notion of activity, one that subjugates human creativity (and movement) to the dictates of market and industry logic. To see through the imposed

‘cultural veil’ is an activity and an attitude that is a source of great satisfaction. In practicing this way, I incorporate into the work process the unstable existence of meaning and of existing itself. To me, complacency to a life committed to material acquisition is a well-absorbed clichéd model of human conformity.

Photography and the Staged Sculpture

Looking through a camera at something or a picture of something can be sometimes more interesting than looking at the thing itself in its unglamorous or banal context. I

share similar views with English contemporary artist Matt Collishaw on the choice of making use of the photographic medium. Collishaw said in interview that,

A lot of the time the thing itself is of no importance until it has been documented in some way… It is really quite bizarre to be charmed by the organization of chemicals on a bit of material.9

The image replaces the objects transferring the physical and material to the realm of thinking and wonder about different ways that things and people may exist outside the constrains of a dominant perspective. Direct experience is deferred or mediated by the photograph with the hope that it may tease the imagination of the viewers towards creating their own personal propositions. Susan Sontag said that,

To take a picture is to say, among other things: ‘this is worth photographing’. And to appraise an event as valuable or interesting or beautiful is to wish to have a photograph of it.10

Sontag saw photography as an independent source of seeing or of material that would fundamentally change our visual sensibility…11 More emphatically in her elevation of the photographic medium, Sontag claimed that it cannibalises all art forms as it converts everything into images, in her words,

9 Matt Collishaw, when interviewed by Louisa Buck, ‘Nappy Change for Art’, Art Newspaper, v. 12, n. 112, March 2001, p. 44. Once involved with the YBA (Young British Art) movement, Collishaw is a practicing artist based in London and working in a wide range of media including the photographic. 10 Susan Sontag, ‘Photography within the Humanities’, a speech delivered at a Wellesley College photographic symposium on April 21, 1975. In Liz Wells, (ed.), The Photography Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p. 61. 11 ibid., p. 60. Sontag saw photography as having the quality and power to raise all kinds of sociological, moral and historical questions.

Photography is an art which devours other art. It is a creation, a creation in the form of some certain kind of visual image, but it also cannibalises and very concretely reproduces other forms of art.12

Sontag also said that …objects can disclose some kind of aesthetic value simply when they are reproduced, and that particularly, casual, vernacular, off-hand, deteriorated, throw-away objects have a kind of poetry that a camera can reveal.13 She further elevated the scope of value of the photograph by acknowledging its power to influence people’s way of seeing. As she stated,

The photograph is a kind of job for the imagination to do something that we should have been able to do if we were not so disturbed by so many different kinds of information that are not really absorbed. Photographs have this authority of being testimony, but almost as if you have some direct contact with the thing, or as if the photograph is a piece of the thing; even though it’s an image, it really is the thing.14

In my work, the photograph thing becomes the key object for interpreting complex relationships between objects and us. These images are embedded with a series of intentions, situations, and modes of behaviour concerning not only architecture, design, and the arts, but also the communication of a philosophy.

I see in the discarded material a rich source for personal utopias. Photography gives the imagined utopia a grasp on the ‘real’. It records the realisation of a scene that happened in real time and space, although in this case ‘reality’ is a product of imagination and mis an scene. Mine is a utopia that speaks of the value of creative and self-reflective initiatives and the detriment of succumbing to convenience and conformism, so commonplace in our contemporary existence.

12 ibid. 13 ibid., p. 65. 14 ibid., p. 64. Italics mine.

The documentary aspect of the work is vital as it does use the photographic medium primarily as a tool for recording. I favour photography for its qualities of accumulating and preserving meaning. I use both analogue and digital technologies – I shoot on negative film in the studio with a medium-format analogue camera. The negative image is scanned and then digitally printed. I use the camera to record arrangements discovered while playing with redundant objects. I look for intense, unexpected, and unusual compositions. The chance element has always been welcomed in the process of creating the final image. My engagement at first with the objects as sculpture sparks an extra sensibility in the way I think about the materiality of the photograph. The photoworks are connected with the readymade assemblage they depict through the synthetic materiality that they both share. The images come from plastic film and are printed digitally. These are materials and technologies of our times, what our society is producing – the almost redundant film and the prevailing standard digital printing.

Photography traces and sketches the life of possibilities. It offers viewpoints. A photograph carries the potential to compel us to look beyond the hermetic realms of the photo itself making the space of imagination a space of experiencing, which is one of the major forces underpinning my work. Photography compresses the third dimension not in a negative way, but elevating the depicted to multi-dimensional realms inside the space of the mind. It teases our imagination to see the unseen, to start to speculate and wonder. The role assumed by the photographic image is far from being specific. As Judy Annear says, the photographic subject as object exists beyond time and within our imaginary.15 She adds that,

15 Judy Annear, World Without End – Photography and the 20th Century, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 15. Judy Annear is a Senior Curator of photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The photographic double or trace of the world can never exactly reproduce the thing which is at its origin, and like the shadow or the mask remains tantalising and elastic both in its content and meaning.16

The photograph adds an extra layer to the depicted, manipulating our levels of perception and at the same time taking away the basic matter of which the depicted consists. Speculation in relation to the photograph can be endless, we wonder how the image was made, what it is, what it represents, why it is there, where is taken place, and so on. I am attracted to the idea that photography today is tightly connected to ordinary, everyday social practices. Photography also renders the depicted reproducible, it challenges the ‘original’, questioning notions of originality and ‘artistic genius’.

Left-overs from our excessive material consumption are transformed to create images, which proclaim the value, the qualitative and aesthetic experience of trash through elemental forms, reductive colour scheme, and simple composition. They pose questions in relation to the scope of our entrenchment with a culture of disposability and premature obsolescence, well disseminated by the market. By taking the path of slowing down, the work represent ways that contrast with the overactive, lifestyle engendered by excessive engagement with consumerism, characterized with the constant and neurotic moving from one thing to the next.

Some of the found objects that I take to the studio to reconfigure may take multi- functional roles, reshaped and reused in subsequent shots. For example, the same pair of white-primed skies appears in the photographs Camaski (Fig.1.1) Site-geist

(Fig. 1.2), and Breaking the Frozen Pattern (Rampage) (Fig. 1.3). I found the skis on top of a rubble-full tip on my way ‘work-home’ in 2003. They stroked my attention due

16 ibid., p. 20.

to their almost pristine state. As I got closer to investigate, I noticed that they were manufactured the year before. Since I do not ski, I took them to the studio attracted by the object’s form and astonished by its premature obsolescence. While in Camaski and in Site-geist the recuperated objects interact with the body of the model suggesting alternative use, in Breaking the Frozen Pattern (Rampage), the reconfigured pair of skis has been staged in isolation in a double exposure mode. The double exposure implies movement, a pulsating energy, the vibrant unity of spirit and matter as the object propels (takes-off and lands-down) in space via a ramp/spongy packaging material. It is a controlled and contained space-time experimental drama. The

‘shadowplay’ created by the over layering of images generates a partially messy visual space, although this somewhat confusion is countered by the sober neutrality of the extreme colour reduction of its predominant grays and whites.

Collaborative Models

Close friends at the time of the conception of the tableaux were the models. The various backgrounds of the human models, who were all based locally, speaks of cross-cultural exchanges happening around our lives. I took one friend at a time into the studio, where an intimate and relaxed space was generated with soft and continuous light, a few reconfigured objects, recycled paper backdrops, and warm conversation. One of the most important things for the scene to work was to make sure that the model-friend felt at ease and acquainted with the environment, as if he or she was at home or somewhere comfortable for them. The discarded object is highlighted while interacting with the human body, taking the role of providing basic needs and facilitating a certain quality of living, making sense out of what seems absurd. This

sense of fulfilment is suggested through the neutral and assertive posture of the human models.

In most of my photographic work, I aim at conveying an atmosphere of surrendering to slower speeds of being. Monotony is preferred to confused complexities. It is a vision of a utopian society in this new millennium that has outgrown the compulsion to continue with the 20th-century’s obsession with material excess. An atmosphere of tension, a sense of gravity and at the same time a search for balance started to appear more overtly in my photographic works since 2003. The image Desert State (Mountain)

(Fig. 1.6) marked this new direction in my research. I was not immune from the climate of terror that became commonplace after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The fear of terrorism striking again anywhere in the west after the attacks which destroyed the

World Trade Towers in New York in 2001 and caused the death of thousands of people, shifted my perception of life and therefore affected the way I engaged with everything. The American space shuttle Columbia disaster in February 2003, combined with the invasion of Iraq headed by the United States in March of the same year generated an overpowering sense of disquiet and chaos inside me. Consequently, a disconcerting feeling and a desire to overcome chaos is reflected in many of the works that follows from that period. The staged objects in the diptych Beyond Fission

Lies Fusion (Untamed) (Fig.4) and Freezing to Death (Transcommunication Pack) (Fig.

5), form a personal vision of the United States using recognizable figures embedded in

American history, such as The Statue of Liberty and the space shuttle. They signaled to the hegemonic path of power, destruction, and decadence that predominated in that period.

The works Aerodynamic – Existential Technique (H + C), and Atomic – Existential

Technique (H2 + C) (Fig. 1.7), hung on the wall as diptych in the solo exhibition

Cushion: Do not Crush Insulation in 2004, are other examples of conceptual forms suggesting balance with tension allowed by the combination of body weight, posture, object assemblage, image composition and lay-out. The intersection of materials, shapes, colours, bodies, and conceptual underpinnings is complex, although I am expressing an idea through very simple means – a human body and a couple of plastic chairs’ shells. The resulting images can be seen as stern for their visual reduction, but they can also evoke the possibility of a playful and collaborative relationship of balancing forces and properties between human beings and reinvented objects. This playful notion is perhaps more evident in the ‘human plus chair’ (H + C) ensemble in the image Look No Hands (Fig. 1.8).

I create ‘situations’ in which readymade objects and human beings are transformed to portray new types. It involves personal notions of the body, ergonomics, minimization and optimization of resources and space. Objects are reconfigured to fit and suit the human models considering their body characteristics, as in Camaski, where the white skis are transformed into a makeshift, cantilevered bed with the help of another found object – a rusty, light-yellow painted urn, which also is depicted on its own in Rocking well (Fig. 1.9). The ‘bed’ seems to be ‘custom-made’ to accommodate that body. The ensemble of body and objects although seemingly stiff, is held together in a harmonious balance of forces. Light, space and form are worked in an uncomplicated manner. Only one diffused light source illuminates my subjects. In the photographic studio, space is always limited and I use that to reinforce my subscription to ‘less is more’. The reduction in space, colours and materials are intended to emphasise how intense the simplest of interventions can be.

Each of the reconstructed objects have a personalised “function” or “fit” in relation to the model, who performs as symbol for an individual that could be anyone rather than

posing as an identifiable person. I persisted on capturing postures of neutrality and equilibrium, aimed at creating ambiguity with the conflating suggested notions of existential alienation and individual resourcefulness. The isolation in which the models appear to be in is suggestive of a self-generated situation where one may find peace and balance.

The way that the models are dressed offers a de-genderised view of humanity. Hardly any flesh is shown, appearance is not over-valued. My models’ de-sexualised dressing code and subdued body language distance from mainstream society’s obsession with the most obvious strategies of sexualising the self through fashion design. Mainstream fashion gives character to people so that they do not have to generate and outspeak their own. Advertisements stress the importance of appearance and acceptance of pre- given modes of being. Fashion and its cycles are subservient to the neurotic values of a world culture driven and dependent on the economy. Constant change and updating of fashion ignores the concept of fully using something up. I find stimulation on the endurance of fashion, in feelings of exclusion and self-imposed constrains and in the struggle for giving substantial voice and exposure to the individual and unique. I work with characteristic male traits and outlooks, such as minimum use of decoration, austere formalism, and appraised functionalism. My practice places importance on cultivating personal languages in contrast to blindly adopt trends validated by mainstream market.

In experimenting with people and objects, I am exploring ideas of symbiotic and ethereal relationships implying a deeper, unexpected connection and dependency between the human body and psyche with the discarded industrially extruded object. It addresses the possibility of uplifting cosmic energies – the utopian vibe that plays the

important role of encouraging, hugging and bending humankind having the potential of

“propelling” one into an unknown that could be challenging and exciting.

In The Magnanimous Beige Wrap – Part 1 (Contraption), (Part 2 – Expansion), and

(Part 3 – Collaboration) (Figs. 1.12, 1.13, and 1.15), certain ideas found in Platonism and in Constructivism, such as the aim on relationships of balance through the connection of plastic elements and the ascetic grandeur of simple forms respectively are expressed. These notions are reinvented by reinvesting seemingly discreet and humble objects with a human being hoping that the simplified visual structures that they become when united, allow for new meanings containing strong references to contemporary existence besides the canonical ones of the past. Nicholas, the model in the Magnanimous triptych, and I, became friends through his wife Nadja, with whom I shared an artist’s studio in Surry Hills, Sydney, between 2002 and 2004. Nicholas to me was and still is the contemporary embodiment of the work/live/play energy that once existed among the Russian Constructivists of the pre-Stalin era.17 Nicholas is an

‘artist-constructor’, someone who made me think of Vladimir Tatlin (Fig. 1.14) and

Alexander Rodchenko. Like his predecessors, Nicholas life and work as a sculptor and industrial designer are an ongoing fusion of art with utility; his works in graphic and industrial design represent the participation of the artist in the production process in just the manner that they conceived it. Work-wear is what Nicholas wears most of the time. We both praise work practically and intellectually, and feel connected to the

17 The Constructivist movement in Russia was intrinsically connected with advertising and industrial production. Amongst the many Russian artists involved in the establishing of ‘production art’ were El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Liubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Vladimir Tatlin. Together, Vladimir Mayakovsky, a poet, and Alexander Rodchenko, a multi-faceted visual artist, became the ‘advertisement-constructor’, a name they gave their partnership whose task was to create advertisements in the shape of posters, sign-boards, packaging design, lit signs, text and illustrations in magazines and newspapers. Constructivists not only created the promotional ads, but were also involved in a larger sphere of distribution and commercialisation of knowledge through books aimed at erasing illiteracy among workers and peasants – they designed book-stands, kiosks, book shelves, and even wearable outfits with shop logos and slogans for the book sellers. As noted by Elena Chernevich, ‘production art’ emerged “as perhaps the central achievement of the post-Revolutionary aspiration to democratise and to popularise art.” In Elena Chernevich, in Mikhail Anikst and Elena Chernevich, Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties, translated from the Russian and edited by Catherine Cooke, Thames and Hudson in Association with Alexandria Press, London and Moscow, 1987, pp. 25 and 27.

utopianism, which those collective of Russian artists/designers once proposed – of creating a synthesis of art and life in which production was intended to serve its users/consumers for long and to the fullest.

My research is an ongoing, passionate investigation on the relationships between utility and poetry, the found object and the personal aspect of discovery and invention. My images are poetic statements related to my own politics and ideals, which exist among contradictory and complex notions of aestheticism, reconstruction, and purpose. It celebrates the aesthetic in a paradoxical way. When I am asked, “your work is so clean… what do you do?” I do not have a straight answer to this question. It has never been my intention to sanitise the image. The objects were found with marks of wear and tear, or stains, which I have always kept through the entire process of capturing the image to producing the photograph, never erased. In Metal Skelter (Fig.1.10), the tectonic, stripped down outlook of two manufactured bent-iron units, echoes the scaffolding-like architecture mostly found in factories, iron bridges, and exhibition halls of the 19th and 20th century. The metal bars surfaces are covered with rust. It shows a model building’s skeleton in a decaying state propped by a ‘candy’ pink plastic base

(cushioned bags previously used to house computer hard drives).

Cleanliness next to slickness is not something that I have in mind for the outlook of my photographs. I find the “un-heroic”, the redundant, the unfashionable or the lack of cosmetic treatment, as in clothes that are worn-out and/or un-sexy, and prosaic objects suggestive of function, powerfully attractive. The human models wear no make-up and the clothes they wear are not new – these garments are usually theirs or mine. They exert strong symbolic charges with their raw appearance. I am not interested in the grotesque and grunge aesthetic. In the other hand, I think that the ultra-clean and fashionable aesthetic of sci-fi chic, which associates pleasure and good living with

surrounding oneself with the latest white and shinny technological gadgets is problematic and I choose not to subscribe to that. Although my photographic images have a polished and sleek aesthetic insinuated by the balanced composition of elements, diffused lighting and considered colour scheme, these images are an attempt at deconstructing pre-established aesthetic norms of quality, uniqueness, newness, and ‘good form’, as they highly emphasise the obsolete, the utilitarian object whose multiple possibilities of use have been halted. Bricklaying (Fig. 1.11), depicts a white plastic helmet with text (same as in the image title) inscribed in its front. Its worn out quality speaks of past use and service. The fact that it was found dumped on a skip among debris metaphorically implied that the bricklayers’ profession was being made redundant. In an attempt at emphatically reviving the value of work and in particular the purposeful and skilful workmanship in the laying of bricks, I arranged the rescued bricklayer’s helmet over a red fabric/carpet and staged its ‘fifteen minutes’ of fame.

Influential Practices

The Modern Avant-Garde

Simplicity is resolved complexity.18 Simplicity is complexity itself, and one has to be nourished by its essence in order to understand its value.19

18 Constantin Brancusi, quoted in Carmen Giménez and Matthew Gale, Constantin Brancusi – The Essence of Things, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, p. 19. An iconic figure of the Modern Parisian art scene, Brancusi was of Eastern European origin, more precisely from the rural mountain landscape of Romania. He moved to Paris in the first decade of the 20th century. There he lived and developed his practice for 50 years. 19 Constantin Brancusi’s aphorism was taken from the Brummer Gallery catalogue of late 1926. ibid., p. 129.

Reconfigurations are connected with a range of cross-reference and associations.

Some of my sculptures echo the canonical Modernist art objects, the ones which embodied a certain aesthetic abstraction or a reductive formalism, such as Marcel

Duchamp’s prosaic readymades and the streamlined white sculptures of Brancusi. My reconfigurations do not try to mimic these Modern iconic forms, but are intended to be critical propositions in response to the present world of perpetual, economy-driven changes and the consequential excess waste. The references are tangential and my work does not rely on the techniques and materials used by these artists. Instead of porcelain, gesso, or marble, the material that I used is an unorthodox sculptural material, the discarded readymade such as packaging foam, paper bags, etc.

It interested me to work with foam, as it is a material that is easily available, free of cost once it has come out of everyone’s packaged newly acquired computers, air- conditioning units, plasma screens, etc. I am excited in seeing the discarded making their way into the galleries, visible in the photographic recording, evoking some grand historical production. In Milestone Frontier: Brancusi Emaculated Here (Fig. 1.19), the readymade Styrofoam packaging of a G4 e-Mac computer, an obsolete model of a near past which had a prominent rounded base, was slightly transformed and reassembled to become the sculptural centrepiece in the photograph. The white surfaces that contemporary society manufactures, uses and discards, possesses a predominant sealed off, antiseptic quality expressed in its shininess and cold slickness, although imperfections can also be found in their surfaces. When kept and made visible in the photographic image, these bumps, dints, and dirt spots become invitations to a less precious reading of the art object. Milestone Frontier: Brancusi

Emaculated Here also alludes to the process of endless reproducibility of the foam packaging, in particular the ones used to protect computer technology today. The present ubiquity and over production of packaging foam is paralleled to Brancusi’s

multiple reproductions of the same sculpture, which alludes to photography’s inherent property of creating numerous multiples out of one work. Brancusi tended to work on a limited number of topics returning to the same work over the years to create new versions with different materials. As pointed by Paul Paret, Brancusi sculpted six

Endless Columns,…, and well over twenty versions of Bird in Space.20 His ‘replication’ of a sculptural piece was a progressive creative process where he elaborated on the theme each time he returned to it (Fig. 1.17). Each remake was made to be unique and never the same as the previous versions and therefore they were not reproductions per se. A controversial court case in the U.S. involving the nature and status of Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space, which in its arrival in New York for an exhibition in 1926, got confused by custom officials as a mass produced decorative item that in being so was accountable for import levy. He won the case having to defend his aerodynamic forms derived of a refined treatment, which he assured came from tenacious manual work applied in each stage of the process of making his sculptures.21

In 1921, Brancusi started to photograph his sculptures in the studio, constantly moving things around, re-arranging and setting tableaus, playing with the objects in space for the shots (Figs 1.17, 1.20, and 1.21). In this performative existence, the artist created thousands of photographs, which, as it was noted by Paul Paret, thematize Brancusi’s serial production and reproductive dissemination of his sculptures…22

The sculpture depicted in the photograph Milestone Frontier: Brancusi Emaculated

Here, refers to Brancusi and Duchamp’s iconic works in terms of formal resemblance, but there is also an underlined sexual speculation associated to both artists, which is

20 Paul Paret, ‘Sculpture and its Negative – The Photographs of Brancusi, in Geraldine A. Johnson, Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, Cambridge University Press, UK, 1998, p. 102. 21 For more information on these two scandalous scenarios, first involving Princess X and later Bird in Space, see Giménez and Gale, op. cit., p. 26 and p. 29 respectively. 22 Paret, in Johnson, op. cit., p. 102.

suggested in the title. Duchamp’s readymade sculpture Fountain of 1917 (Fig. 1.16), a white porcelain urinal bought from a plumber’s shop has very close formal resemblance with Brancusi’s organically shaped white sculptures, more overtly with

Princess X of 1916 (Fig. 1.18).23 The two artworks are not only anthropomorphically connected, but their allusion to bodily function, gender, and sexual desire, addressed the mysterious and peculiar ways in which both artists approached those issues in their private lives. A urinal’s functionality was and still is associated with bodily excretion, a male device to gather men’s urine, vomit, ejaculation, etc. In Juan Antonio Ramirez’s view, Duchamp’s decision to turn the urinal a 90 degree angle from its normal position implying that the bodily fluids would return backwards, evoked the solipsist meaning of

(sexual) masculine activity.24 Fountain can be understood as the replacement of a woman or even a man, considering Duchamp’s ambiguous sexuality. It is known that

Duchamp did not leave any biological descendants and did not allow himself to be captivated by a particular woman.25 Duchamp’s existence was ruled by the idea of consuming and producing as little as possible living on a limited budget and having few possessions. This economic model of living was to him an elegant way of preserving one’s liberty.26

To suggest a thing or concept, Brancusi created a fragment or an abstraction of a known form from the real world. These fragments in many occasions evoked forms from the modernising world that he was witnessing. His poetic language aimed at expressing a certain experience of his chosen subject rather than its literal reproduction (See this reductive language expressed in the sculpture Hand, Fig. 1.22).

Brancusi was less concerned with details of naturalistic appearance of a chosen topic

23 During the Salon des Indépendents of 1920, Brancusi’s sculpture named Princess X, was banned from the exhibition by judges outraged with the obscenity found in the obvious phallic form of the work. 24 Juan Antonio Ramirez, Duchamp Love and Death Even, transl. Alexander R. Tulloch, Reaktion Books, London, 1998, p. 57. 25 ibid., p. 9. 26 ibid.

for sculpting, and more with reaching the universal spirit of things. His labour intensive, machine-like finished sculptures, tried to capture sensations and feelings common to most human beings through the surfaces and forms of his sculptures.27 Brancusi’s cosmic aspirations were made obvious in his Endless Column (Fig. 1.20). A column he created in various dimensions and materials during many years until his death in 1957.

The title reinforces the sculpture alignment with infinity and incompleteness.

Component elements of his Endless Column are seen in early studio photographs where they were used as a base element or plinth for other sculptures (Fig. 1.21). He made sculpture as base and base as sculpture in various occasions eschewing any hierarchical relationship between the parts. Brancusi was always questioning the boundaries between art and object, mass production and handcraft to give voice to his personal modern aesthetic.

More Contemporary Influences

Besides the Modern legacy of artists and architects who adopted the reductive approach or conceptually made use of objects of mass production and consumption, as mentioned earlier, other more contemporary experiential practices in which functional objects, people, and their performative relationships were emphasised, were also of great influence in my research. In particular, artists, designers and architects who tried to reconfigure aesthetic notions in order to generate unexpected and more personal propositions.

Brazilian artist Lygia Clark was one of these artists with whom I discovered affinities.

Clark started to practice in the 1950s while Brazil was experiencing unforeseen

27 Malvina Hoffman, Sculpture Inside Out, New York, 1939, p. 52. Quoted in Alexandra Parigoris’s essay ‘The Road to Damascus’, in Giménez and Gale, op. cit., p. 54.

economic growth going through a revolutionising process of modernisation following the footsteps of the industrial rationalism of the developed nations of the west. Brasilia, the country’s capital was inaugurated in 1960. A city constructed from scratch in the middle of nowhere, to be the symbol of national modernisation. Clark’s works of this period aimed at integrating art and architecture favouring the non-figurative lineage.

Her intention was to move away from dominant nationalist and conservative traditions by creating works not only related to local contexts, but that could also become integrated with the international art context. As a member of the Neo-concrete artistic movement in Brazil, Clark critically absorbed and reformulated certain aspects of

European Modernism and in doing so, as explained by Rina Carvajal,

The Neo-concrete artists reactivated the idea and tradition of the antropofagia (anthropophagia) of Brazilian culture brilliantly articulated by the poet Oswald de Andrade in the context of the modernist movement of the 1920s… Artists and writers associated with this mode used metaphors of selective digestion, metabolization, and the transformation of the cultural legacy of the colonizer by means of syncretic combination of elements derived from both local and foreign contexts.28

Following the greatest utopian lineages of the twentieth century, Clark’s practice sought for the reconnection of art and life. For her, the artistic process consisted of:

Receiving perceptions raw, living them, elaborating oneself through the processes, regressing and growing outward, towards the world.29

28 Rina Carvajal, ‘The Experimental Exercise of Freedom’, in Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz, The Experimental Exercise of Freedom – Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 39. 29 Lygia Clark, ‘Da supressão do objeto (anotações)’, in Manuel J. Borja-Villel, ed., Lygia Clark, Fundació Tàpies, Barcelona, 1997, p. 264. In Suely Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, in Martin and Ruiz, ibid., p. 68.

Clark’s art evolved toward the experiential with the emergence of what she named

“relational objects”, which were banal, precarious objects, such as plastic bags filled with air, rocks, pebbles, rubber strips, threads, nets, etc (Figs. 1.23, 1.24, and 1.25).

Clark introduced the relational to the spectator in order to generate dialogues between objects and humans. As it was pointed by Yve- Alain Bois,

It was the interaction between different forces that moved Lygia (your own pulling, the extensibility of the elastic, and the weight of the pebbles)…30

The spectator/’client’ was supposed to hold, to touch, or to envelop themselves with these objects chosen by the artist. These “sessions” akin to rituals where her objects were handled, felt, and inhabited aimed at reactivating the power of sensing the self and the world. Clark believed that we all possessed that power.

Clark’s originality of approach in her later works disrupted the structures of both fields: of art and of psychological therapy. Clark did not believe in representation, neither in passive contemplation. As it was explained by Suely Rolnik,

… Clark liberated the artistic object from its formalist inertia and its mythifying aura by creating “living objects”…; freeing the spectator from his or her soporific inertia, whether by making possible the spectator’s active participation in the reception or in the execution of the work or by intensifying his or hers faculties of perception and cognition…31

Clark’s works involved and relied on the actual participation of the spectator with the precarious objects. In my work, interaction with objects happens to the spectator via

30 Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Nostagia of the Body – Lygia Clark’, in Krauss, Rosalind, Michelson, Annette, Bois, Yve-Alain, Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., Foster, Hal, Hollier, Denis, Kolbowski, Silvia, October the Second Decade, 1986-1996, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1997, p. 26. 31 Suely Rolnik, ‘Molding a Contemporary Soul: The Empty-Full of Lygia Clark’, in Martin and Ruiz, op. cit., p. 60.

representation through the photographic image. Clark and I were both interested in how to use everyday objects to foster personal expression while giving emphasis to the concept of containment as a necessity if one wishes to expand in self-awareness.32

Clark held the utopian belief that her creative propositions could bring change to the ones participating. Hers was a role of a therapist/facilitator/proposer who provided the spectators with a springboard for their “freedom”.

The notion of communication and exchange of positive energy between people and discarded objects is suggested in the assemblage consisting of two people united by a readymade foam shape, which are depicted in the image Lumbar Hi-Fi Receivers (Fig.

1.26). Each piece of material has its own voice through its texture, surface, weight, and density. Everything occupies space and transmits energy. We may choose to exchange our energy with them or not. I am especially interested in reappraising materials and forms that somehow have lost the prestige or sense of needed duty that they once had; the ones which are usually looked down and would rarely be given a prominent profile. In the photograph Little Rugged Red Rocking Roof (Fig. 1.27), one of the human beings appearing in Lumbar Hi-Fi Receivers lays inside the structure. The roof has been placed bit lower in relation to what seemed to have been a previous stage of adjustment, represented in the image titled Two Hands, One Head, Twice

(Fig. 1.29). Here we face a collaborative act, the selfless hands building paying attention to someone else’s needs.

The precarious and the desire to care for them are important in my practice just as it is in Lucy Orta’s contemporary mixture of design, architecture, social intervention, and art

(Figs. 1.28 and 1.30). Orta’s preoccupations situate around the precariousness of life

32 Ironically, after Clark’s death in 1988, her relational objects, including masks and garments have been exhibited inside display cabinets or through installations of photographic and video documentation. The essence of the work may have been lost considering that Clark envisioned the public engaging with the work not just through seeing it, but more importantly via the other senses.

lived on the streets – the homeless experience in our contemporaneity. There is a strong sense of social responsibility in her works. Many of them are collective interventions – garments and shelters providing chain connections between people, metaphorically suggesting the formation of communities through human contact. Orta’s clothing and mobile habitats offered a mixture of poetry and functionality. These are quite sophisticated creations operating as extensions of the body in connection with other bodies/bodices. In this manner, she proposed a personal utopian dream of unity through performative acts at various venues, in which she could demonstrate the purpose of her wearable architecture.

Orta’s propositions suggested that a better way of living on the streets was possible if we all were keen to collaborate and care for each other. As noted by Paul Virilio,

In Lucy’s work, the warmth of one gives warmth to the other. The physical link weaves a social link.33

Her performances also produce an out of the ordinary dialogue between the homeless

– the presumed wearers of her garments and the spectator, the people with homes. A humbler take on the notion of reinventing a shelter, is proposed in Sobremanta Sol

(Fig. 1.31). A blanket with colourful geometric design, something akin to a bastardised version of Anni Albers or another talented Bauhaus’ graduate textile work of the 1920s, wraps the body of a man (Figs. 1.32, 1.33, and 1.34). The model’s dark tracksuit pants, although very little showing, strikes out in a cold and unflattering contrast with the warmth that emanates from the ‘Sun Blanket’.

33 Paul Virilio, ‘Urban Armour: Observations on the work of Lucy Orta recorded during an interview in December 1995’, in Ewen McDonald, Lucy Orta, publication accompanying the exhibition Personal Effects/The Collective Unconscious, Museum of Contemporary Art Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, unpaged.

The question of packaging is dual as it facilitates transport minimizing damage of goods and at the same time it brands or disseminate whatever is the message about the product that the manufacturer wants to convey. In Paul Virilio’s words,

Lucy Orta’s work seeks to disturb us, to attract us inexorably, like packaging attracts customers, towards problems that are continually avoided nowadays.34

Orta’s clothes and shelters are a form of packaging. They hold printed text – messages telling the stories of ordinary people who attended the workshops created by the artist.

Makeshift shelters are also proposed in my works: In Metal We T(rust) (Fig. 1.35) and

In Curiosity We Fit (Fig. 1.37), both from 2004. The situations depicted in these photographs point to the capacity we have to improvise and to be resourceful with what is available. They show bodies laying down in unorthodox beds/enclosures. These conceptual habitats are not necessarily comfortable in the most obvious cushioned and opulent notion of comfort. These images as propositions of alternative living seek to challenge the one-dimensional assumption that comfort means soft excesses.

The oeuvre of visionary artists, architects and designers with a focus on the importance of adaptability and multipurpose has always influenced my practice. I found amusing the way they mix utility and fantasy, making the artwork to stand as an aesthetic and functional experiment. Investigations and visions of the future were expressed in the projects of Archigram, which was a collaborative ensemble comprising the English pop architects Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Green, Ron Herron and

Mike Webb. The group disrupted in a fun way the architectural scene of the ‘60s, making public their ambiguous and irreverent designs of cities that walked and/or had interchangeable building units, all of which remained unbuilt. Archigram’s utopia

34 ibid.

proposed liberation through malleable architecture, which worked hand in hand with their naive technocratic optimism (Fig. 1.36).

In a similar vein, the critical practice of the Italian group Superstudio of the 1960s and

70s, focused on utopian propositions related to architecture and design, to destabilize consumer society. They questioned the practice of building for the sake of building by proposing absurd monumental architecture that they never intended to execute. Their

Continuous Monument of 1969-70 (Fig. 1.38), which appeared reconfigured according to various locations chosen by the group using collage and airbrush techniques was the visualisation of Superstudio’s objects such as mirrors, that are for reflection and measure, … signals for an existence, which continues…35

Superstudio was concerned about the alienation of life in the city and desired that this automated life was eradicated. As designers, their critique was also incorporated into the beautiful objects that the group created, although their position in relation to consumption was one of contention. More important to them was to put forth their conceptual proposals. As Superstudio members expressed,

…To come first or last has no importance if the whole race is wrong, and the race of consumerism is definitely wrong. Thus the thing to do is not to take part in the race, but to get out of it as soon as possible, and to isolate oneself apart to collect together slowly the pieces of our existence and forge the instruments for survival, the instruments for the satisfaction of true needs.36

35 Superstudio, ‘Destruction, Metamorphose and Reconstruction of the Object’ published in In, no. 2-3, 1971, in Peter Lang, and William Menking, Superstudio – Life without Objects, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, 2003, p. 121. Superstudio’s members were Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia, Roberto Magris, Alessandro Poli, Alessandro Magri, and Gian Piero Frassinelli. 36 Adolfo Natalini, ‘A House of Calm Serenity’, published in Vogue, September-October 1969, in Lang and Menking, ibid., p. 75.

Conclusion

My photo-sculptural arrangements are conceptual propositions, visual translations of hope for a critical existence. I mix old and new technologies, the ordinary with the marvellous, the real with the imaginary for the creation of conceptual works to imply the idea of value as being closely connected with considered personal economies. The artwork becomes an ideological and aesthetic experiment, in which utility and fantasy coexist. However visionary the work may be, it does not distance from the society of the time that the work is being created, suggesting economic and social activities that are latent in our society, but that in real living experience are still undervalued. There is the underlining play with the idea of escaping from existing circumstances by changing one self – the belief that we are able to develop new habits and are able to choose.

Escaping by reinventing and creating a personal narrative while embarking on a journey through utopian legacies of the past.

I saw the relevance of Le Corbusier’s thinking and production of that period more emphatically as a ‘model’ for influencing people in opposing ways to the push towards excessive consumption in our present context, which was an activity already being promoted in the 1920s through the growing of the advertising machine. Through my investigations, Le Corbusier appeared to have placed great value on durability and quality of manufactured goods, on the lengthy full savouring and experience of things, instead of choosing to live enslaved to mainstream fast-fashion cycles. As it will be shown, like Le Corbusier, the latest fashion, the new gadget, the conspicuous consumption – these flimsy expressions of ‘taste’ – do not appeal to me. I look back into certain practices of past Modernities, particularly of the 1920s decade because I believe there was then such a fresh, naïve creativity, a drive to make art closely linked to everyday life. Perhaps the desire to achieve commercial success (as we are driven

to today) was not the priority for the creative hub of Modernism. Above that, there was the committed utopianism to work for the common good, and for the establishment of a

“cultural” civilization.

My individual experience and perception of the contemporary living context, where the disequilibrium and chaos of our civilised relationship with production and consumption has pushed me towards looking into the past, to a time where the degree of industrial and technological progress had not yet reached the excessive marks of today.37 My disgust for the conventional idea of ill-considered production and consumption, together with my admiration of the virtues of living without being a slave to excess, are what more closely relates my research with Le Corbusier’s quest. His concern with the future of humanity in the face of accelerated industrial progress will be exposed in the following chapters of this thesis.

37 The chaos and disequilibrium caused by the economic paradigm do not seem to be of much interest when the focus has been to achieve high and higher economic growth. “The feedback effects of economic growth and its accompaniments on technological change itself remain relatively neglected by economists.” Robert U. Ayres, Turning Point - An End to the Growth Paradigm, Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, 1998, p. 4.

CHAPTER TWO – Un-leashing the Domestic in Le Corbusier’s Habitats

Introduction

Having outlined the conceptual and practical characteristics of my work in the past chapter, I will now turn to Le Corbusier and his challenging propositions for living, set within the prevailing cultural and commercial discourse of the 1920s. This chapter reveals his contribution regarding the importance of creating space for intellectual reflection, in particular upon the disturbingly excessive level of production and consumption that society is entrenched with nowadays.

People tax me very readily with being a revolutionary. It is an effective if somewhat flattering way of putting a distance between a society preoccupied with maintaining its present equilibrium and eager minds which are likely to disturb it. Yet this equilibrium, which they try so hard to maintain, is for vital reasons purely ephemeral: it is a balance, which has to be perpetually re- established.38

Le Corbusier expressed that he never wanted or had the pretension to change the face of the world, but instead possessed an insatiable drive for learning and sharing knowledge. His life was one of continuous and passionate research. Giving rein to his creative energy, Le Corbusier produced unique works in the Modern period, applying to them his evolving poeticism. Always an innovator dedicated to experimentation in order to pose new questions of a technological, material, formal, or conceptual order, Le

Corbusier worked with a simple, clear method, while he relentlessly pursued new ideas.

38 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, translated from the eighth French edition of Urbanisme by Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Press, London, 1947, p. 308.

Before entering the realm of Le Corbusier’s ideologies and practice of the 1920s, it is crucial to set it within the cultural, social and economic discourse of the world in which he was living. Significant social and economic changes were happening, influencing creators such as Le Corbusier toward research into new propositions for living, seeking adaptation and fresh beginnings to those new circumstances. The interwar period roughly coincides with a golden age for advertising marked by the growing presence of

American advertising agencies in the European markets.39 They placed emphasis on images over words, aiming to arrest attention by capturing humans sensuously (Figs.

2.1,2.2 and 2.3). In this way advertising took on the task of penetrating the consciousness of the people. As noted by Kirk Varnedoe,

Signboards were a far more aggressive presence in the cityscape during the first decades of the century than at any time since…. advertising was seen, internationally, as having grown into something monstrous…40

In tandem with advertising, industrial capitalism with its “assembly line production” was making available a plethora of commodities much greater in number and in diversity than what had been previously produced.41 As noted by Stuart Ewen, this innovation was in many ways unsophisticated, and hardly educated as to its own implications.

Transformations were astonishing, particularly in quantitative provisions – in shorter

39 Rene Clarke when reviewing the history of advertising in the United States in 1934 declared that, “the fifteen [sic] years between 1921 and 1930 were the golden age of advertising.” Rene Clarke, ‘Cavalcade’, Advertising Arts, September 1934, p. 12. In Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low - Modern Art and Popular Culture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991, p. 297. Despite being American in their techniques and methods, the form and style of the ads produced by these advertising agencies were increasingly being influenced by European Modernism. “Not simply a matter of borrowed imagery or shared styles, though these abound.” Varnedoe explains that modern publicity with its intention of making certain objects or products “take on vivid lives in the public imagination”, had its strategies linked with “Modern art’s insistence that the world be seeing anew, as well with its general spirit of invention and demand for change.” In Varnedoe and Gopnik, ibid., p. 244. 40 Varnedoe and Gopnik, ibid., p. 250. 41 Henry Ford established the “line production system” for “maximum production economy” in 1910 with his automobile plant in Michigan, United States. In Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico, Düsseldorf, 1976, p. 23.

periods of time, assembly line factories allowed machines and workers to put together more and more products. It was obvious for industrialists that the emerging capacity of their system to efficiently produce all kinds of things necessitated the creation of wider channels for the distribution of its ever-increasing production. It was understood that,

The utilitarian value of a product or the traditional notion of mechanical quality were no longer sufficient inducements to move merchandise at the necessary rate and volume required by mass production.42

At the same time, the elite market had ceased to be enough to sustain that ongoing growth of the system of production. A system that would produce mass consumers needed to be created and continuously extended to absorb the fruits of an expansive mode of production. In Edward Filene’s words,

By the end of the depression of 1921, productive machinery was so effective that even more so than before much greater markets were absolutely necessary than those provided by the existing public buying power.43

Advertising strengthened and solidified its position due to the market’s desperate need to move its vast production. The creation of mass consumption required that the ad- men invested a great amount of research and resources into human psychology. This research into an understanding of human instincts and motivators was undertaken so that industry could use the knowledge to propel people toward consumerism. It was found that the instinctual bearings of “prestige”, “beauty”, “acquisition”, “self- adornment”, and “play” could be tackled by the marketing departments, framing products in the aura of these ideals, hence marketing the products as catalysts for the

42 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, St. Louis, San Francisco, Toronto, Mexico, Düsseldorf, 1976, p. 34. 43 Edward A. Filene, The Consumer’s Dollar, New York, 1934, p. 29. In Stuart Ewen, ibid., p. 25.

betterment of the individual.44 An advertisement was focused on how the product could make the consumer become a better person by acquiring it. Advertising connected those latent personal “qualities” desired by most people with possessions. By using an advertisement to bring an image of a product into the context one’s desired life, the buyer consumed the connection and became a subscriber to the emerging prescriptive market driven economy.

…When you glance at magazines…[a] rivulet of text trickles through the meadows of automobiles, baking powders, corsets and kodaks.45

Products such as those above mentioned by Walter Lippmann, were advertised being used by people. As noted by Stuart Ewen,

Inextricably linked to the development of consciously styled products, advertising projected images of these products, and of the “happy” consumers who purchased them…46

Edward Filene, a Boston department store merchant, noted,

Mass production demands the education of the masses, the masses must learn to behave like human beings in a mass production world.47

The education proposed by Filene was merely the public’s acquaintance with what was available for purchase in the marketplace. Any other kind of education that offered a threat to the interests of building up a strong consumerist culture, was not, in his view,

44 Terms coined by Stuart Ewen. ibid., p. 35. 45 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery, 1914, pp. 52-53, quoted by Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, Basic Books, US, 1988, p. 43. 46 Stuart Ewen, ibid., p. 43. 47 Edward A. Filene, Successful Living in the Machine Age, Garden City, New York, 1931, p. 272, 144. In Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, op. cit., p. 54.

desirable. Similarly, Calvin Coolidge referred to the role advertising had in “educating” the public. He explained the role of advertising as offering knowledge about a variety of goods available for consumption. His words make advertising sound like something akin to cultural enrichment:

Advertising demanded but a momentary participation in the logic of consumption. Yet, hopefully that moment would be expanded into a lifestyle by its educational values. A given ad asked not only that an individual buy its product, but also that he experience a self-conscious perspective that he had previously been socially and physically denied. By that perspective, he could ameliorate social and personal frustrations through access to the marketplace.48

With consumer consciousness in the hands of advertising campaigns, the contemporary concept of “essential” things for living became heavily influenced whatever the market determined to sell. The market “educated” via advertisements sending messages inciting the formation of new material desires, and coercively perpetrated a fear of exclusion and inadequacy in the individual who did not fit into the norm established by the ads’ content. “Education” was nothing more than market mores indoctrination.

Capital and power in the 1920s were concentrated in metropolitan centres. There was a world market boom causing severe decline in the local and regional economies. A modernizing world emerged, with the techno-social economic dynamics of production and consumption propelled by the spread of communication and the growth of desire demand. Post-First World War devastation was the springboard to an accelerated reconstruction immersed in radical changes, especially at urban centres. Increasingly,

48 Coolidge’s referred notion of education, in his words were: “When we stop to consider the part which advertising plays in the modern life of production and trade, we see that basically it is that of education … it makes new thoughts, new desires and new actions.” In Frank Spencer Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising, Garden City, New York, 1929, p. 620. In Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, op. cit., p. 36.

people installed electricity at home instead of gas or oil. Growth in access to cars and communications such as telephone and radio was also taking place. The ‘spirit’ reverberating throughout the 1920s was one of optimism, which reflected the development of high hopes that urbanites were feeling in relation to a future shaped by technological advances. It was a period of intense intellectual and artistic activity.

Le Corbusier and many other artists at the beginning of the twentieth-century gravitated towards metropolitan centres, migrating from smaller communities, seduced by the ‘new world order’. Le Corbusier adopted Paris as his new home in 1917, and there he soon started to get involved in the bubbly, sociable, and culturally driven

Parisian atmosphere.49 As claimed by Kirk Varnedoe,

Paris was the forefront of artistic innovation, and had been for decades; and from this vantage, the future was visible, or at least depictable, as it was not from others.50

Le Corbusier believed, as did most of the artistic avant-garde, that the signs of technical and scientific achievement epitomising the ‘new spirit’, or the zeitgeist, were more intensely experienced in the metropolis, rather than in rural and arcadian landscapes.

Le Corbusier was among those artists and intellectuals who held an optimistic view of the world, for a future where industrialisation would enable the rise of favourable standards of living for all. Industrial production, in his mindset, embodied the appealing promise of ‘democracy’. He saw his work, like many other avant-garde artists,

49 “The French have always considered culture to be an intrinsic part of the national profile and, therefore, they have also considered support of the arts to be an essential activity of the State.” In Paul Greenhalgh, ‘The Struggles within French Furniture, 1900-1930’, in Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, Reaktion Books, London, 1990, p.55. It was also common knowledge then and for a long period thereafter that Paris was the international capital of style. 50 Varnedoe and Gopnik, High & Low - Modern Art and Popular Culture, op. cit., p. 292.

architects and designers of the period, as a form of positive propaganda, a means to alter consciousness and promote the triumph of new social forces.51 In Le Corbusier’s words:

The legitimate pursuit of any society aiming at permanence must primarily be the housing of man, sheltering him from the elements and thieves, and above all maintaining around him the peace of his home, sparing no effort, so that his existence may unfold in harmony without dangerously transgressing nature’s laws. This aim bears no relationship to the housing tolerated today. It is nothing but a crude compromise, brought about by the powers unleashed by money: profit, rivalry, haste – all the motives which have degraded man’s dignity, crushed him into submission and made him forget his fundamental right to a 52 decent way of life.

He sought, holding on to his industrial utopianism, to create a platform where he could put forth his ideals of reform, which he believed would lead to the improvement in the quality of human life:

As a just reward, architecture will bring a special happiness to those who have given her their whole being. This happiness is a sort of trance that comes with radiant birth after the agonies of labour. It is the power of invention, of creation which allows man to give the best that is in him to bring joy to others, the 53 everyday joy found only in the home. … To dwell, work and improve oneself (improve one’s body and mind)…54

51 Varnedoe and Gopnik, High & Low - Modern Art and Popular Culture, op. cit., p. 248. Futurists – glorifying the machine, Dada – mockery of industry, Duchamp – art intertwines with commerce and advertising in a way that it confronted an established relationship people had with objects by investing everyday objects with change of context, scale and with strategic display. 52 Le Corbusier, ‘The Construction of Dwellings’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, transl by Pierre Chase, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, p. 25. 53 ibid., p. 34. 54 Le Corbusier and François de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man from La Maison des Hommes, first edition in English, 1945, Architectural Press, London, 1958, p. 21.

Le Corbusier’s position was ambivalent: his desire for simplicity and his lust for technological progress co-existed side-by-side. Infatuated with industrialization and the idea of progress, he was naïve enough not to foresee the disastrous social and environmental consequences that followed the development of industrial capitalism. Le

Corbusier lived in a pre-ecologically conscious world, where industrialisation and mass production were seen as redeeming applications.

Bare and Dare

The problem is one of adaptation, in which the realities of our life are in question. Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.55

Le Corbusier desired that his work in architecture and design would inspire alternatives and challenges for people. He saw changes occurring without the need of revolution in the most literal way: revolution was to him the gradual process of transformation in the habits of society.

Despite the crisis due to the aftermath of the First World War, domestic life in the

1920s was beginning another revolutionary stage, with household electricity becoming ubiquitous and a growing number of electrical appliances being created for domestic use, such as vacuum cleaners, fridges, and heaters to name a few. New habits were replacing old ones and consequently domestic architecture would need to undergo

55 Le Corbusier’s last words in his book, Towards a New Architecture, translated from the thirteenth French edition by Frederick Etchells, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1986, pp. 288-9. Vers une Architeture, its original French title, was first published in 1923. The first English translation was only effectuated in 1927.

metamorphosis if it was to accommodate the emerging shift. Nevertheless, hardly anyone in that period was familiar with Le Corbusier’s new propositions for living.

It is important to remember the constant difficulties and obstructions that Le Corbusier experienced when proposing his housing schemes and plans for urbanisation to the various public authorities then ruling the municipalities of France. This opposition occurred because municipal authorities had specific opinions and enforced specific regulations based on a pre-war set of parameters, ignoring the societal changes and the severe economic crisis of the period, all of which Le Corbusier took account of.

Russell Walden’s essays on Le Corbusier56 highlight the influence of Jean-Jacques

Rousseau’s theoretical concerns with the humanity of man in the Modern world on the formation of Le Corbusier’s vision. The critical writings of Rousseau, who made passionate protests against slums, the plight of the poor, the place of the machine in society, the distribution of wealth, the source of political power, and the tragedy of man’s spiritual alienation as a result of his technological commitment to an industrial world, were in the hands of Le Corbusier by 1909.

As soon as he set up residency in Paris, Le Corbusier became concerned with the intense and chaotic growth of industrial cities. As he confessed in his book Urbanisme,

(translated into English as The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, first published in

1924),

The growth of every great city has exceeded all prevision. This growth has been a mad one, with disturbing possibilities. The industrial life and the

56 Russell Walden ‘Le Corbusier’s Early Years in Paris’, Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1982, p. 121. Walden specified that the young Le Corbusier read Rousseau’s Confession during the summer of 1909, and Du Contrat social probably soon after that.

commercial life which are adjusting themselves to it are new phenomena on an overwhelming scale.57

Le Corbusier was effected by how terribly people lived in slums, where cases of tuberculosis and other infectious disease abounded. Industrial development contributed to the proliferation of insalubrious dwellings collecting where the lower classes of factory workers and unemployed people of Paris lived.

Although he witnessed the problems of industrial cities, Le Corbusier believed in the inevitability of the industrial revolution, he prophesised of the machine as a reality entirely independent of human desire and wills.58 He saw the industrial shift hitting unstructured cities and citizens, causing disorder, physical and psychological stress, illness, and social injustice. The habitats he witnessed in industrial cities (particularly in

Paris, he thought), failed to cater for the basic human needs of sun, fresh air, greenery, and clear uncluttered living space. Le Corbusier considered the natural conditions of

“sun, air, and verdure” as the fundamental parameters for his urban development plans of the 1920s, believing that salubrious conditions should be the priority when designing to optimise living conditions (Fig. 2.6).

Le Corbusier’s (in)famous declaration: “la maison est une machine à habiter” (a house is a machine for living in) has commonly been understood as Le Corbusier communicating his proposed house to be a soulless, cold and robotic environment. But he intended to place his new dwelling in a position of likeness to the machine in a peculiar way: he desired the house to exude functionality, with the sturdy and well designed standardised components facilitated by industrial production. In his vision it was a house capable of being maintained, to be kept in good working order, and not

57 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, op. cit., p. 98. 58 Le Corbusier, Radiant City, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Paris, 1935, pp. 195-196. Quoted in Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘A Vision of Utopia’, in Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 229.

needing to be replaced or renovated conspicuously. The house Le Corbusier had in mind was one that combined aspects of efficient utilisation of space and furnishings with the poetic and the humane; for him a mechanistic habitat was one that could serve its inhabitants well in every aspect. In that sense, he desired that his machine à habiter should embody the expected operative purpose encountered in factories. But it was not a house that should physically emulate a factory building. His concept of house- machine was not based on the literal nor on the general, but rather on the personal and utopian reading of the machine. Relentlessly, Le Corbusier tried to clarify his intention and his views concerning the machine:

When we founded L’Esprit Nouveau in 1920 (Fig. 2.4-5), I gave to the home its fundamental importance. I called it a “machine for living”, thereby demanding from it a complete, flawless answer to a clearly articulated question. This profoundly humanistic program restores man to the central preoccupation of architecture. …The word ‘machine’ is derived from the Latin and Greek meaning ‘artifice’ or ‘device’, ‘an instrument constructed to produce certain results’. The word ‘device’ states the problem well. It is to grasp the increasing perilousness of the situation and to create out of it a necessary and adequate framework for life. Through the medium of art, and with a dedication to the welfare of mankind, we then have the power to brighten that life by elevating it.59

The machine-like simplicity and functional look had undesired connotations:

To nearly everyone “functional” architecture was identified with the factory or with the office – with the skyscrapers that were built in such profusion in the decade before the Depression, and the industrial plants that were all business and very little humanity.60

59 Le Corbusier, ‘The Construction of Dwellings’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., p. 3 (Fig. Indication mine) 60 Russel Lynes, The Tastemakers, The Universal Library, New York, 1972, first published in the U. S. in 1949, p. 245-6.

Le Corbusier selected the architectural elements and furnishings for his projects regarding their function, although for him, functionality as a purpose should never be separated from the aesthetic and the poetic realm. In his environments, use value was given vital importance; but function did not compromise the aesthetic and vice-versa, they came to life together, forming a harmonious synthesis.

The plans of Le Corbusier’s houses were very unconventional for the period. Some of the innovative features of his houses in the 1920s were: ramps used as connections between floor levels; kitchens placed above the ground level; and he designed bathrooms and bedrooms as the only spaces in a house that received a fully enclosed

“room” treatment. The rest of the body of the home unfolded in a free, continuous fashion, dispensing with the idea of regular room division and the consequent proliferation of darkened, limiting, maize-like environments. The bareness of his spaces opposed the traditional heavily walled, lined, and decorated interiors and exterior facades favoured at that time. Instead, Le Corbusier was proposing architecture of no fuss, of clean lines and simplicity akin to those found in the contemporary ocean liner

(Figs. 2.7-8). Le Corbusier saw a striking similarity between the Modern ship’s interior architecture and the monastic quarters of medieval origin. Both environments dealt with an idea of comfort that eschewed opulence, and that attracted him immensely (Figs.

2.7, 2.9 and 2.10).

Confronting Comfort – Embracing the Self

Siegfried Giedion’s description of the dynamism and multi-functionality found in patent furniture coming into the market in the twentieth century, serves as an analogy to the type of comfort Le Corbusier was proposing with his ‘house/machine for living’:

Patent furniture could perform alternate functions. ...It could take on any desired position of the human body, change from this position, and return to the normal. Comfort actively wrested by adaptation to the body, as against comfort passively derived from sinking back into cushions – here is the whole difference between the constituent furniture and the transitory furniture of the [last] century.... Furniture was thus endowed with a flexibility unknown before, and 61 ceased to be a rigid, static implement.

Le Corbusier’s living spaces differed enormously from what already existed and what was expected to come up as the next trend, at least in Paris at that time. The Art

Nouveau and Art Deco movements spread the notion that opulence was ‘good’, via their profuse use of expensive, heavy and bulky materials, and stuffy rooms.

Le Corbusier declared when describing his Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau (more detail in chapter three of this thesis), that this model-apartment was inspired by the Carthusian monastery of Ema (Grande-Chartreuse d’Ema) in Tuscany, which Le Corbusier visited on two occasions in 1907 and 1910.62 The type of comfort offered by the medieval monastery of Ema is perhaps the one that more closely connects with Le Corbusier’s

Modern vision of ‘good living’ (see Fig. 2.9). The monk’s cell that he temporarily occupied at Ema was spacious, dynamic, and vibrant, unlike the usually narrow, ill-lit monk’s cells of other monasteries.63 For Le Corbusier, the time spent at the monastery of Ema was not only one of solitude inside a private cell – he ate meals with the community of monks, and walked around the countryside contemplating and communing with nature.

61 Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command - A Contribution to Anonymous History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1948, p. 390. 62 Le Corbusier, in the Preface of Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, transl. by James I. Dunnet, The Architectural Press, London, 1987, p. xiv. He continued visiting monasteries in Italy during his travels in 1911. 63 Hazem S. Osman, Crossings: Journey Through Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche, a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies Master of Architecture, Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario, 1999, p. 88.

Le Corbusier’s interest in meditative space was constant throughout his practice and life.64 He strove to include in each of his architectural works traces of those monastic spaces that had made such a strong impact on him: simple order and functionality in the programme, formal geometries, and the peaceful atmosphere generated by the play of light. It was comfort sought from a less materialistic perspective, and creation projected through balanced configuration of space in light, that Le Corbusier made manifest in his architecture.

The equipment Le Corbusier chose for the home were not only of Spartan elegance.

These tools, furniture, objects of utility, and architectural fittings were configured in ways that would allow efficient and unburdened usage. Luxury in the sensation of comfort, so he thought, was to be found in the pared down constitution of certain purposeful and well-made products of industry. The Corbusian houses of the 1920s emanated an atmosphere of quietude and warmth, which had the potential to act as a source of stimulation for the spiritual and the creative faculties of their inhabitants. As

Le Corbusier declared,

Day after day, we notice among the products of industry articles of perfect convenience and utility that soothe our spirits with the luxury afforded by the elegance of their conception, the purity of their execution, and the efficiency of their operation. They are so well thought out that we feel them to be harmonious, and this harmony is sufficient for our gratification.65

Le Corbusier intended to pose a challenge to the prevailing notions of bourgeois domesticity. The ‘machine for living in’ transgressed the idea of home and homeliness

64 Le Corbusier spent his later life in a small log cabin of only sixteen square meters, which he designed in 1951 and named Le Cabanon (The Shed). It is located at the French seaside town of Roquebrune-Cap Martin. Le Corbusier’s cabin/studio/beach-home can be said to be the ultimate ‘machine for living’. 65 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 91.

attached to the clichéd assumption that warmth and cosiness in a home could only be obtained with soft padded ‘homespun’ décor such as floral curtains, sumptuous divans, and doilies on the table. Transgression of a pre-established notion of the domestic did not imply a rejection of domesticity all together. In fact, his designs celebrated a new and challenging home-living experience. Le Corbusier’s home was a ‘manifesto-home’, which posed resistance to the prevailing habits, beliefs, and conditions favoured and sanctioned by the contemporary bourgeoisie.

Le Corbusier’s concept of home with its so called ‘unhomely’ features was envisioned as a creative, thought-and-practice provoking critique of the dominant social and cultural order, rather than as a stylistic reactionary attack on the established order. The paring down process that Le Corbusier’s interior design undertook was often labelled as an anti-domestic trait, and yet this may be so only when analysed through a purely conventional frame of domesticity.

The prospect of a new form of habitation with fashionable connotations attached for the very fact of being ‘new’, succeeded in seducing a small slice of an adventurous elite to commission Le Corbusier’s architecture. However, living in these houses proved to be the challenge for those clients. It was a less glamorous experience than they may have anticipated without the luxuries that the bourgeois client was accustomed to. The spareness of Le Corbusier’s interior design and furniture offered no frivolous comfort.

Apart from the spatial challenge presented by the free plan, the components of the fit- out also proved to be an obstacle to ‘comfort’. For example, Thonet chairs were included as part of the equipment in most of Le Corbusier’s domestic interiors of the

1920s, primarily used to furnish dining and study areas. Thonet chairs were not designed with any cushioned components, but were made of bentwood with plywood

or simple cane seats, and in general the Thonet brand furniture of the era was never distinguished with any ornamental embellishment.

In the contemporary context, Le Corbusier’s architecture and fit-out looked and felt more like that of a servant’s environment. These seeming shortfalls lead to dissatisfaction in conservative inhabitants: the bourgeois were out of their comfort zone. As noted by Adrian Forty in his research into the evolution of furniture design, the austerity of design for servant furniture made it less comfortable in a conspicuous way than that of their masters’ furniture.66 The gap that existed between the lifestyle that the owner wanted to feel secure that they were able to project to the world, as being differentiated from that of their servants, was unable to be filled by this new proposal for a utilitarian, open plan domestic environment.

Le Corbusier intended his uncluttered architectural spaces to serve the inhabitant beyond presenting to the world a successful self-image of the inhabitant. He intended the home environment to serve the inhabitant with space where it was possible to immerse into oneself and reflect, instead of relying on outside entertainments and trivialities, which were always distracting and seldom fulfilling. He viewed intellectual diversion as,

…An elevated activity: to manage, by means of those stimulants which for us are the achievement of life – that is, music, books, the creations of the spirit – to lead a life that is truly one’s own, truly oneself.67

66 Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire – Design and Society 1750-1980, Thames and Hudson, London, 1986, p. 84. The author gives illustrative and written accounts on the absence of excess decoration and the distance from the established notion of comfort in the servant’s furniture in Europe spanning a period between the1870s and the1920s. 67 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 73.

The home would become a space and an ambience to facilitate inner exploration, for rediscovering the essence of what it was to be a human being. Self-cultivation was viewed by Le Corbusier as being an ideal ‘entertainment’, as he added,

These activities of the spirit, this introspection, which can delve only a little way, or very deeply, is life itself, that is, one’s internal life, one’s true life.68

Since people’s work-load was becoming a little lighter due to shifts in work methods and operations brought in by Taylorism and Fordism, Le Corbusier imagined that the extra time and energy could be channelled towards the development of a deeper sense of knowledge about the realities of human existence.69 He also realised the need for recreation and relaxation space outside and nearby the home in areas abundant in greenery, provided by city councils to their citizens at no cost:

The eight-hour day. Some day it may be the six-hour day. … It is obvious that here again we have an architectural problem; a problem of housing and town planning; of the organization of residential quarters; of arrangements for using our lungs to the full, for after the day’s work is done comes the time when we can breathe freely.70 …The eight-hour day. Then the eight hours of recreation. … The possibility of engaging in sport should be open to every inhabitant of the city. And it should take place at the very door of his dwelling. … So that everyone – men, women and children – on reaching home, can change their things and come down for play and exercise, to fill up their lungs and relax and strengthen their muscles.71

68 ibid., pp. 73-4. 69 “Taylorism and Fordism were twin concepts developed in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, becoming highly influential throughout the industrialized world in the interwar years. Taylorism, devised by Frederick Winslow Taylor, was a system based on ‘time and motion’ studies, which sought to achieve industrial efficiency on the factory floor. It was applied subsequently to several areas of human activities with consequent implications for design, such as in the planning of efficient, labour-savin kitchens and domestic equipment. Fordism related to Henry Ford’s introduction of the moving assembly line for the Model T Ford automobile in 1913.” In Jonatham M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Ornament, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 12. 70 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, op. cit., p. 209. 71 ibid., pp.213-214.

For the industrialists, shorter working hours were devised strategically to generate more consumption – the worker would have the ‘opportunity’ to spend more time in the consumer market because of their expanding leisure time. Industrial democracy subscribed to the line of thinking and mechanism of modern industrial production, which meant that, as was well put by Ewen,

Workers were free to “cultivate themselves” among the incontestable fruits of the new industrial cornucopia.72

Communal activities were included in Le Corbusier’s plans for urban housing development, as for instance in the case of community gardens around residential plots, which would facilitate social intercourse and a certain degree of self-sufficiency by making the residents the producers of food. With the communal organization made up from the amalgamation of ‘cell’ units, Le Corbusier wanted to reactivate some traditional values associated with rural communitarianism, where self-sufficiency, thrift, and social bonds could be experienced. This is how Le described the conception of his contemporary city of 1922:

Close at hand are the 150 square yards of kitchen garden joined up with similar plots belonging to the neighbours. … The inhabitant comes back from his factory or office, and with the renewed strength given him by his games, sets to work on his garden. His plot, cultivated in a standardized and scientific way, feeds him for the greater part of the year. There are storehouses on the borders of each group of plots in which he can store his produce for the winter. Orchards lie between the houses and the cultivated ground. … This new type of housing scheme turns the inhabitant into an agricultural labourer and he becomes a producer.73

72 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, op. cit., p. 27. 73 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, op. cit., pp. 217-218.

Le Corbusier was not against sensual pleasures and the entertainment industry, but advocated to consume them in moderation. Moderation of pleasures, balanced by the sense of accomplishment born out of doing and being productive in the world, was to him the source of ultimate satisfaction. In his words,

Man feels to-day that he must have intellectual diversion, relaxation for his body, and the physical culture needed to recuperate him after the tension of muscle or brain which his labour – “hard labour” – brings. This mass of desires constitutes in facts a mass of demands.74 …Gold, lacquer, marble, brocade are caresses which we look for in the garden of caresses: the ballet, the dance- halls, the elegant restaurants where we dine. Caresses of our senses which are perfectly legitimate at the right time and which deserve to be given well.75

In his emphasis on moving away from excessive participation within the public domain,

Le Corbusier was misaligned with the predominant agenda of economic growth, which depended (and still does) on an ever-growing level of consumption. For him, the engagement that we could have with ourselves and with the community, including balanced doses of solitude, was much more important than to continually succumb to the external distractions offered by the commercial world at large.

Le Corbusier seemed to be affected by the simplest of stimulants and wished people to enjoy their own experience along that path. As he wrote,

Eventually we leave, take a few steps in the bracing air, and return home. We pick up a book or a pen. In this mechanical, discreet, silent, attentive comfort, there is a very fine painting on the wall. Or else: our movements take on a new assurance and precision among walls whose proportions make us happy, and whose colours stimulates us.76

74 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., pp. 277-8. 75 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 77. 76 ibid.

Le Corbusier imagined his domestic environments possessing an atmosphere that could influence new habits, and activities that could also lead the inhabitant in the direction necessary to attain a more profound knowledge of oneself. Through its ascetic constitution, the home would be conducive to exploration and experience of aspects of human existence rendered difficult otherwise. It is interesting to note that Le

Corbusier knew that what he was proposing was at odds with the prevailing human behaviour and lifestyle. As he recorded in his writings,

First of all regularity, our daily bread. Then background noise to fill in the holes, the emptiness. Musical noise, coloured noise, embroidered or batiked noise. A low volume noise, a high volume noise, reading the newspapers (description of the action of others), cinemas, dance-halls, Pigall’s… in order to get away from oneself, never be alone. If I were to come face to face with my soul (fearful thought)? What would I say to it? Watch out!78

Le Corbusier believed that excess luxuries and clutter distracted people from their inner wellbeing. He insisted,

Display is not very becoming, except for kings; the citizen abhors display and the thinking man thinks better in a space where the air flows freely.79

77 ibid., pp. 29-30. 78 ibid., pp. 30-1. 79 ibid., p. 118.

In substitution for the ‘misleading coat’ he associated with ornamentation, he offered spaces for living filled with balanced doses of sunlight, clean air, and surrounded with verdure. The basic pleasures [les joies essentielles], Le Corbusier wrote,

By which I mean sun, greenery and space, penetrate into the uttermost depths of our physiological and psychological being. They bring us back into harmony with the profound and natural purpose of life.80 Demand ventilating panes to the windows in every room. Teach your children that a house is only habitable when it is full of light and air, and when the floors and walls are clear.81

Le Corbusier’s interest in a union between the built and natural environments, for the achievement of widespread wholesome ways of living inclusive of all strata of society in the present and in future generations, was expressed in several passages of his books:

The whole city is a park. The terraces stretch out over lawns and into groves. Low buildings of a horizontal kind lead the eye to the foliage of the trees. … Here is the CITY with its crowds living in peace and pure air, where noise is smothered under the foliage of green trees. The chaos of New York is overcome. Here, bathed in light, stands the modern city.82

While he understood that the inclusion of regular doses of sun, green from trees, fresh air, and exercise in people’s life would greatly help the individual physical health, the cultivation of a healthy body was not to be dissociated from the more metaphysical aspects of human existence. As he stated,

80 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, New York, 1967, p. 87. The first French edition, La Ville redieuse, was published at Boulogne-sur-Seine in 1935. In Mary Patricia May Sekler, ‘Le Corbusier, Ruskin, the Tree, and the Open Hand’, in Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 62-63. 81 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., p. 123. 82 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, op. cit., p. 189.

I go where order is coming out of the endless dialogue between man and nature, out of the struggle for life, out of the enjoyment of leisure under the open sky, in the passing of the seasons, the song of the sea. I go where tools are being put to use: the primary tools that are required for the purpose of making existence possible within the limits of the day, the seasons, the years and the generations.83

It seems that for Le Corbusier, more important than the world of objects there existed our union with nature and the invisible world. Le Corbusier believed that if practiced in daily life, these non-materialistic relationships could positively affect the psychological quality of our lives by enriching and transforming us. To him, this was more important than material wealth. Le Corbusier believed that we need to come to an understanding about ourselves in order to lead a balanced life in a market-driven world.

The Modern movement of which Le Corbusier became a vital figure was obsessively determined to bring a sense of wholeness and harmony to the lives of people.

Architecture was to serve humanity. Modern Utopianism,

Sought ways to harness the dramatic increase in productivity with the universal good.84 …From Neoclassicism through to the various schools of geometric abstract modernisms of the twentieth century, painters and sculptors maintained Utopia as a conceptual element in the construction of style. Their art was perceived to be, at least in part, a template for a mode of higher existence.85

It has been along the lines of utopian ideals of harmony and balance between people and the world of things embraced by Le Corbusier and the Modern pioneers that my

83 Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, New York, 1967, p. 6. In Sekler, ‘Le Corbusier, Ruskin, the Tree, and the Open Hand’, in Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 65. 84 Paul Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, V&A Publications, London, 2005, p. 39. 85 ibid., p. 40.

practice has emerged. Since its beginnings, this search for modes of a ‘higher existence’ is found in my staged photographs. Earlier works Normal Distractions from

Good Conversation (Part 1 and Part 3), from 2001 (Figs. 2.12-3), are examples in which one explores a process of introspection, suggested by the model’s meditative and relaxed postures. They also suggest the transformative potential of materials achieved through abstraction and re-use. In a similar vein, subsequent work such as

Little Rugged Red Rocking Roof, 2004 (Fig. 1.27), express a turn toward asceticism, reinvention and reuse through constructing pose, props, and atmosphere, to propose a challenging relationship between pleasure and restriction, and a conscientious reduction of excess within visual and economic culture.

Case Studies

I will now turn the focus of this chapter toward two case studies, Le Corbusier’s Villa

Savoye and Villa La Roche.86 Both residential buildings were developed during the

1920s (Figs. 2.14-5). They are considered to be seminal works carrying Corbusian trademarks, and carrying the stigma that found his spaces for living to be associated with the un-homely. While undergoing research on Le Corbusier in Paris, I was able to visit the Villas Savoye and La Roche on a number of occasions. This physical exploration of the spaces, sensing the different constituent environments of the houses, analysing their physical aspects as well as their psychological effects, I consider to have been of significant importance to my project. These experiences have allowed me direct analysis of Le Corbusier’s work, and provided first hand knowledge that has enabled me to draw grounded comparisons and conclusions, identifying

86 The Fondation Le Corbusier’s offices and archives are located in the adjacent Villa Jeanneret. The Foundation looks after Villa La Roche, often referred as Villa La Roche-Jeanneret, due to the two private residencies have been built wall to wall in the same bloc of land. The Fondation Le Corbusier also administer Le Corbusier’s apartment on the top floor of the residential bloc he created at 24 rue Nungesser et Coli, in Paris, which he owned and lived in with his wife Yvonne Gallis from 1933 until his death.

interesting relationships between my art practice and Le Corbusier’s. The austere,

Spartan ambience found in my work has been greatly influenced by the environments experienced at the Villas Savoye and La Roche.

Villa Savoye

The simplicity of expression of the Villa Savoye, in box-like form with an almost square plan, was not merely an arbitrary convention adopted by Le Corbusier, but was a symbol of a climax in his search for harmonious space for living. The villa strongly revealed his commitment to wholeheartedly exploit the vast possibilities of design and new technologies, and it symbolised the maturity and refinement of the ideas that defined the architect’s Purist period. This ‘box on stilts’ is an expression of purity and visual simplicity. It appears unburdened in a way that exudes unusual vitality and energy. Of his houses, the Villa Savoye most adequately and clearly fits his factory metaphor of perfect embodiment of energy and efficiency.

The interior layout of the Villa Savoye is a projection of continuous activity and interconnectivity and variety of passing images, while the cubic exterior form stands static in contrast. The view and the various angles encountered by the inhabitant or visitor are a key aspect of the building’s composition. Interestingly, the turning circle trajectory of a contemporary motorcar set up the dimension of the envelope of the house (Fig. 2.16).

The kitchen complied well with the modern impulse to conceal things in order to avoid dust and germs getting to them. The small basin below the ramp near the main entry to the home, acted as a prominent Duchamp-like ready-made hygiene reminder (Fig.

2.17). Sliding cupboard doors fabricated from mill-finish plate metal and framed within painted cabinets take a dominant appearance in the overall kitchen area despite their economic occupation of the space. Cabinets made of the same materials, but varying in proportions determined by the programmatic use, appear in almost every other room in the house (Figs. 2.23 and 2.35-7).

The interconnected spaces of the Villa Savoye appear to have come to life according to the requisites of the program, each responding in special proportions according to the dimensions of the interior components, be they fixed (windows and cabinets for example), or mobile elements such as the furniture. All of these architectural and design elements communicate a sense of openness and flexibility in relation to how one could possibly use the space (Figs. 2.20, 2.22-3, and 2.35-7).

The various interior compositions that comprise the villa Savoye are harmonious and of such an imposing presence that one is constantly tempted to believe in the possibility of living with only a bare minimum of things. We are drawn in to these spaces to be psychologically entranced by the balance of colour, light and proportion that together are powerful enough to render the presence of almost anything else in the space absolutely unnecessary (Figs. 2.19-20 and 2.22). One suddenly becomes acutely aware of the very basic aspects of living made noticeably strong by the ongoing endurance of the house’s functionality and its aesthetic neutrality achieved with a considered hand uniting the component parts to shape a balanced whole. It is not the surface or the formal beauty of the house alone that makes one fall in love with it. More than anything it is the combination of carefully devised aspects, such as the sunlight the house receives, absorbs and reflects, the choices of different ‘navigating’ routes for moving around the interior, and the selective views to the outside through the piercing of external walls (Figs. 2.18, 2.21, and 2.27-8). As noted by Beatriz Colomina,

Seeing, for Le Corbusier, is the primordial activity in the house. The house is a device through which to see the world, a mechanism for viewing. Shelter, separation from the outside, is provided by window’s ability to turn the threatening world outside the house into a reassuring picture. The inhabitant is 87 enveloped, wrapped, protected by the pictures.

Sunlight floods the uniquely designed master bathroom, where a tiled ‘chaise longue’ alongside the bathtub has been strategically placed in a position that guarantees the bather plenty of diffused sunrays (Figs. 2.24-6). Despite having usually designed sparse and economically proportioned bathrooms for his habitats, Le Corbusier created for this villa an exceptionally spacious one, which functioned as the pivotal space in the unfolding of the overall floor plan for the house’s more intimate quarters. The villa

Savoye roof garden is the summit of this intimate sun odyssey. The curvy white walls of the roof terrace engulf the sun, in particular in the late afternoon because the concave curve of the wall that has been built facing toward the setting sun (Fig. 2.28).

The Villa Savoye’s architectural programme was developed following a rigorous analysis of basic human needs and activity, calculating how much space would be ideal for these activities, and how to arrange the spaces to make best use of available day light inside the house. Somehow, although the house seems to transcend them, it was still the universal human biological needs, (to eat, sleep, and excrete) that were the main considerations for Le Corbusier when he approached the design for this house. This reinforces the intrinsic relationship between basic, fundamental functional needs and a pure aesthetic preoccupation related to his artistic research.

87 Beatriz Colomina ‘Where are we?’, in Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy, Architecture and Cubism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2002, p. 158.

The Villa Savoye today fully belongs to and serves Le Corbusier’s ideas, perhaps more-so than when the Savoye family first occupied the house in the late 1920s. As a building with heritage listing and funding for ongoing maintenance, the house now receives visitors from all over the world, allowing great numbers of people to experience and wonder through those then innovative propositions for Modern dwelling. This house, with its enduring resistance to obsolescence, contrasts with the way utility and aesthetics co-exist today, where a bondage-type relationship with the needs of a market-driven economy is pervasive. Today product utility and appearance have assumed a servile role to the profitability that a product may represent to industry.

Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye stands as the epitome of the ‘new spirit’ of the time in form and concept. In this project we see clearly the subversion of material value, aesthetics, and notions of domesticity that were dominant at the time, and the ideas endure today.

Villa La Roche

Comparing Villa La Roche to Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier considered the former to be

88 elaborate and decorative when examined in relation to the ‘purisme pur’ of the later.

For Le Corbusier, art appreciation and art making elevated human beings beyond the tiring quotidian disorder of metropolitan life. Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre

Jeanneret designed and built the La Roche house for the art collector Raoul La Roche from 1923 to 1925. The house plan stemmed from the notion of a monk’s cell combined with a Parisian artist’s studio, and a generous gallery space to house La

Roche’s art collection (Figs. 2.11 and 2.29). (Raoul La Roche opened the gallery to the

88 ibid., p. 159. Colomina quoted Le Corbusier’s opinion on his house, extracted from ‘Four Compositions’, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre complete de 1910-1929, H. Girsberger, Zurich, 1930, 1977, p. 189.

89 public on Tuesdays and Fridays). Monsieur La Roche, a bachelor and a patron of the arts, desired his house to mirror that of an artist’s by locating an art studio central to the design, to express the artistic tastes that he had acquired on visits to actual artist

90 residences.

Today the Villa La Roche is open to public visitation, the house itself and its art collection having been restored. Apart from the art collection, many original building features are on display, some being original and some being faithful replicas. One rings the bell of the main door at the Villa La Roche and an employee of the Foundation Le

Corbusier greets the visitor like a butler may have done. It gives one the impression that that house is still functioning as a home of someone who loves to have people around to appreciate what he or she has to show off, like the house itself, which was and still is as much on display as Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings on the walls.

As we step in, we are faced with having to choose to take the right or left set of stairs to reach the first level. The plan of the house indicates a certain delineation between public and private domains with the bedroom, kitchen and dining room placed to the right-hand side, and the library and the art gallery sited to the left. The monk-like Purist room, Raoul’s sleeping quarters (Fig. 2.11), is a fully private space separated from the gallery area by two levels and by locating the two spaces at opposite sides of the house to each other.

90 Nancy Troy, De Stijl Environment, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1983, quoted in the footnotes of Paul Overy, ‘The Cell in the City’, Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy, Architecture and Cubism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2002, p. 132. Troy claims that the model of the artist house had been much copied by patrons since the later half of the 19th century. Several clients of Le Corbusier were art collectors. Raoul La Roche, was a young Swiss banker, director of the Crédit Commercial de France. Besides having been one of the major sponsors of L’Esprit Nouveau, La Roche commissioned Ozenfant and Jeanneret to purchase for him a collection of cubist paintings (from the dealers Kahnweiler and Uhde) and bought Purist paintings executed by Ozenfant and Jeanneret. For more details see Beatriz Colomina ‘Where are we?’, in Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy, Architecture and Cubism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2002, p. 155.

Much of the furniture used by Raoul La Roche at the time he lived there has been replaced with replicas, or with nothing at all. Although the La Roche house continues to be a place of display, if we compare it now with photographs taken during the period when it was inhabited, one notices while exploring the entire house that some rooms are conspicuously empty. This debasement somehow leaves one disappointed, considering the expectations gained at the entry door: that we are about to experience a home that has been looked after as though someone still lives there, maintaining the house in a similar way to match how the art collection in residence is maintained.

Surprisingly, the coloured walls have been repainted in accordance with Le Corbusier’s original palette of greys, light blues, pinks, burnt siennas, creamy yellows, and whites

(Fig. 2.29). The pink floor covering of the art gallery was one the Le Corbusier’s earliest applications of linoleum. (Linoleum was one of those newly emerging materials whose potentiality in regard to aesthetics and energy efficiency were foreseen by Le

Corbusier). He appreciated linoleum in terms of its aesthetic fitness, but also for its potential for being durable and easy to clean (Fig. 2.31). The humble Thonet chairs and the Maples club chairs are no longer there. The dining room table floats in space devoid of a purposeful existence. It now showcases a variety of replicas of Le

Corbusier’s tubular metal furniture reproductions in a quite disinterested, un-staged way.

The Fondation Le Corbusier did not try to match the 1920s’ settings in exactitude to make the villa a museum or a precious art object (Figs. 2.30-1). Visitors are free to sit on and move the reduced number of articles around. Le Corbusier would be proud of the endurance of his equipment here: the replicas of his chairs are not at all new. Holes in the canvas of one of the chaise longues and the sunken upholstery of the fauiteuil grand confort, show that they have been worn out through use, but still not to the extent that they must be replaced. I was thrilled to have encountered Le Corbusier’s

replica chairs in such a precarious state: servant to constant use, and visibly showing marks of wear and tear. This image, by coincidence, is akin to one of my composed scenarios: Mini-Flex Super-Comfort, 2004 (Fig. 4.22, in Chapter Four). In this image, two pieces of spongy foam ex-packaging material-come-double seater faces the viewer. They are empty but evoke the possibility of being used for recline, perhaps due to the oblique resemblance to Le Corbusier’s fauiteuil grand confort armchair.

My assemblages pose as poetic devices created through reinvention to transgress prescriptive attributes of function and image ascribed to things and people. The belief that the initiative and the will to improve life starts from creating a space to reflect and ponder is put forward in my research. This belief is suggested in the ordinary, austere, and meditative atmosphere of the assemblages I am driven to construct, utilising objects and people and expressed within a hopefully beautiful photographic tableau.

Thinking Matter(s)

The passionate but restrained poeticism of Le Corbusier’s manuscript contains an optimistic view of the future, a trait that I find attractive and persuasive. His theories as well as the well known reductive aspects of his architecture, which I first observed through photographic reproductions in books and journals, have greatly affected and influenced my work and life.

Throughout his lifetime, the number of architectural works that Le Corbusier built was less than sixty, but he published more than fifty books and hundreds of journal articles.

Le Corbusier’s publications were use of a wide gamut of visuals such as photographs of places, buildings, objects, paintings, sculptures, drawings, sketches, and

photographs of his own oeuvre. Some images were appropriated from various sources including advertising leaflets, postcards, newspapers, and encyclopaedias. In Le

Corbusier’s publications, images were typically juxtaposed in relation to each other and separated with text. The text often consisted of his thoughts in the guise of analysis or speculation, and sometimes it was of a rational bias, at other times of a cathartic creative explosion, displayed unsystematically and barely offering coherence. Le

Corbusier intermittently developed his philosophies, documenting everything through writing, sketching, photo-collages, and whenever possible those philosophical possibilities appeared in his architecture.

In Paris, together with the painter Amédée Ozenfant,91 Le Corbusier initiated the journal L’Esprit Nouveau (Fig. 2.4), which covered contemporary issues in art, architecture, politics, economy, science, psychoanalysis, literature, music, theatre, sports, cinema, and industrial design.92 From 1920 to 1925 Le Corbusier and Ozenfant made their international journal L’Esprit Nouveau an exciting vehicle for the dissemination of culture, combining their intellectual input and enthusiasm as much as

Le Corbusier’s unashamed enterprising instinct. The journal’s posture and characteristics echoed the emerging ‘new spirit’. Defined by Cocteau:

The periodical L’Esprit Nouveau inherited from the classics solid good sense, a

confident spirit of criticism, a wide view of the world and human mind.93

91 As depicted by Richard Weston, “Ozenfant had perfect modern credentials: son of a builder-developer who worked with Hannebique’s reinforced concrete system, he was a keen motor-racer and married a Russian painter.” In Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 104. 92 The journal L’Esprit Nouveau carried the subtitle ‘International Review of Contemporary Activities’. Until the publication of issue number 4 L’Esprit Nouveau had also the Dadaist poet Paul Dermée as the journal’s editor, then dismissed by Le Corbusier and Ozenfant on the grounds of incompatibility of interests. Ozenfant declared that Dermée wanted to turn L’Esprit Nouveau into a Dada journal. More on this affair in the ‘Notes to Pages’ of Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity – Modern Architecture as Mass Media, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1994, p. 361. Le Corbusier’s partnership with Ozenfant lasted only until 1925, dismantled over disagreements on how to arrange Raoul La Roche’s paintings on the walls of the gallery in his Villa La Roche. In FLC, Dossier Villa La Roche, ref. 506. 93 Richard Weston, Modernism, op. cit., p. 104.

It opened up a plural space for the discussion of contemporary issues, blurring the lines dividing high art and commercialism. Although the journal included various authors’ contributions, articles were mostly written by the duo Le Corbusier-Ozenfant, who frequently wrote using pseudonyms. Included in the contents of L’Esprit Nouveau were advertisement of products and services; reviews on new consumer items such as cars, bathroom fittings, space-saving cabinets, and objects of personal use; as well as new construction methods and materials.94 Aware of the persuasive force of the advertising machine, which was generating new values associated with consumerism,

Le Corbusier’s journal welcomed the advertising of only selected products (Fig. 2.5).

He invited some companies to rent ad space in L’Esprit Nouveau, while selectively rejecting others who had applied. He believed that the products he had selected to advertise were important elements within the context of his innovative vision for a

Modern human existence.95

Le Corbusier ascribed value and importance to objects and constructional methods that seemed utterly out of context, or of an experimental order. In a similar vein to

Marcel Duchamp, who through his “readymades”96, added new meaning and value to the urinal, snow shovel, and hair comb for example. Duchamp could render these objects with unusual importance because for him they possessed an inherent special

94 Some of the advertised products and services in L’Esprit Nouveau were: Roneo metal doors – praising its durable, resilient, and unalterable constitution; La Maison Isotherme de Raoul Decourt – a construction firm owned by the engineer named on the title, which offered construction methods utilising metal plates and aeration between wall panels envisaging thermal balance and fire safety; and the École Française de Rythmique et d’Éducation Corporelle – run by Le Corbusier’s brother Albert Jeannere, the school advocated the importance of cultivating a healthy body and mind through regular exercise, which Jeanneret called ‘corporeal entertainment’. 95 Application forms for advertising in L’Esprit Nouveau appeared from issue number one. Along with the table of costs (tarif de publicité) for the different dimensions of ads occupying the journal’s pages, these followed a section named ‘conditions d’insertion’, where topping the seven clauses it was stated that L’Esprit Nouveau reserved the right to refuse any announcement requests if the directors thought them incompatible with the nature and interests of their publication. For a full account of L’Esprit Nouveau’s ‘terms and conditions’ for advertising see L’Esprit Nouveau – Revue Internationale Illustreé de l’Activité Contemporaine Arts Lettres Sciences, Numbers 1-28, Da Capo Press, New York, 1968 and 1969. 96 Duchamp began to use the term “readymade” in 1915. In Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp – Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1995, p. 127.

quality, manifesting as a capacity for the objects to represent ideas. Le Corbusier arranged things and ideas in ways that until his time had not been publicly tested. He believed like Duchamp in the act of selecting in itself, in selecting being an artistic action and not a mechanical one. In explaining Duchamp’s selecting act, Jerrold Seigel wrote that:

…He was appropriating found objects as signs of his own preoccupations, projecting his inner cosmos of associations onto things encountered in everyday life.97

By transferring objects that he consciously selected from the shelves of department stores and magazine’s spreads, to strategic installs inside galleries and museums,

Duchamp’s practice intertwined with commerce and advertising in ways that confronted the accustomed relationship people had with mass produced objects.

When Le Corbusier promoted a product in his periodical, whether via an advertising spread or as an illustration that complemented the argument within a written article, he did so because the highlighted item was of significance to the expression of his ideas.

These products and ideas were intended to shake pre-established notions of the home, and the way one was accustomed to think. For someone to live with such strange readymades was then a creative move. Most of these items were included in his built projects throughout the 1920s, such as the Roneo metal doors (Figs. 2.32-4) and the

97 Jerrold Seigel, The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp – Desire, Liberation, and the Self in Modern Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1995, p. 126. Duchamp’s “avant- gardism”, as the critic Clement Greenberg understood, made us recognize “that anything that can be experienced esthetically can also be experienced as art.… The notion of art, put to the strictest test of experience, proves to mean not skilful making (as the ancients defined it), but an act of mental distancing – an act that can be performed even without the help of sense perception. Any and everything can be subjected to such distancing, and thereby converted into something that takes effect as art.” Clement Greenberg, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde’ (originally published in 1971 in Art International), in Duchamp in Perspective, Joseph Masheck, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1975, p. 124, 128. Quoted in Jerrold Seigel, ibid., p. 116.

Thonet chairs (Figs. 2.32 and 3.40-3), so far only used in commercial or institutional programs.

Like Duchamp, Le Corbusier did not follow a pre-established or dominant notion of beauty and significance when selecting objects and materials to express his ideas.

Both seemed to be interested in challenging deeply embedded perceptions and attitudes that to them were becoming irrelevant in relation to the Modernity they lived in. To Le Corbusier, the act of selecting something implied an intuition about the intellectual and spiritual self, something aligned with the development of a critical personal opinion. This form of self-attuning is a challenging undertaking. Most people tend to avoid looking within themselves for the observation of tendencies, tastes, and desires, and avoid reflection upon choosing. This is a denial of self-knowledge, of what it is that influences why we may choose ‘A’ instead of ‘B’.

In my work, the ready-made object remade composed as a pictorial centrepiece, is aimed to effect people in a more memorable way than the object did it its original state

(Figs. 1.3, 1.10-11, and 1.19). All of the found objects and materials that I take into the studio to reconfigure have captured my attention before my intervention and that was why I salvaged them, through a conscious process of selection geared by a personal notion of purpose.

Selectivity, if exercised consciously by everyone, would positively contribute towards a more enlightened, less materialistic existence and consequently influence society as a whole in this way. It seems that to Le Corbusier, similar acts and intentions for thinking and the cultivation of intelligence may be considered to be latent human traits worthy of pursuing, as the following passages from his book The Decorative Art of Today elaborate:

…The human spirit is more at home behind our foreheads than beneath gilt and carved baldacchinos.98 …The naked man does not wear an embroidered waistcoat; so the saying goes! The naked man – but he is an animal worthy of respect who, feeling a head with a brain on his shoulders, sets himself to achieve something in the world. The naked man sets himself to think, and by developing his tools, seeks to free himself from the dominance of external circumstances and the necessity for exhausting labour.99

By developing the habit of using our thinking faculties we may be able to reach a form of self-satisfaction and freedom, and at the same time give and take benefit from the larger world. As Le Corbusier explained:

…He uses his tools to make objects of utility, and the purpose of these objects is to lighten the unpleasant tasks of everyday life. The naked man, once he is fed and housed … and clothed, sets his mind to work and focus his thoughts on what he thinks best and most noble.100

Later in the same text, Le Corbusier claimed that when thoughtful process is connected to the conception of industrial design, it is made overt by the unburdened performance, elegant appearance, and gracious long life (due to strength and the high quality manufacture) of the products.101 It may be said that in a haze of ingenuity, Le Corbusier thought highly of humanity and had great confidence in our capacity to satisfy needs and gratify our senses without relying on extraneous material accumulation. To Le

Corbusier, people were supposed to be engaged and interested in intellectual discernment.

98 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 77. 99 ibid., p. 22. 100 ibid. 101 ibid., pp. 91-3.

Preserving Ephemera

Le Corbusier’s personal urge for a constant generation and dissemination of knowledge has been epitomised in the extensive archive that he created by keeping almost all the ephemera, objects, and manuscripts that crossed his life-path. Le

Corbusier’s archive was made available for public consultation after his death through the formation of the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. More than to ensure his own history, Le Corbusier initiated and maintained the archive with the intention of preserving the collective phenomena of his era. He was fascinated by the ease of access to information happening in his time, as he noted:

The fabulous development of the book, of print, and the classification of the whole of the most recent archaeological era, have flooded our minds and overwhelmed us. We are in an entirely new situation: Everything is known to us…. Whenever a problem arises, we can apply exhaustive analysis to conjure up a picture of what any peoples did or would have done at any period. Ours is certainly an era of documentation. … The museums are a means of instruction…102

To him, a museum should contain everything, it should not exclude the mundane object and spotlight only those objects usually sourced from churches, palaces and country houses, considered beautiful for being collectable, rare, and precious. More importantly, he thought that museums should be concerned with acknowledging the ordinary present that would soon become the past. In his criticism, the majority of existing museums were dangerously limiting because they tended to keep only

102 ibid., p. 22. The “true museum” imagined by Le Corbusier would contain the stuff of its present. At the time he wrote this book, in 1925, among the examples he gave there were “a plain jacket, a bowler hat, a well-made shoe, an electric light bulb with bayonet fixing, a radiator, a table cloth of fine white linen, our everyday drinking glasses, and bottles of various shapes… china bidets, wash-basin,… Innovation suitcase and Roneo filing cabinet with is printed index cards…” ibid, p. 17.

prestigious objects that were usually associated with high stratums of hierarchical rankings in history, and/or those objects that attracted ‘block-buster’ crowds due to their sensational trajectory. Earlier, Adolf Loos commented that museums were going through a stage of promoting ornamentation:

Only those objects, covered with decoration, which were little suited to a particular use and were not worn out were kept.103

To Loos, museums, for this reason were falsifying history and therefore denying people real cultural development.104 In concordance with Loos’ position, to Le Corbusier,

The ideal “museum” reveals the full story, and it is therefore good: it allows one to choose, to accept or reject.105

Although Le Corbusier collected throughout his life, this statement suggests that he did not consider himself a collector, but an educator and a pupil at one and the same time:

He likes to understand the reasons for things. It is the reasons that bring light to his mind. He has no prejudices. He does not worship fetishes. He is not a collector. He is not the keeper of a museum…106

Le Corbusier was interested in preserving the peripheral and the disposable including merchandise catalogues, business flyers and cards, shop dockets, and newspaper clippings. He saw in those things that were not normally worthy of being saved as wealth of resources for future research on the social, economical, and cultural

103 Adolf Loos, ‘Architecture’ (1910), trans. Wilfred Wang, in Yehuda Safran (ed.), The Architecture of Adolf Loos, London, 1985, p. 105. In Simon Richards, Le Corbusier and the Concept of the Self, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003, p. 15. 104 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), trans. Wilfred Wang, in Yehuda Safran (ed.), The Architecture of Adolf Loos, London, 1985, p. 100. In Simon Richards, ibid., p. 15. 105 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 22. Le Corbusier used upper case letters for the full sentence. 106 ibid., p. 23.

condition of the world he was in contact with. The ephemera of his everyday would become a material source to be re-viewed, re-thought, and so forth, which potentially could generate endless new theories, new meanings, and thoughtful new artistic forms.

That material was also interesting to him because the items were not invested with

‘aura’, a special trait that we usually find or are supposed to detect, in ‘precious’ museum pieces. Le Corbusier was aware that the prosaic objects and fleeting information that he was rescuing had been overlooked due to a hierarchy of values established in particular by the mainstream museums.

Le Corbusier’s accumulative activity was not for the satisfaction of a personal fetish, instead it was to contribute toward the progress of culture. The preservation of the ephemera from his everyday life has made them, and to an extent him, immortal.

Inside drawers, picture frames, shelves, filing cabinets, and nowadays inside computers as electronic files, these things are surviving. His collected ephemera did not disappear as their counterparts did in the marketable ‘life’ where they normally existed. Le Corbusier saw the proliferation of an enormous variety of goods just for the sake of overcoming precedent production as mere vanity and the cause of terrible clutter. He criticised design education, which he thought problematic:

…When our educationalists, both in their books and in the schools, disregard the origin and purpose of the objects displayed in the museums, and use them as the basis of their teaching, to urge on their pupils to outdo, if that is possible, examples already exceptional of their kind, and thus encourage them to fill our everyday lives with the impractical showpieces which clutter and distort our existence, leaving it quite simply ridiculous.107

Le Corbusier opposed the notion of progress, where it implies that new things are constantly replacing previous ‘old’ ones. He said that:

107 ibid., p. 22.

Our own purpose is not to imitate the weakness of the weaker classes of earlier ages; we intend our culture to serve some purpose, and spur us on to the best. The museums are a means of instruction for the most intelligent, just as the city of Rome is a fruitful lesson for those who have a profound knowledge of their craft.108

Le Corbusier desired that people be engaged in the process of developing their potential for critical thinking and ability to judge for themselves. As he declared,

…There is no more urgent task than to force ourselves to re-adjust to our functions, in all fields. To free our attention for a few moments from bondage to its habitual tasks and to think about the why, reflect, weigh up, decide. And to answer the why with innocence, simplicity, and candour.109

He believed that people did not have to live their entire lives relying solely on the answers and dictates, mores and fashions coming from the outside world, where one could lose one’s freedom and creativity:

…Such distractions – all provide an opportunity to avoid confronting oneself, to evade the need to create. To create? Yes, that is to say, to put two ideas of one’s own together, and then to continue: four ideas, eight ideas, etc. Time passes and this introspection, this continuity of thought, makes each man free, with his own powers of judgement, and ready for all the joys of exploring his own freedom; infinity is open to him. Yes, but that can induce vertigo!110

108 ibid., p. 22. 109 ibid., pp. 71-2. 110 ibid., p. 31.

Conclusion

Le Corbusier’s Modern house challenged traditional ways of living and defined a new subjectivity. It was a stance that projected a strange light on the act of inhabiting, demanding transformation in the human subject. He believed that if people took the challenge, which required patience and perseverance combined, they could possibly achieve a satisfying life experience. In his vision,

When he [man] finds harmony, this thing that is a creation of his spirit, he experiences a shock that moves him, that exalts him, that encourages him, that provides him with support in life.111

The new way of inhabiting would help improve well-being and consequently, spiritual engagement followed by self-knowledge. Le Corbusier wished for a less materially based fulfilment to be recuperated by mankind. He hoped that his ideas could inspire people to grow personally by working things through intuitively when dealing with the unexpected. Le Corbusier was not simply offering the architectonics of the home, but the prospects of a lifetime of expansive adventure into the inner personal landscape that we tend to ignore. Enrichment would take place on an invisible dimension.

Quietude, simplicity, and economy of means played a vital role in Le Corbusier’s quest for human enlightenment. These factors were opposed to the dynamic energy that was becoming commonplace at that stage of industrialisation and Modernity. Uncertainty and agitation, mobility and renewal were – and still are – symbolic of the fluidity embedded in an established notion of progress. It is well known that Le Corbusier was interested in the practical and physical aspects of the ideal world he envisioned. The proof lies in his built and unbuilt architecture, his industrial design, and the vast visual

111 ibid., p. 23.

and literary archive that he left behind. However, the fact that he gave significant weight to dreaming of a spiritually conscious civilisation has been pushed into the background of criticism of his oeuvre.

As an artist, Le Corbusier was not an oddity for having meddled with the commercial realm of advertising. Many other avant-garde groups of the same period attempted to reach mass audiences by venturing into commercial work, more precisely via the advertising commissions some of these artists undertook. As Michael White has noted, the very first image to appear within the pages of De Stijl was an advertisement.112

De Stijl artists, while producing ads and obtaining funding through business, were able to satisfy the premise of their universalist agenda, which focused on reaching a mass audience with art. These artists believed commerce would acquire a special aura by being in contact with the fine arts. On the other hand, there was also the prestige that these artists thought they would achieve by being involved with successful brands. To them, the notion and actuality of the artwork undergoing commodification via its intermingling with the world of consumption echoed more to the fulfilment of a duty to humanity than to a downgrading, apolitical contamination. Russian Constructivist artists often engaged in advertising for the State. These artists argued that:

Artists should work for the benefit of society as a whole through the exploration of the direct social and utilitarian applications of their endeavour, harnessed to the realities of mass-production technology.113

As explained by White:

112 Michael White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New, York, 2003, p. 78. 113 Jonatham M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Ornament, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 119.

If we take the basic motivation of gemeenschapkunst to be the connection of fine art with a large public, advertising offered an ideal means of achieving this goal. Today advertising is viewed as entirely manipulative.114

In a similar fashion to the exemplified avant-garde to intermesh art, culture, and commercialism, Le Corbusier envisioned a Modern culture emerging from the industrialised world of goods and services, but surviving and flourishing on its own terms. That is, living beyond the market’s conquest for control. Le Corbusier understood that people were becoming more and more interested in accessing the new products made possible by the advances in the technologies of design and manufacturing. At the same time, his interest in advertising goods and services was connected more strongly and primarily with his will to pursue a social program based on his architectural, theoretical, and practical schemes. In other words, the advent of leasing space for the ads in L’Esprit Nouveau had significance to him, as a form of financial support towards the development of his practice as an architect and painter who wanted to influence and transform society. He believed it was through his architectural works, Purist paintings, and writing that his innovative ideas could be widely disseminated and assimilated. Le Corbusier hoped the contact made through his journal advertising would open the possibility for further business exchange in the form of architectural or design commissions for the firms whose products were advertised.115

114 Michael White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, op. cit., p. 81. 115 Tim Benton speculated on a particular Voisin (the car manufacturer) advertisement published in L’Esprit Nouveau no. 10, pp. 1140-1. He thought, looking at the archives of L’Esprit Nouveau at the Fondation Le Corbusier, that “In fact, it appears that this advertisement was designed probably by Amédée Ozenfant, as a free tribute to Voisin, in the hope that the firm would increase its financial contributions to the magazine.” In Tim Benton, ‘Dreams of Machines: Futurism and l’Esprit Nouveau’, Journal of Design History n. 1, vol. 3, 1990, p. 31. Le Corbusier’s search for patronage was quite overt in the written plaque placed inside his Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau: “A call to Industrialists” – “The large-scale manufacturer must take charge of the process of building.” In Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier – Creation is a Patient Search, translated by James Palmes, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1960, p. 72.

Le Corbusier’s creative and adaptive move into the commercial realm, either with his journal, or with the private architectural commissions he executed, produced a valid and rich cultural discourse, which contributed to the phenomenal wealth of ideas being circulated at the time. More importantly, the commercial connection did not threaten the integrity of his vision, or the radicalism of his built work.

Everything that we do is with the knowledge that we live in a consumer society. We not only consume goods, but also culture, education, and the natural landscape. I do not see the work that I produce as a mere product. My practice is focused on the system of relations, activities, and experimentations to create new propositions (see Figs. 1.7 and

4.28). Selling artworks is not something that goes against my philosophy, as I do not see my artwork as clutter, or as something that will add to the already bloated retail market. In a way, contradiction exists here because I use the photograph as an art object to express my concern with a world where objects exist and are consumed in excess. Nevertheless, I believe that exploring the full value of things (art included) can lead to satisfaction beyond a material one. It is a satisfaction possible to achieve when things are put to use, enjoyed and cultivated. Borrowing from John Lang, values represent a link among a person’s emotions, motivations, and behaviour.116

Le Corbusier’s universalist utopia did not intend to erase individual characters or personal traits in people, but to launch humanity, each and every person uniquely, into a reflective journey through their very core. He believed that this process of self- discovery would strongly contribute towards building up a more sensible, peaceful, ordered world, improving the post-war fragmented and chaotic state. One will likely find

116 John Lang, ‘Symbolic Aesthetic in Architecture: Toward a Research Agenda’, in Jack L. Nasar’s Environmental Aesthetics – Theory, Research, and Applications, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne, 1988, p. 20.

at least one room inside Le Corbusier’s habitats that we might call a place of solitude, a retreat, where one can dream and meditate.117

Having discussed Le Corbusier’s ambiguous connection with the commercial realm and his interest in creating a space for thinking, reflection, and self-learning through architecture, in the next chapter I will turn to the importance Le Corbusier placed on extending the life-span of goods and fashion, and to his aversion to material accumulation.

117 Jacques Sbriglio, Le Corbusier: The Villas La Roche-Jeanneret, Fondation Le Corbusier, transl from the French by Sarah Parsons, Birkhaüser Verlag, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1997, in Marylène Ferrand, Jean- Pierre Feugas, Bernard Le Roy and Jean-Luc Veyret, Le Corbusier: The Quartiers Modernes Frugès, transl. from French by Sarah Parsons, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, Birkhäuser Publishers, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1998, p. 47.

CHAPTER THREE – ‘Loosing’ Weight

Introduction

This chapter examines Le Corbusier’s anti-decoration position in relation to architecture and design. Philosophical and practical influences past and present to him are explored, as well as the notion of re-use and the importance of social ideals of equality in Le Corbusier’s practice. The chapter title refers to Adolf Loos while punning at the shedding of body matter so paradoxically pursued in our current times, when notions of utility, purpose, and enduring forms seem inadequate in light of a myopic economy-fuelled existence.

World War I left a trail of devastation all over Europe, making civic reconstruction an imperative for the countries affected. Le Corbusier and Amedée Ozenfant were among the first avant-gardists to announce a search for order through the remaking of the physical world: “The war has ended; all is organised; all is clear and purified; factories are built …”118 The new industrial methods, Taylorism in particular, which were fuelled by the demands of war, became indispensable through post-war rebuilding.

The Sachlichkeit functionalist approach of the early twentieth century (see Figs. 3.1-2), which stood for quality in design conception and production, and consistency of aesthetic form contrasted with the romanticism and the heavy ornamentation with a fleeting superficial character prevalent movements such as Art Nouveau (Fig. 3.3).119

118 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret and Amedée Ozenfant, Après le cubism, Paris, Commentaires, November 15, 1918, p. 11. In Mary Caroline McLeod, ‘”Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change’, Art Journal, vol 43, n 2, Summer 1983, pp. 134. In 1918, the pseudonym ‘Le Corbusier’ had not yet been adopted by Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. 119 Sachlichkeit, “while not entirely translatable, means matter-of-factness, attention to function, practicality, objectivity. The word and its meanings were the key concepts in the recognition and

The Sachlichkeit legacy certainly influenced Le Corbusier, to whom industrial technology would enable mass production of simple, but nonetheless beautiful, well- designed, and long-lasting products. He was also aware of the large amount of purposeless and/or kitsch items being pumped out of manufacturing conveyor belts since the first industrial revolution. In his mind, the positive aspect of industrialisation was the fact that it could be

Turning out tools of perfect utility and convenience that soothe our spirits with the luxury afforded by the elegance of their conception, the purity of their execution, and the efficiency of their operation.120

On the other hand, Le Corbusier was noticing the downside of mass production:

Industry blew upon the world, and there was a hurricane. The industrialist thought to himself: ‘let us smother our junk with decoration: decoration hides all manner of flaws and blemishes.’ The sanctifying of camouflage. Desperate inspiration and commercial triumph.121

Le Corbusier was not offended by decoration, more importantly he was expressing his negative view about the dubious principles fuelling the course of industrialisation, which, was not prioritising high-standards of design and manufacturing – prerequisites

Le Corbusier thought to be utterly necessary components of production.

Many of the images in Vers une Architeture promote a past that Le Corbusier admired

– Greek architectural Classicism – as well as the promising changes of the present.

appreciation of the functional and vernacular traditions.” In Herwin Schaefer, The Roots of Modern Design – Functional Tradition in the 19th Century, Studio Vista, London, 1970, p. 182. The German Werkbund group, founded in 1907, was one of the major defenders of the Sachlichkeit. The Deutcher Werkbund was a German organization founded in Munich in October 1907, aimed at bringing together artists, crafts workers and manufacturers “to improve the design, quality and reputation of German consumer products, overshadowed as they had been by foreign competitors, particularly the French”. In Jonatham M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Ornament, op. cit., p. 23. 120 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. xxiii. 121 ibid., p. xxiii.

That being the open array of possibilities brought forward by industrialisation – factories, airplanes, cars, communication, etc.122 The deliberate juxtaposition of the two different sources of imagery flagged his belief that despite the distinct nature of each era, they were alike in terms of possessing platonic qualities strong enough to influence contemporary design and to escape the whip of obsolescence. Greek classical buildings and the new sport car, for example, were considered by Le

Corbusier to equally possess enduring ‘good form’ (Figs. 3.4-5).

It was the style of rational constructional principles of the engineer that was praised in

Vers une Architeture. The overarching imposition of order was an obvious feature within the measured geometry that characterized this style. Any ornamentation was derived purely from construction – from the layering of structural elements. Pioneering engineering techniques were championed and saw the elevation of steel as preferred structural and aesthetic constructional element. Together with glass, steel formed a strong self-braced structure, and allowed a way of building that did not require a weight of material ‘fillings’ in order for it to stand up. The technological breakthrough of steel construction opposed in its application, the heavy, dark, and internalised architectural environments otherwise predominant at urban centres.

Modern constructions started to shed plenty of flesh allowing in this manner new spatial experiences of openness and lightness in a literal and metaphoric sense. One symbol of the emerging new epoch, the Eiffel Tower, with the tectonic vigour of its steel structure, was admired by Le Corbusier, along with other scaffolding-like architecture – stripped down, utilitarian structures, mostly found in factories, iron bridges, grain silos,

122 Vers une Architeture, English translation Towards a New Architecture, is a seminal book written by Le Corbusier in 1923. It has been highly influential for subsequent generations of architects, not only for its texts of almost liturgical resonance, but also for the intriguing choice and relationship between visual material and for text. “It is a brilliant piece of literature, with all the sharpness, wit and acerbic charm of the very best of Adolf Loos.” Paul Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, V&A Publications, London, 2005, p. 223.

and wide-span pavilions. The constructional principle of a supporting structural grid and continuous load-bearing floor slabs as found in factory buildings was a source of inspiration for Le Corbusier and the pioneer legacy of Modern architects (see Figs. 3.6-

9). With this principle in mind, standardised pieces of structural material were rendered versatile. A steel bar may have utility as a pillar, a fence, or a window lintel. Above all,

Le Corbusier admired the ‘matter-of-fact’ way that engineers approached their tasks:

Forced to work in accordance with the strict needs of exactly determined conditions, engineers make use of generating and accusing lines in relation to forms.123

These words suggest that the engineer’s line of work serves as an analogy to the way

Le Corbusier approached the issue of living and our relationship to the material world – there should always exist a response to specific circumstances and an awareness of basic human needs.

Le Corbusier saw his house as an organic entity, which followed the laws of nature but contrasted with the organicism found in the expressionistic forms of Art Nouveau design. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Art Nouveau begin to be regarded by many artistic avant-gardes and industry – at least in the realms of industrial design, structural engineering, and architecture – as a frivolous style, eclectic, and superfluously decorated. The new world of production, following the footsteps of

Taylorism and Fordism, demanded more efficient, less fiddly design, executed through economic methods. The Modern architecture created by Le Corbusier emerged to a great extent from this newly formed space made available by the loss of popularity of the Art Nouveau movement.

123 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., p. 35.

In his book of 1925, The Decorative Art of Today, when setting an anti-decoration argument, Le Corbusier ironically cited the following adversary position to his own:

…An object of use should be decorated; as our companion in fortune and adversity it should have a soul. Together, the souls of objects that have been decorated create an atmosphere of warmth, which brightens our unhappy lot. The great emptiness of the machine age should be countered by the ineffable diffusion of a soothing and gently intoxicating decoration.124 …We are told that decoration is necessary to our existence. Let us correct that: art is necessary to us, that is to say, a disinterested passion that exalts us.125

The Modern movement of which Le Corbusier became a vital figure was obsessively determined to bring a sense of wholeness and harmony to the lives of ordinary people.

Architecture was to serve humanity. To him, progress was not solely attached to economic growth, but more importantly he associated progress with the well-being of humans. In his utopia, he saw a mechanised world supplying the sources of betterment: “Industry has crated new tools… Such tools are capable of adding to human welfare and of lightening human toil.”126

Taking advantage of Modernity’s hype on material expansion, of people’s increased desire for experiencing the new enabled by industrialisation, Le Corbusier proposed his idiosyncratic view of Modern dwelling with the use of commonplace vocabulary blended with a social-utopian perspective. The availability of well-made and therefore dignified machine-made items was an important factor in the actualisation of his dream of refining the ‘taste’ of people, which he believed, could set them free from crudity and strengthen the importance of culture in people’s lives. Mass production for Le

Corbusier, if perfected, would positively transform the world, improving the quality of

124 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. xxi. 125 ibid., p. xxiii. 126 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., pp. 283-4.

human life at large. In his mind, the transformation was not only ready to take place among the lower classes.

‘Ergonomic’ Living

A society lives primarily by bread, by the sun, and its essential comforts.127

Le Corbusier and Ozenfant’s journal, L’Esprit Nouveau, served as a platform for criticising the ornamental tendency dominant in France throughout the Art Deco period, and the many revivals of past styles that were happening at that same time.128 The frou-frou make-up of the prevailing architecture and design trends were not only a sign of kitsch to Le Corbusier (he abhorred kitsch), but he also saw excessive decor as a masquerade, a total trickery, and therefore dishonest. Le Corbusier and Ozenfant chose utilitarian objects as subject matter in their paintings – the mass-produced plates, bottles, jugs, cups, goblets, glasses, pipes, books, etc (Figs. 3.10-2). They argued in the essay Le Purisme that these objects were of an aesthetic make-up, which transcended stylistic excess. Le Corbusier’s aversion to these styles, combined with his quest for an uncluttered aesthetic, engendered a new and elemental attribution of meaning, running along the lines of Mies van der Rohe’s famous dictum, ‘less is more’. This formal and conceptual ‘anti-excessive’ positioning also closely echoed the

‘Loosian’ approach. In Loos’ words:

Modern man wishes to enjoy art as art and to have utilitarian objects about him that serve him well but are otherwise neutral, indifferent, unassuming.

127 ibid., p. 100. 128 Adolf Loos’ ‘Ornament and Crime’ text of 1908 was published in L’Esprit Nouveau issue number 2 of November 1920.

Ornamentation, artistic embellishment of the utilitarian object, belongs to earlier, less sensitive eras. Modern man is incapable of cutting his meat on a plate with a mythological scene of naked gods and goddesses.129

Le Corbusier was indebted to Adolf Loos’ anti-ornament theories and briefly acknowledged him in his book The Decorative Art of Today:

…But in the twentieth century our powers of judgement have developed greatly and we have raised our level of consciousness. Our spiritual needs are different, and higher worlds than those of decoration offer us commensurate experience. It seems justified to affirm: the more cultivated a people becomes, the more decoration disappears. (Surely it was Loos who put it so neatly).130

While Le Corbusier shared with Loos an aversion to ornamentation, their motives were not always the same. Loos claimed that one of the crimes of decoration in the Modern age was excessive use of manual labour, which made production more expensive. His emphasis on the decorative being economically unviable for the development of nations reoccurs throughout his seminal text Ornament and Crime:

The immense damage and devastation which the revival of ornament has caused to the aesthetic development could easily be overcome because nobody, not even the power of the state, can stop the evolution of humanity! It represents a crime against the national economy, and, as a result of it, human labour, money and material are ruined. …It [ornament] commits a crime itself by damaging national economy and therefore cultural development. …In a highly productive nation ornament is no longer a natural product of its culture, and therefore represents backwardness or even a degenerative tendency.131

129 Adolf Loos, Trotzdem 1900-1930, Brenner-Verlag, Innsbruck, 1931, p. 72. In Herwin Schaefer, The Roots of Modern Design – Functional Tradition in the 19th Century, op. cit., p. 186. Loos lived in Paris from 1923 to 1928. 130 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 85. Le Corbusier mentioned Adolf Loos briefly again in page 134, …”around 1912, Loos wrote that sensational article, Ornament and Crime …” 131 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, 1908, in Yehuda Safran, and Wilfried Wang, The Architecture of Adolf Loos – an Arts Council Exhibition, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1985, p. 101.

Le Corbusier defended the importance of quality in no-frills design to the development of a thoughtful economy of means. In these words he suggests people to develop a sensibility to things that would have purpose in their lives:

We all confront the problem of our surroundings for the sake of our comfort and well-being, for the delight of our hearts, for our pleasure, and also for the satisfaction of a feeling for what is fitting: we would like to be appropriate. Elimination of the equivocal. Concentration of intention on its proper object, and attention on the object. An object is held to be made only out of necessity, for a specific purpose, and to be made with perfection. A perfect object is a living organism, animated by the sense of truth.132

Unlike Loos, who ambiguously approved the notion of replacing material possessions frequently – “Let us have furniture made which can be used for firewood after three years…”133, Le Corbusier advised people to become economic and selective with their purchasing, organization, usage, and maintenance of things :

Take a flat which is one size smaller than what your parents accustomed you to. Bear in mind economy in your actions, your household management and in your thoughts.134

Paradoxically, Le Corbusier praised the seductions of industrial production as well as he undermined them. Naively, he believed in the integrity of industry, assuming industry had humanistic goals coinciding with his:

We are indeed committed to apply all our knowledge to the perfect creation of a tool: know-how, skill, efficiency, economy, precision, the sum of knowledge. A

132 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. xxivi. 133 Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament and Crime’, 1908, in Yehuda Safran, and Wilfried Wang, The Architecture of Adolf Loos – an Arts Council Exhibition, op. cit., p. 102. 134 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., p. 123.

good tool, an excellent tool, the very best tool. This is the world of manufacture, of industry.135

But he also blamed industry for the “trash always abundantly decorated” that it was producing.136 As he declared:

Previously, decorative objects were rare and costly. Today they are commonplace and cheap. Previously, plain objects were commonplace and cheap; today they are rare and expensive. Previously, decorative objects were items for special display: the plate which the peasant family hung on the wall and the embroidered waistcoat for holidays. … Today decorative objects flood the shelves of the Department Stores. … It is to industry that we owe this reversal in the state of affairs…137

In this instance, Le Corbusier challenges the myth that Modern industrial production excluded the mechanical manufacture of decorative items in favour of the pared-down counterparts (see Figs. 3.13-5). In fact, the home-decorating industries had already boomed just after 1840. As it was pointed by Russel Lynes,

The new mechanical methods of making furniture gave designers a free hand to indulge their delight in ornamentation, and they tried to outdo themselves and each other in fanciness and frippery. Heirlooms began to find their way to the attic as the new chairs and sofas, bedecked with fruit, flowers, and beasties and standing on twisted spindles, crowded into living rooms and parlors.138

During the nineteenth century, most manufacturers discovered that “it was easier to produce ornate or elaborate designs as simpler ones.”139 It was cheaper to disguise

135 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 84. 136 ibid., p. 87. 137 ibid., p. 89. 16 Russel Lynes, The Tastemakers, The Universal Library, New York, 1972, first published in the U. S. in 1949, p. 221. 139 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2002, p. 146.

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poorly joined seams and imperfections with profuse decoration than to produce a well executed simple design (Figs. 3.16-7).

Le Corbusier’s writings suggested that he expected from the captains of industry a great deal of integrity:

Business has modified its customs: it bears a heavy responsibility to-day: cost, time, solidity of the work. Engineers in numbers fill its offices, make their calculations, practise the laws of economy to an intensive degree, and seek to harmonize two opposed factors: cheapness and good work. … The morality of industry has been transformed: big business is to-day a healthy and moral organism.140

He trusted those responsible in the ranks of industrial production to have ideals and intentions connected with the improvement of people’s lives much as Le Corbusier desired. To Le Corbusier,

An object is held to be made only out of necessity, for a specific purpose, and to be made with perfection.141

To him, the quality of an object determined by good materials and workmanship, should replace poor performance and mind-boggling quantities. The ideal expounds: fewer items, arranged in special ways, housed in economic interior spaces, in order to generate and serve harmonious living. This stand in contrast to the current prevailing state of chaos, that lacks measured, considered approach to production, distribution and consumption of goods and compounds our present disregard to environmental and human degradation.

140 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., p. 284. Italics mine. 141 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 192.

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Le Corbusier connected quality with rationality and rigour applied to the design of goods.

…Choice of material, first of all, has been dictated by considerations of strength, lightness, economy and durability alone.142

A well-designed object, such as the filing cabinet exemplified by Le Corbusier, was of great benefit to users, as he noted, “clarifies our needs…”143 The filing cabinet emerged for Le Corbusier in the 1920s, as a metaphor for an ordered individual and society, which he thought were both in need of organization and sensible judgement:

…The judgement of the public is confused. Bric-à-brac and all that is pretentious, unseemly and horrible is paraded. Complete ignorance.144

Le Corbusier valued purposeful, well-made, durable, ‘beautiful’ industrial objects. It was as if he wanted those objects to become ‘classics’, to be passed on from one generation to another, becoming even more appreciated for their functional and aesthetic endurance. He tried to convey the notion that mass production and standardisation could foster artistic excellence, when constituents were thoughtfully selected and applied. In that schema, the architect may be akin to a music composer, assembling parts to complete a symphony. For Loos, the absurdity of decoration was more than an aesthetic concern; it was a matter of wasted resources – material and human labour. In his words:

Ornamentation is wasted effort and therefore a waste of health. It has always been so. But today it means a waste of materials as well, and the two things together means a waste of capital.145

142 ibid., pp. 92-93. 143 ibid., p. 77. He included this example when arguing that a channelling of attention should happen “only to those things worth of it.” On his footnotes pp. 76-77. 144 ibid., p. 211.

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Contemporary society has fallen for ornamentation and the trinkets of profit-driven industry that Le Corbusier and Loos much abhorred. It is the mind-set of a culture of excess within which the logic of purpose is overruled by the consumer’s search for instant gratification and subscription to an economy of planed obsolescence geared by profit.

A significant range of industrial products and methods of construction endorsed by Le

Corbusier, were displayed to a wider audience through the Pavillon de L’Esprit

Nouveau.

Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau

In Paris, together with Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier participated in the Exposition

Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 exhibiting their

Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau – a model home, house-unit that embodied what Le

Corbusier saw as the domestic space of the future.146 Le Corbusier used the pavilion as a way to demonstrate how industrial methods and standardisation could be used to frame a house and a way of living that reflected ideals about economy of production and the aesthetics associated with that. The Pavillon was a key event in his career for the physical exposure it gave to his most relevant concepts for living.147 The Pavillon

145 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, (1908) in Sämtliche Schriften, Vienna 1962, pp. 276-287, in Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos Theory and Works, Idea Books, Milan, 1982, p. 66. 146 Pierre Jeanneret was Le Corbusier’s cousin who with he had a business partnership for twenty years, covering the entire period of Le Corbusier’s architectural practice that this paper is focusing on. …’Architectural projects were signed by both men (Pierre had an academic architectural degree, whereas Le Corbusier did not).” In Ivan Zaknic, Le Corbusier – The Final Testament of Père Corbu a Translation and Interpretation of Mise au point, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 14. 147 Le Corbusier’s use of a car manufacturer – Voisin – as a sponsor for his Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau shocked and embarrassed the organizers. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes of 1925 had the sponsorship of another car manufacturer, Citroën, whose luminous name

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de L’Esprit Nouveau’s innovative ‘decorless’ decor clashed radically with the majority of luxuriously ornamented pavilions. The organisers of the exhibition were shocked with the simplicity of L’Esprit Nouveau’s outer and inner appearance, which contained furnishings sparsely distributed in space, which were so far unusual in a home-exhibit context. Exhibition organizers who favoured the Moderne Tendenzia were confronted

148 by L’Esprit Nouveau’s lack of emphasis on surface decoration. Art Deco had been in vogue since before the First World War, with ostentatious floral and oriental motifs based on eighteenth-century craft traditions, then moving on to more angular and geometric designs showing the Cubist movement influence after the War (Figs. 3.18-

9).

Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau was in a practical sense a mock-up of one of the apartments comprising his visionary immeuble-villas – blocks of residential units incorporated in his Plan Voisin de Paris, and which so far had only existed as drawings

149 and sketches (Figs. 3.22-3). The displayed house/apartment built specifically for the exhibition, stood for the standard bourgeois dwelling; it consisted of an open plan with combined areas, utilising a minimum of materials. The construction was markedly

150 innovative in its methods, choice of materials, and overall structure. A fragile layer of

flicked on and off attached to the Eiffel tower taking turns with the other illumined word ‘art’. Organizers allocated the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau to an out of the way area, not easy to be spotted by visitors. 148 Moderne at the time of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was considered to be every design with an Art Deco content. Later, the Moderne style mutated into decorative pastiches of the Modern style defended by Le Corbusier. 149 The Voisin Plan was a provocative urban plan for the city of Paris – a fragment of his also Contemporary City for 3 million Inhabitants, exhibited in 1922 at the Salon d’Automne, which was the first exhibition of urbanism in France. A maquette of the Voisin Plan was displayed in a curved annex of the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau. For a broad explanation and 3D simulation of both urban ideas see video from film of Jaques Barsac, Le Corbusier vol 1, Bibliothèque Centre Pompidou, Paris. 150 A sense of the new was emphasized with the use of reinforced concrete on the structure of the pavilion’s two floors, following the premises of Le Corbusier’s Domino system. The vast majority of pavilions in the exhibition were made of plaster. The method that Le Corbusier utilized in the application of the concrete combined pouring-on-site and pre-cast components (Siegwarts beams and Pima coffered plates). The new was also evoked with the use of Solomite walls - a panel system of compressed straws; Gunite coating applied with Ingersol hand spray gun for final pristine finishing; Euboolith floors - a seamless linoleum, tubular steel for the stairs hand railing; and Ronéo metal doors - just newly mass produced were also used as fitting elements of the model apartment. For a better description of materials and new techniques, see L’Esprit Nouveau issue 28, January 1925.

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white paint was adopted strategically to emphasize the smooth mechanical texture of the buildings’ concrete body and its unusual furnishing items. The rationally arranged geometric parts making up Le Corbusier’s buildings, when embedded in a white wash, would give life to a ‘mechanical lyricism’, as he had termed it, enabling the building to appear strongly when contrasted with its surroundings. Le Corbusier’s innovative simplicity and unorthodox tendency for a sparingly furnished home, with fitted mass produced items that until then were foreign to the domestic world, immensely contrasted with the sumptuous and luxurious décor of the majority of the other pavilions whose stylistic approaches were aligned with Art Deco (Figs. 3.20-1).151 Le

Corbusier’s model-apartment fits within the description Mark Wigley gave to the way the pioneers of Modern architecture and design were more likely to shape the world:

The look of modernity is that of utility perfected, function without excess, the 152 smooth object cleansed of all representational texture.

The hedonistic and excessive décor of Art Deco, despite the strong simplification of profile given by the geometricizing forms, was far from being the image and experience of simplicity that Le Corbusier desired. As he put it:

…But this surface elaboration, if extended without discernment over absolutely everything, becomes repugnant and scandalous; it smells of pretence…153

151 “Broadly there were two distinct Deco approaches, which are perhaps better characterized by designers such as Adnet, Pierre Chareau, Robert Mallet Stevens and Eileen Gray, who tended towards reduced decoration, and who made aggressive use of geometry and primary colour, and those such as Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, Sue et Mare, or René Lalique, who essentially manipulated historical and exotic styles. But all are characterized, to a greater or lesser degree, by processes of generalization and abstraction or, to use a contemporary term, a streamlining of form.” In Paul Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, op. cit., pp. 175-6. 152 Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses - The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1995, p. 3. 153 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 89-90.

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Le Corbusier launched his model-home claiming it to be an “anti-mediocrity manifesto”, something to combat the flooding of excessive surface decoration. Opposing the opulence of Art Deco, he suggested architecture committed to providing quality with less quantity and aimed to be less expensive as well. To Le Corbusier, less items and less decoration would be plenty to make the living space appealing:

Once you are aware of the all powerful eloquence of lines, your minds will no longer be encumbered by petty decorative events and, more important, your future architectural creations will be based on the right chronology, a hierarchy that gives first place to essentials. You realize that these architectural essentials depend on the quality of your choice, on the vigour of your mind, and not on rich materials, marbles, rare woods, or ornaments, which are useful only as a last resort – meaning, in effect, that they are not very useful at all.154

The Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau possessed an efficient open plan organization, with demarcation for rooms mostly made by the readymade equipment installed: metal

155 railings, chairs, and in particular the casiers. Hung on the interior walls there were also Purist paintings, which he thought to be a vital component of his architectural ensembles of the period. There were paintings by Amédée Ozanfant, Le Corbusier as well as by Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger.156 Among the equipment that Le Corbusier selected and included in the interior of the pavilion there were: modular storage units by Remington, a manufacturer of office furniture; Thonet bentwood chairs; Maples

154 Le Corbusier, Précisions sur un état présent de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Vincent, Fréal & Cie., Paris, 1930, p. 74. In Jacques Guiton, The Ideas of Le Corbusier on Architecture and Urban Planning, George Braziller, New York, 1981, p. 30. 155 Le Corbusier preferred the term ‘equipment’ instead of furniture or furnishings. Casiers were storage units that could function as cabinets of various sorts or wardrobes. Their versatility worked marvellously in the division of spaces or ambiences in the open plans. 156 Le Corbusier’s painting Still Life with Various Objects (1924) became quite famous after its display in the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau. Le Corbusier and Léger had a lifelong friendship during which they shared many ideas as well as having had different opinions on certain issues. While Léger when writing about architecture referred to it almost entirely as a resourceful composite of surfaces and linear shapes for a painter to decorate, Le Corbusier in the other hand, expressed his view of architecture prioritising the plan and after that the organization of three-dimensional volumes. Léger’s background as an architectural draftsman hints at his closeness to geometric forms in the guise of his cubist paintings and even more as he developed ideas connecting pictorial structure with architecture. See more on this in Robert L. Herbert, ‘“Architecture” in Léger’s Essays, 1913-1933’, in Eve Blau and Nancy J.Troy, Architecture and Cubism, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 2002, p. 77-84.

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club-chairs; stage-lighting spotlights; science lab vessels used as flower pots; standard issue bottles and utensils; and a Berber rug (see Figs. 3.21, 3.24-5). On his selection of the Thonet chairs Le Corbusier declared:

We have introduced the humble Thonet chair of steamed wood, certainly the most common as well as the least costly of chairs. And we believe that this chair, whose millions of representatives are used on the Continent and in the two Americas, possesses nobility.157

Following in the footsteps of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier included in his Pavillon de

L’Esprit Nouveau household items that had their origins in mass production – they had

158 not been designed bespoke by the architect. He wished that the gamut of industrial products, carefully selected by him, would be seen and re-envisioned by the public just as he saw them – as decent, beautiful, and reliable items more than worthy of our appreciation, use and enjoyment. These objet-types adopted by Le Corbusier in his architectural projects had the important task of inspiring a meditative state in their user, through their precise mechanism, good fit and their beautifully pared-down features.159

My staged photographs come from this lineage. I propose in my work a personalised reinvention of material excess, questioning the mentality of extravagant consumption

157 Le Corbusier, Almanach d’Architeture Moderne, Les Editions G. Cres et cie., Paris, 1925, p. 145, translation sourced from Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command - A Contribution to Anonymous History, Oxford University Press, New York, 1948, p. 492. 158 Adolf Loos brought to light the bentwood Thonet chair when furnishing the Viennese Café Museum he designed in 1889. Loos was the first distinguished architect to use Thonet chairs, In the 1850s, Michael Thonet pioneered with wood bending in the industrial process of making furniture. Thonet chairs became well known for being lightweight and easy to assemble, for their durability, versatility of use, and for being relatively cheap. “Thonet’s merit was to have designed and manufactured a mass product of undoubted aesthetic worth, a truly social product.” In Herwin Schaefer, The Roots of Modern Design – Functional Tradition in the 19th Century, op. cit., p. 148. It was only later, between 1927 and 1928, that, in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier designed a few furniture pieces intentionally devised to be part of his architectural projects. All through the 1920s, he selected from existing catalogues the equipment for his interiors. 159 ‘Objet-type’ or ‘type-needs’ is a term borrowed from typenmöbel by Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927). This German architect was the first to formulate the program for the Deutscher Werkbund (German Arts and Crafts Society) in 1906. Le Corbusier also called these objects “Human-limb objects, type-objects, responding to type-needs: chairs to sit on, tables to work at, devices to give light, machines to write with (yes indeed!), racks to file things in.” In Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 74.

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disseminated by capitalism and now deeply ingrained in our quotidian. I try to challenge the widespread attitude of insatiable desire for quantity and the latest product, by creating conceptual works, which evoke the idea of moving away from that excessive condition, and from the prescribed perception of a world always abounding with new things. The present abundance of discarded material is a rich source for my personal utopias (Fig. 3.30. More of my images in Chapters One, Four and Five).

Recycled Fashions

In his positive utopia, Le Corbusier placed great importance on taking notice of already existing things:

Here, reborn for our modern eye, are historic architectural discoveries: the pilotis, the long windows, the roof garden, the glass façade. Once again we must learn at the end of the day to appreciate what is available…160

Le Corbusier reinvented already existing things by addition, subtraction and transformation, or by simply transferring readymade items into new contexts. He manipulated forms and objects he admired, whether traditional or pioneering, by reconstructing them into new permutations in new contexts. For example, the ocean liner, a Modern icon, was of great interest to Le Corbusier, not merely in what it evoked in a picturesque way. More important to him was the functionality pervading the ships’ program envelope and the spatial relationships present in plan and section. It was the ocean liner’s proposition of a compound of communal decks and private cabins inserted into a limited envelope that particularly attracted Le Corbusier. The ocean liner

160 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète I, p. 60. In Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920-1930, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987, p. 43.

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was abstracted in some of his projects, (see Figs. 3.29, and 3.31-3), imaginatively transformed carrying resonances of the real thing without being an imitation. Le

Corbusier saw connections between the Modern ship proposition for habitat and the monastic living of medieval origin. Both historical fragments, one emerging from his present, the other from the past, were transposed into his architecture in the shape of discrete melanges of ideas, and allowed meaning to arise less literally. What the ocean liner and the monk’s cell might have been in its original context was not so easily pinpointed in its new role in the architecture and design of Le Corbusier. His focus was on reconceptualizing the operative and formal aspects of given models.

Elements of significant presence in Le Corbusier’s oeuvre embodied the basic forms of platonic shapes, such as his pilotis, which were cylindrical; conical ramps that formed geometric shapes and negative spaces; and ribbon windows that emphasised the horizontal plane. These features re-occur in several of his built works, often modified and redesigned according to each program, to the new context, and to his artistic vision. Re-use, reinterpretation, and rearrangement of building elements and equipment were constant features in Le Corbusier’s living spaces. Along these lines, he selectively adopted certain Classical forms. These forms went through a transformative intellectual process before reappearing in his architecture, displaced from their original context but still bearing vestiges of their original foundations. Le

Corbusier proposed an innovative constructional system that acknowledged its

Classical parallel, in a mutated manner, in a new world. For example, the Classical peristyle – a range of pillars surrounding a building in ancient Greece – was brought into Le Corbusier’s architecture reborn as pilotis, a columnar system whose main purpose was to lift the bulk of the building up off the ground. Le Corbusier’s pilotis grid reinterpreted the perimeter-based use of colonnade in Classical architecture. Pilotis

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were more than structural and sculptural elements, these grids of cylindrical columns at the ground plane created a flexible space of open-ended usage (Figs. 3.26-9).

Ideas and forms were reconfigured and reapplied not only in Le Corbusier’s architecture; these processes are also evident in his Purist paintings (Figs 3.11 and

3.25). The objects Le Corbusier selected to furnish his architecture, as well as the objects for the still-lives of his paintings, as noticed by Herwin Schaefer,

Were all of the kind that is straight out of the nineteenth century. …Le Corbusier’s pipe, his metal garden chair, his glasses and bottles, his luggage, his metal office furniture, the Thonet chairs, and his ocean liners.161

Again, we notice the influence of Adolf Loos on Le Corbusier’s practice, as hinted by

Schaefer,

One of the things Loos helps us see is that Modern design was not created, was not an achievement of a few individuals of that period, but was there to be brought to light.162

In many instances, Le Corbusier’s writings reveal him to be someone who placed great value on the durability and quality of manufacturing, and on thoughtful and leisurely savouring of things. This can be seen as to be a way of engaging, rather than living a shallow life, effected by fleeting fads, and material gain. Art and architectural theorist

Mark Wigley has well documented Le Corbusier’s aversion to the phenomenon of fashion and his unwillingness to be associated with fashion’s merciless ephemeral character:

161 Herwin Schaefer, op. cit., pp. 197-198. 162 ibid., p. 188.

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…Differences of style, the trivialities (frivolities) of passing fashion, which are only illusions or masquerades, do not concern me.163

It is interesting to notice that from the early stages of his career, Le Corbusier was already displaying a fierce commitment to the quest of permanence and timelessness

(see Figs. 3.40-3). He avoided succumbing to passing fads or aesthetic trends, opting instead for the use of long-lasting materials and methods of construction in the fulfilment of his artistic conception:

I have always been a strong advocate of reinforced concrete and I brought to the realization of the building in question [Villa Schwob at La Chaux-de-Fonds] the fruits of long experience, and I concentrated upon it all my artistic effort and my constructive skills, in the hope of creating a work which would not simply give just a passing moment of delight.164

Desire for permanence in the material domain was modelled on what he saw as eternal qualities in certain human feelings, such as:

Human passion, since man was man, has been constant and extends from birth to death; its range being limited by a maximum and a minimum which appears to us constant through the ages. This is the gauge by which we can measure the permanence of human creations.165

The progressive radicalism of the avant-garde was associated with its urge towards continual change and development166, a trait that did not perfectly fit Le Corbusier, who

163 Le Corbusier quoted by Mark Wigley in White Walls, Designer Dresses – The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, op. cit., p. 38. 164 Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, letter from Paris to Monsieur A. Lavandière, D.P.L.G., in Lausanne, 20 April 1919, Fondation Le Corbusier. Quoted in Russell Walden ‘Le Corbusier’s Early Years in Paris’, Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 123. 165 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow op. cit., pp. 45-6. Quoted in Simon Richards, op. cit., p. 12. 166 Coined by Matei Calinescu as being “ a typical trait of the avant-garde”. In Hilde Heynen, ‘Architecture or Revolution? Le Corbusier and the Avant-Garde’, in Tim Benton, Peter Carl, Hilde Heynen, Charles Jencks, Mohsen Mostavi, Daniel Naegele, Fernando Oyarzun, and Stanislaus Von Moos, Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, Architectural Association Publications, London, 2003. p. 42.

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desired that the world would became less hungry for perpetual novelty. He shared with the Futurists the envisioning of a future resulting from the play between the forces of an ever developing technological world and the imaginative abilities of the human mind.

Le Corbusier and the Futurists looked at the world in an unconventional way, posing questions to traditional ways of thinking and offering creative ways of seeing society, individuals and things interacting with each other and with the universe at large. Le

Corbusier differed with the Futurists’ insatiable appetite for the new, leaving no time for the appreciation of past production. To the Futurists life was now – and youthfulness ruled with strength, energy and innovation. Their approach was in harmony with the economy’s merciless cycle of new creations for rapid obsolescence. Le Corbusier by contrast, did not subscribe to novelty for novelty’s sake. It seemed natural to him that an object chosen by an individual would only be replaced by another when this object could no longer offer its proper utility – when it had somehow ‘died’:

We sit on them [the objects of utility], work on them, use them up; when used up, we replace them.167

Akin to Le Corbusier’s attitude, in attempting to counter the present obsession with the new model, new surface, and their rapid turn into wasted matter, I photographically trace the life of possibilities in the discarded to promote a more elastic life for objects and the hope for more creative and improvising impulses in our everyday lives.

Pure Consumption

Le Corbusier pledged for standardisation without glitter, for acknowledgement of value beyond the surface, beyond the confines of a self-affirming, image-driven approach.

167 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 8. Parenthesis and italics mine.

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Attacking opulent decoration – gaudy, glittering and pompous trimmings – Le Corbusier declared:

Such stuff founders in a narcotic haze. Let’s have done with it. We will soon have had more than enough. … Great art lives by humble means. Glitter is going under. …168

It seemed that Le Corbusier was trying to say that there was a moral way of consuming, a more refined way. His utopia, borrowing Georges Bataille’s words, aligned with Marx’s hope for an independence of man from things, which signified reaching and exercising of a perfect adequacy of man to things, “man would have them

[material things] behind him, … they would no longer enslave him.”169 For Le

Corbusier, the enjoyment of art and the acculturation of the self were more pressing issues and activities than shopping sprees and material accumulation. Le Corbusier’s precepts called for a kind of ‘purism’ in consumption habits, a notion that went against the predominant torrent, which was implanting and spreading strong emphasis on consumerism. His prerogative was the exploration of radically new possibilities for living based on the development of wisdom and the renunciation of the superfluous.

The almost religious resonance of the process of “purification” invoked by Le Corbusier was above all connected to attitudes of restructuring and refining the world of things and human everyday habits, and aimed at provoking new life experiences, which he thought would contribute towards the moral, mental, spiritual, and physical renewal of human beings.170 He held the belief that the average person living in that period of

168 ibid., p. 135. 169 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share – An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, transl. By Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1988, p. 135. Parenthesis mine. 170 Le Corbusier lengthy commitment to the ineffable mission to ‘purify’ architecture makes a bit more sense if his upbringing in a Calvinist family is brought to light. The experience of growing up in La Chaux- de-Fonds, Switzerland, for Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (his birth given name) was filled with the sober, harsh and blunt, ascetic precepts of Calvinism.

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enormous change was not yet able to perceive that the shifts occurring in the world demanded new habits and attitudes more in harmony with the spirit of the epoch. He saw the chaotic melange of old habits and traditions no longer accompanying the reality of life. Purity of expression belonged to the realm of order, harmony, and proportions. The objective aesthetic obtained through purity of expression was the new ethics of the start of industrial civilization. In the art scene of the period, think of De

Stijl, for example.

Purification was a concept aimed at inciting people to a new clarity about themselves, to a spiritual awakening or a renovated spirit of interiority, that could lead to a more profound knowledge of the self. In order to engage with Le Corbusier’s proposed process, it was necessary that the domestic environment of the individual went through a kind of ‘cleansing’. The domestic environment was given focus because interior spaces of a home are the most immediate spaces in relation to one’s own inner space.

It was not so much an attitude towards hygiene, excretions, and odours that Le

Corbusier was preoccupied with. It was clarification, and refinement of the visual and experiential space of the home that he prioritised. Le Corbusier saw the accumulation of objects of no real use inside people’s lives, for sentimental reasons or for reasons of habit, as an alienating practice. In his words:

Sentiment-objects or objets d’art are nothing but dross in comparison with this inner fire – slight charm and certain encumbrance, most likely trifles, clowns, jesters – intended merely for distraction (I am speaking here of decorative objects d’art). The legitimate sentiment-object lies far off and higher up, in a purified abode on a more elevated plane; then it is a work of art, and as such it is another matter altogether.171

171 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 74.

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Manufacturing quality is not a leading determinant of consumer preference today. As noted by the Italian designer Enzo Mari,

The quality of production normally is very low…people want easy answers, they don’t want to struggle for things and that is precisely what the system wants, for us to act like zombies.172

Consumers prefer cheaper items with a shorter lifespan so they may be updated relatively inexpensively, without planning and without guilt. We live immersed in material surfeit at all levels. As we purge in order to clear the way for new goods in our lives, waste production soars. Not surprisingly, wider considerations on the impact of our actions are overlooked, as many individuals choose not to reflect on community or global responsibility.

In the studio, I remake and photograph waste products so they are reinvested with life and utility, bypassing otherwise their prosaic, dejected status. The ambition is for the audience to reflect on the scope of their subjugation to the capitalist logic of blind consumption and excretion.

Le Corbusier saw cluttered ambience acting as a barrier, impeding the individual from venturing into a harmonious ensemble of spirit and matter. He envisioned a much lighter ambience with very few well chosen items that would facilitate humans in pursuing a balanced, happy existence. This view necessitated a rejection of the compulsion to possess indiscriminately if one was to become less materialistic and more spiritually ‘enlightened’. The challenge was enormous considering that the context of endless desire-forming established by global advertising campaigns had already set in. Le Corbusier proposed a way of living that required individuals to make

172 Enzo Mari on an interview, David Ryan, ‘Enzo Mari and the Process of Design’, Design Issues, vol 13, n. 3, Autumn 1997, pp. 34 and 35.

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conscious choices, persistently confronting one’s own anxieties and emotional holes.

Consciousness facilitates an engagement between people and the world of things, instead of living by the dictates of passing fads.

Aligned with Le Corbusier’s philosophies, my practice emphasises the value of material re-use, and adaptation to existing circumstances. I extend the life-span of goods and fashions, propose efficient expenditures of space, time and physical energy, acting as a catalyst for social innovation, and in inducing the awakening of human wisdom through making this space where we may reflect (see Figs. 1.1, 1.6-7, 1.27, 1.35, and

1.37).

Le Corbusier’s love for objects of Modern production was expressed ascetically through his works, in which the austerity in his designs and theories were more emphatically articulated as an attempt at influencing people in opposing ways to the push towards excessive consumption. Le Corbusier’s concern with the future of humanity in the face of accelerated progress is demonstrated in the following words in his book The City of Tomorrow and its Planning:

Now that the machine age has let loose the consequences attaching to it, progress has seized on a new set of implements with which to quicken its rhythm; this, it has done with such an intensification of speed and output that events have moved beyond our capacity to appreciate them; …This rhythm has been accelerated to such a point that man … lives in a perpetual state of instability, insecurity, fatigue and accumulating delusions. Our physical and nervous organization is brutalized and battered by this torrent.173

173 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, op. cit., pp. 99-100.

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Equity Design

Within an idealised capitalist context the new world of mass production could provide accessible goods (home, objects) and services for a better quality of life to the working class, who Le Corbusier saw was living in sub-human conditions:

In their own homes, where they live in a precarious ease, since their remuneration bears no real relation to the quality of their work, they find their uncleanly old snail-shell, and they cannot even think of having a family. If they do so there will begin the slow martyrdom that we all know. These people, too, claim their rights to a machine for living in, which shall be in all simplicity a human thing.174

Le Corbusier did not discriminate, when dreaming of a distribution of the fruits of industrialisation among people. His idealism was of an egalitarian lineage:

There is a socializing component in the climate of the time that finds its tasks in the betterment of the community rather than in the private satisfactions of a few. In architecture, the primary projects are no longer monuments for heroes and palaces for the rich, but workers’ housing, factories, department stores, and public buildings of utility and common welfare, in which there is no room for exaggerated individualism.175

Although the infamous white surface of the European Modern architecture movement of the 1920s and 1930s was becoming a uniform of identification, working as a bond signifying aesthetic togetherness, each one of the pioneer architects of the period had their own trademark ‘style’. These architects also made distinctive use of colour in their projects, yet because of the ubiquity of the white walled image, many people have assumed they did not. Walter Gropius in Germany, and Johannes J. P. Oud and Gerrit

174 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., pp. 279. 175 Herwin Schaefer, op. cit., p. 168.

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Rietveld in Holland, were key architects among the group of Modern innovators (see

Figs. 3.34-7). In their quest for social betterment through experimentation with new technology and social utopianism, they shared with Le Corbusier a pioneering vision, which gravitated between contrasting and merging with the capitalist call of the time.

This duality is exemplified by the fact that the number of projects Le Corbusier successfully executed for the wealthy client superseded the number of public housing schemes realised for the working class. Le Corbusier was aware that technology, commerce and advertising were becoming more sophisticated. The message was reaching the public on a larger scale, but despite that, the concentration of capital power still remained in the hands of a mere few. In light of these facts, his position in relation to the dominant controlling system was not one of combat or one of an overt antagonistic nature, but one of mingling with that system, in order to be able to fluidly introduce his controversial ideas.

Le Corbusier quirkily used photographic images from various sources in his books and journal articles to promote and to disseminate his practical works and theories. (See figs.) As pointed out by Tim Benton,

Le Corbusier’s social idealism was tempered by a natural tendency toward elitism and an urgent practical need to curry favour with the industrialists, bankers and bourgeois dilettantes who made up the bulk of the readership of L’Esprit Nouveau magazine.176

Le Corbusier saw that for the wealthy to embrace living according to the esprit nouveau it would entail radical relearning in ideals and lifestyle habits. This new lifestyle would require personal will and compromise if they were to absorb the new sensibilities that would ultimately be character defining and life-enduring. In housing, for both the rich

176 Tim Benton, ‘The Myth of Function’, in Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, op. cit., p. 47.

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and for the masses, Le Corbusier envisioned the application of the same overall scheme: the “Five Points of a New Architecture”, encompassing construction methods and materials.177 For Le Corbusier, adaptability to the ideals of Modern life and appreciation of that sensibility involved all classes of society. As he explained,

There is no longer such a thing as a private palace; luxury no longer resides in the Aubusson carpet but has moved up to the brain.178

Le Corbusier’s houses for the bourgeois did not differ spatially, functionally, or aesthetically from the homes he conceived for the working and lower classes. In all cases, they were assigned with same type of flooring, window panels, stairs, pillars, fittings, within the same spatial arrangements.

His interest in breaking with inequalities, via the application of same methods and materials for the homes of the working class and the upper class, was experimented and expressed in the Quartiers Modernes Frugès housing complex that he designed for workers in Pessac. This complex was developed and built at around the same time he was creating the two-in-one Villas La Roche-Jeanneret. The ‘duplex’ clients were the wealthy art collector Raoul La Roche and Lotti Raaf and Albert Jeanneret, a couple of modest means. The Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau, created for the Exposition

Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925, follows the same egalitarian trend – it worked as a multifarious prototype home that powerfully advertised his democratic inclinations. As an example of non-discriminate application of architecture, Le Corbusier designed roof gardens and exterior hanging stairways into most of the five types of the Quartiers’ dwellings (see Chapter Four Figs 4.16 and

177 Le Corbusier’s “Five Points of a New Architecture” did not get fully established until 1927 at the inauguration of the Weisssenhof Housing Development in Stuttgart. The five points were: #1, the pilotis; #2, the roof garden; #3, the free plan; #4, the strip window; and #5, the free façade. For more details see the full description in Karin Kirsch, op. cit., pp. 111-13. 178 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 42.

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4.20). These features were also included later in the commissioned Villa à Garches, completed in 1928 and in the Weissenhof dwellings in Stuttgart, in 1927 (Figs. 3.38-9).

In his words, extracted from an interview in the magazine L’Architecture vivant at the time of the inauguration of his two houses at the Weissenhof compound:

We have defined the type-elements of a house and we shall combine them to suit you. In this way, using the same elements (floor, pillars, windows, stairs, etc.), we have designed village houses at Pessac, artist’s house in Paris, large or small villas for people of means, and the League of Nations building in Geneva.179

Le Corbusier embraced the project for Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès as a highly original and socially idealistic opportunity, an experimentation ground for his new aesthetic propositions that were just beginning to unfold.180 Standardisation and pre- fabrication inhabited the utopian minds of the Deutscher Werkbund members as a viable solution to the housing crisis experienced after the widespread destruction of the

First World War. Housing estates emerged in the post First World War period as a manifestation of the social concerns of idealistic architects, Le Corbusier included.

These architects “pioneered, each in his own way, the first postwar working-class

179 Le Corbusier, quoted in Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung – Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927, op. cit., p. 114. 180 In the midst of Le Corbusier’s own establishment as a modern architect, which happened in syntony with his relentless devotion and belief in the positive aspects of architectural standardisation, Henry Frugès commissioned him and Pierre Jeanneret with the project of a housing scheme of a garden city type. Frugès was a businessman with an artistic bent: painting, design, and music were practices undertaken by him on the side, having had described himself as “more of a researcher, polyvalent artist, architect without a DPLG (French state diploma), painter, sculptor, pianist and composer, writer, art critic, historian, etc. than a business man”. In Marylène Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas, Bernard Le Roy and Jean-Luc Veyret, Le Corbusier: The Quartiers Modernes Frugès, transl. from French by Sarah Parsons, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, Birkhäuser Publishers, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 1998, p. 64. Frugès was seduced by Le Corbusier’s call for mass-produced houses after reading his book Vers une Architecture of 1923. Construction was completed in June 1926 giving the municipality of Pessac, up to then by large an agricultural commune in the southwest outskirts of Bordeaux, the distinct mark of being the grounds to Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès, maybe one of the most radical statements accomplished by the modern movement in the area of housing. “Through its complexity, diversity, quality of urban spaces and introduction of hierarchy, this site plan fits neatly into the conceptual traditions of the garden cities, a link that is accentuated by the treatment accorded in the scheme to exterior spaces, pavements, greenery and enclosure of the separate plots. Nonetheless, a host of features making up ‘modern’ urban planning elements that break with tradition are clearly discernible.” In Ferrand, Feugas, Le Roy and Veyret, ibid.,, p. 84.

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housing estates. These experiments forcibly drew attention to a new sense of idealism and provided the vision for mainstream modern architecture.”181

The housing Le Corbusier built in the 1920s acted as a laboratory for testing materials and systems that so far were very little known. In these buildings methods were tested in practice, developed or modified as required, and due to this experimental situation, not surprisingly some new materials and technologies presented flaws. The principle, or most overt issue being cracking in reinforced concrete that caused leaks and in severe cases structural instability. Low-cost construction was desired but not always was something Le Corbusier could achieve when unanticipated problems threatened the standards of quality and longevity that he sought.

Le Corbusier’s simple living spaces, facilitated by his pared down design approach that did not lean on ephemeral fashions, suggested a form of democracy in which past inequities of accessibility for items according to status or class criteria could be broken down. Le Corbusier believed, and his built works testified, that his housing was perfectly sound to be inhabited by the business class elite, the working class, or the poor. The living spaces he built for the working class were practically the same as the ones he did for the bourgeoisie. Using a limited variety of humble, plentiful materials, the quality that he could achieve was the same for every client, rich or poor (see Figs

3.38-41, and 4.17-9 in Chapter Four). As he so clearly stated:

Architecture par tout, millionaire ou outré.182 Le Corbusier sided with the Constructivist dictum that everyone is equal before the machine …[In

181 Russell Walden ‘Le Corbusier’s Early Years in Paris’, Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., pp. 121-122. FLC 182 Le Corbusier declared in the mid 1920s, edited in Jacques Barsac, Le Corbusier, Parts 1, U-Matic, 176 min, black-and- white and colour, Ciné Service Technique, copyright Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, 1987.

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Constructivism] form and substance are one …[Constructivism is] the socialism of vision.183

Le Corbusier’s architectural propositions were based on a permeating simplicity and economy of means. The overall emphasis on standards and minimal ways of living signified the exclusion of luxuries previously commonplace among a bourgeoisie attracted to opulence and a frivolous lifestyle – extra rooms and superfluous furniture, for example. This economy of means also gave rein to a more socialist functioning of the ‘organism’, where the majority of its rooms were potentially of a shared occupation.

The ambience of these new spaces clashed with pompous and over sought equipment of any sort.

Le Corbusier pushed notions of human flexibility and adaptability at a psychological and social level. His models for living blurred established behaviour, activities, and class differentiation, but he did not focus on the transformation of society into a classless one, as wished by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin saw a transformative social potential within the architectural propositions of pioneer Modern architects, pointing to

Le Corbusier as a key figure within that context. Benjamin saw the characteristic transparency and spatial interpenetration appearing in Modern architecture as metaphors for a future classless social reality. … Architecture was seen by Benjamin as a non-auratic discipline, capable of stimulating people so that they might align their attitudes alongside those required by the future society.184 In a less radical strain, Le

Corbusier’s concerns for the social perhaps weighed just as much as the development of an aesthetic language – both were intrinsically connected. His priority was to contribute towards the improvement of human life. In his words:

183 Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy, p. 21, quoted in Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, Basic Books, US, 1988, pp. 141-142. 184 Hilde Heynen, ‘Architecture or Revolution? Le Corbusier and the Avant-Garde’, Tim Benton, Peter Carl, Hilde Heynen, Charles Jencks, Mohsen Mostavi, Daniel Naegele, Fernando Oyarzun, and Stanislaus Von Moos, Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, op. cit., p. 54.

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In 1922, Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City proposal only very loosely made distinctions between middle-class and working class accommodation. In fact, he stated later that ever since the beginning of his research into city planning in 1914, he had never been concerned with rich or poor, but solely with man.186

The radicalism of the Modern avant-garde was epitomised by its commitment to social and individual transformation, harnessed by the optimism of utopian dreams of a better world. These Modernists, including Le Corbusier, held on to egalitarian ideals with education featuring as a basic component for the amelioration of society. As it has been sensibly put by Paul Greenhalgh,

They [the pioneer Modern architects] were responding to the social problems around them in an exciting and dynamic way and were attempting to inculcate profound ideas into the design process. Had they been practicing and writing their manifestos today, it is hard to imagine them using the same aesthetic or even political logic. Their focus on morality, on the significance of the economy

185 Le Corbusier, ‘The Construction of Dwellings’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., p. 25. 186 Le Corbusier, Radiant City, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Paris, 1935, p. 146. Cited by Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘A Vision of Utopia’, in Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 236.

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and the need for a healthy environment would have led them to alternative solutions to those they had arrived at by the mid-twenties.187

Conclusion

The homes designed by Le Corbusier clearly eschewed the cosy décor and the predilection for excessive ornamentation, which were (and still are) traits associated with homely comfort. Objet-types and a handful of building elements, such as pilotis, ramps, staircases, large horizontal windows, were continually re-used and re-combined by Le Corbusier in many of his buildings.

In my practice, photographs, people and discarded objects become part of visionary constructions in which imaginative simplicity, economy of means, and reinvention are emphasised. Following in the footsteps of Le Corbusier, who worked with a limited

‘palette’, I enact my belief in the potential for endless creative, alternative and functional possibilities when working with a small number of carefully selected objects and people with whom I have developed close and special relationship with (see Figs.

1.4-6, 1.12, 1.27 and 1.31).

Le Corbusier’s reductive architecture and philosophies did not change the world. He did not settle people in ‘Utopia’ and for that reason we assume that his ideals have failed. We tend to overlook the enormous creative effort he invested in his commitment to reconstruct the urban and domestic environment. We have gotten used to ignoring

(thanks to Jencks) the agonizing, although exciting intellectual process that he went through in order to offer his wild, albeit courageous view of a future society where harmony was intended to touch every aspect of life. Dreams and optimism, self-

187 Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, op. cit., p. 23. Parenthesis mine.

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determination, and humanist thought were manipulated into becoming practical nightmares, which overshadowed the hopes and experimental nature of the visionary.188 Misinterpretations of Le Corbusier’s underlining intentions to do with his propositions for living are the major topic of investigation in the next chapter.

188 “Utopia, whenever it has moved beyond being an idea, a dream of the bien-pensants, has invariably proved catastrophic. The Postmodern decades have been vital for halting and discrediting this recipe for nightmare.” Paul Greenhalgh, The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, op. cit., p. 248.

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CHAPTER FOUR – A Postmodern Critique of Modern Architecture

Introduction

This chapter investigates the negative criticism on Le Corbusier, which started as soon as Le Corbusier began to publish his philosophies to propose and build his innovative architecture in Paris in the early 1920s. The major oppositions then were European journalists – the British architectural critics in particular – and the public authorities of

France .189 Later, during the heydays of Postmodern architectural theorizing headed by

Charles Jencks, criticism extended to the infamous defamation – Le Corbusier the

‘dehumanizer’ – placing the blame for the post World War II International Style’s low- cost housing estate resulting ‘malaise’ squarely on his shoulders.

For every genial invention of man in evolution, for every simplified ordering of this world and most of all for the expression of his unique humaneness, there is a tragic paradox.190

The 1972 blowing-up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St Louis, United States (Fig.

4.1), made symbolic and ‘historic’ the death of Modern architecture.191 Writer and architectural theorist Charles Jencks made several photographic images of the different stages of the explosion, which he used in slide shows at his lecture’s openings of the mid 1970s. He declared that,

189 John Gloag and David Watkin were among the fiercest of those critics. 190 Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: an Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1972, p. 93. 191 Designed by the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki in 1955, this living complex epitomised the ‘evil’ that mass housing had become. Yamasaki designed the also defunct World Trade Center towers of New York.

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The Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction had an enormously liberating impact…I used this rhetorical formula – Death of Modernism/Rise of Post-Modernism – aware that it was a symbolic fabrication (I invented a false date) and yet was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly everyone (especially the press) accepted it as truth.192

Jencks noticed that the public reaction to the destruction of this building was one of satisfaction, especially in former communist countries where housing estates were predominantly built under Modern architecture precepts.

Jencks admitted that the precepts of the Postmodern agenda did not intend to be a binary opposition to the Modern program and condition, but an ambiguous slide and shift from one paradigm to another… a complexification, hybridisation and sublation of the Modern – not its antithesis.193 He explained,

Post-Modernism means the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence, a double activity that acknowledges our complex relationship to the preceding paradigm and world view.194

Nevertheless, reaction against the long established dominance of Modernism seems to have been the key attitude taken by Postmodernism in its emergence. Modernism for the upcoming generation of cultural specialists, was no longer able to sustain the subversive strain its styles once held, therefore it was considered exhausted, dead.

The reaction was in particular against the monumental buildings of the International

Style (Fig 4.2).195

192 Charles Jencks, ‘The Post-Modern Agenda’, a revised version of ‘The Values of Post-Modernism’, from Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, Academy Editions, London, 1987, included The Post-Modern Reader, Academy Editions, London, 1992, p. 24. 193 ibid., p. 33. 194 ibid., p. 11. 195 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Cultural Turn – Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, Verso, London and New York, 1998, p. 1, text first written in 1982. It was Alfred Barr who invented the name: ‘International Style’. As noted Russel Lynes, “the International Style

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Jencks, in the latest edition of his book Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in

Architecture, claimed that,

From the 1950s to the year 2000 the white International Style, and more particularly the Corbusian variations of it, have become the lingua franca of our time, and this has slowed down historical change.196

Robert Venturi’s seminal book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, written in

1962, published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966, called for a break away from the established set of beliefs that framed Modernism. His writing attributed much to architectural discussion influencing a new generation of architects and architectural historians and still hold considerable currency today. For Venturi,

The driving force of the new architectural aesthetic was not practical response to a given situation but conscious and theoretically formulated reaction against the established norms of architecture.197

Contesting what he considered the dull-logic of the Modern architectural program,

Venturi advocated a more contemporary, mass-culture, pop-oriented aesthetic, which he believed the dictates of the Modern movement had continually suppressed (Figs.

4.3-4)

quickly came to be identified in most people’s mind with a phrase coined by Le Corbusier, one of the progenitors and practitioners of the new style. He insisted that a house should be “a machine for living”. The idea was enough to send the shivers down the back of most Americans, as well as most Germans and most Frenchman.” In Russel Lynes, The Tastemakers, The Universal Library, New York, 1972, first published in the U. S. in 1949, pp. 244-245. 196 Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2000, p. 349. 197 In Heinrich Klotz, ‘Postmodern Architecture’, in Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Reader, Academy Editions, London, 1992, p. 247, originally this text was published in The History of Postmodern Architecture, Friedr Vieweg & Sohn Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden, 1984 and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988; translated by Radka Donnell.

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The Postmodern agenda was set with the aim of restructuring modernist postulation with something “larger, fuller, more true,”198 without emphasis on progressive technology or a single world view, as Jencks thought to be the case with Modernism, but to strive for a broader world view, which encompassed a “respect for difference and a celebration of the regional, local and particular.”199 Contextualism, pluralism, and historical symbolism were major goals of Postmodern architecture. The emphasis was on a populist architecture. These architects favoured a historicist platform in the guise of a revival of various classical architectural languages: a return and a praised legitimisation of the nineteenth-century master architectural works and writings.

Emerging Postmodern practices were considered sophisticated and attuned to a thoughtful pluralism, when a variety of approaches, depending on the context of the project were adopted. The flexibility and wealth of a hybrid language were seen as most appropriate qualities in dealing with the complexities of urban life in an industrial and post-industrial society, which contrasted with the reductivist vocabulary of

Modernists and Classicists.

The Postmodern populist strategy fulfilled the rhetoric of defence “against the elite (and utopian) austerities of the great architectural Modernisms.”200 This stand fuelled the spread and strengthening of anti-Modern criticism, which were largely generated from the belief that the reductive geometry characteristic of Modern architecture buildings

198 Charles Jencks, ‘The Post-Modern Agenda’, a revised version of ‘The Values of Post-Modernism’, from Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, op. cit., p. 11. 199 ibid., p. 11. In more recent talks on the evolving program of Postmodern architecture, Jencks pointed out the increasing complexity in the new language, which moved from the earlier juxtaposition of historical styles and forms to ‘folding’ juxtaposition generated by computers. He boasted the ‘foldings’ capacity to store more information than cubic forms along with the credentials: “exciting product”, for being the type of architectural component that is never repeatable, always slightly or radically changing. Within his line of praising “unfolding” tendencies, Jencks considered sensuous the works of architecture generated by computers – because “contemporary life has forced architects in that direction” – a direction in which metaphors of the human body and nature are evoked. Quotes by Charles Jencks from his lecture titled ‘The New Paradigm for Design’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, in association with the University of Technology of Sydney, March 11th 2003. Exemplifying what he called sensuous, Jencks pointed to works by contemporary Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. 200 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Cultural Turn – Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, op. cit., p. 11.

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stood for a heroic posturing devoid of meaning: “an antiquated cult of aestheticism.”201

Heinrich Klotz and many of his contemporaries proclaimed that the appeal exerted by

Modern buildings relied exclusively on the abstraction of its calculated geometric gestures, which made these buildings ‘purely interesting’. In summary, Modern architecture was canonised for its alleged emptiness as a result from the lack of historical meaning and formal complexity. Pop critics framed it as ‘failed project’, one that subscribed to abstract scientific worldviews, engendered in its ‘dry, rigid, inhuman and unfree’ forms.

The Anti-Corbusian Cult

A Postmodern building ‘spoke’ while the Corbusian type was ‘mute’ – not able to generate any significant form of symbolic communication. Le Corbusier’s buildings were what Jencks and Venturi repeatedly proclaimed to be the ‘expressionless and dull’ Modern architecture. This reading of Modern architecture was attached to a

plethora of ‘negative’ outcomes in the shape of mass housing complexes, to which responsibility was conceded sometimes to the movement as a whole, sometimes to a pioneer Modern architect. Political positions within the Modern/Postmodern aesthetic debate have often had moral overtones. A number of critics tend to frame the

Postmodern phenomenon as an always positive and healthy aesthetic and cultural production emerging to carry the responsibility of overcoming the ‘failures’ of old

Modernisms.

Critics supportive of Postmodern architecture, who desired to create a new tendency through which their ideas could be promoted and acted as a vehicle for the ‘star’

201 Heinrich Klotz predicts that this shift in thought occurred around the 1960s, in tandem with the emergence of Pop Art and its distancing of the non-objective mode. Heinrich Klotz. ‘Postmodern Architecture’, in Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Reader, op. cit., p. 236.

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202 architects they supported, solidly established the anti-Corbusian canon. Complying with this approach, Heinrich Klotz referred to Hans Hollein’s Austrian Travel Bureau,

Vienna, Austria, 1978 (Fig. 4.8), and Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia, New Orleans,

US, 1976-79 (Fig. 4.7) as applying the emerging symbolic language Klotz validated. As expressed by Klotz, that architecture referred to the full scope of life and did not limit itself to a faith in progress clad in machine metaphors.203 The symbols in Postmodern buildings, which Klotz defended contrasted with the ocean liner, the factory buildings, and the airplane hangar in the architectonic language of the pioneer Modernists, Le

Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Peter Behrens.

In his infamous new-journalistic account of Modernism, Tom Wolfe also uses the anti-

Corbusian position to his advantage: he wears an acerbic, ironic style of criticising

Modern tenets. In his book From Bauhaus to our House he proclaims that the

“whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness” trade marking Modern architecture as oppressive devices – being the trigger and cause of sensory deprivation.204 Wolfe’s writings clearly displayed a personal disdain for the pioneer Modern architects. He makes playful reference to them by devising titles such as ‘Silver Prince’ for Walter Gropius, ‘White God’ for Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, and

‘Mr. Purism’ for Le Corbusier.205 Wolfe perceives the European ideological influence to be a suffocation of American’s intellectual development. He condemns this influence as

202 In a description by Victor Burgin, “the canon is what gets written about, collected, and taught; it is self- perpetuating, self-justifying, and arbitrary; it is the gold standard against which the values of new aesthetic currencies are measured. The canon is the discourse made flesh; the discourse is the spirit of the canon. To refuse the discourse, the words of communion with the canon, in speaking of art [architecture, design] or in making it, is to court the benign violence of institutional excommunication.” Victor Burgin, ‘The End of Art Theory’, in The End of Art Theory, p. 159, quoted in Beatriz Colomina, ‘Introduction: On Architecture, Production and Reproduction’, Joan Oackman, Architectureproduction, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1988, p. 23, parenthesis mine. 203 Heinrich Klotz. ‘Postmodern Architecture’, in Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Reader, op. cit., p. 245, originally published in The History of Postmodern Architecture, Friedr Vieweg & Sohn Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden, 1984 and MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988; translated by Radka Donnell. 204 Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to our House, Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, 1982, p. 4. 205 ibid., pp. 11, 29, 47.

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a “colonial complex”, believing that the popularity and the high regard attributed to the

European artistic avant-garde, in which Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier had once emerged, was due to an overrated cultural value asserted to European civilization. In

Wolfe’s words,

The charred bone heap in the background was precisely what made an avant- gardist such as Breton or Picasso stand out so brilliantly.206

Revisionists practice strategies of negation, focusing the criticism on negative aspects, or on what made the discourse in question to be a myth. The application of a revisionist form of criticism has had the potential to alter original intentions, distorting them, sometimes completely disregarding their foundations, so focused this type of critique is in the ‘demythifying’ of the issue in question. Adding to this premise, revisionist

Postmodernism,

Seeks to overcome the modern world view not by eliminating the possibility of world views as such, but by constructing a Postmodern world view through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts.207

An ongoing generic, repetitive critique fiercely places Le Corbusier’s project in a position of responsibility for the disastrous outcomes of mass housing which attempted to follow the precepts of Modern architecture. Le Corbusier was criticised as being the token architect, the perpetrator of inhumane ‘machines for living’. This exaggerated statement and largely a reaction to the housing schemes for the lower classes that emerged in European cities as a solution to housing shortages in the aftermath of

World War II. The need for post-war urban repopulation was a key factor in the nature of urban housing development. Spacious domestic environments were not a part of the architects’ nor the city councils’ agendas. Vertical growth was favoured over horizontal

206 ibid., p. 10. 207 Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Reader, op. cit., p. 33. Jencks quoted from the introduction of David Ray Griffin’s God and Religion in the Postmodern World, Essays in Postmodern Theology, 1989.

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suburban sprawls. These European housing developments, mostly adopting ‘high-rise’, high density occupation, influenced the creation of similar schemes in North America – a country that already had been exposed to the Garden City Movement’s ideas of communal living in the 1920s and 1930s. Later, the strategy for vertical growth spread around the whole of the developed urban world.

In London and in its surroundings, many post-war proposals for reconstructing the domestic domain took the shape of lower scale revivals of the cottage/village community looking to the comfort of an English past, however there were also many city residential complexes comprising of monolithic blocks following the language of the

International Style. One of the most famous housing developments in England, the

Housing Estate Roehampton, London, built between 1952 and 1955 (Fig. 4.9), consists of community blocks mixing small towers, and tall slabs, where both types of building were punctuated with parklands. A later residential estate of 1961, Park Hill, in

Sheffield (Fig. 4.10), one of the first expressions of English Brutalism was the victim of constant attacks by critics who pinpointed Park Hill as demonstrative of the negative affect that austere Modern architecture could inflict upon humanity.208 Conversely, as noted by Richard Weston,

This estate has attracted fierce loyalty from a surprising number of residents who value the social ideals behind its design.209

208 “English Brutalism” or “New Brutalism” as its precursors would call in order to distinguish their movement from the Brutalism of Le Corbusier’s later buildings. It is a term coined after Le Corbusier called béton brut the wooden-board marked concrete surfaces of some of his buildings, as in the Unité d’Habitation Marseilles for example. The British housing estate architecture of hard materials and of seemly sterile and harmful connotations was given a certain glamorous status through the Thamesmead estate built in the mid-1960s in the outskirts of London. This brutalist residential block served as an important location for the movies Clockwork Orange (1971) by Stanley Kubrick, and Beautiful Thing (1996) by Hattie MacDonald. 209 Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 217.

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Photography recorded the forms of Le Corbusier’s buildings and their interiors, but the number of eyes that might have seen the forms and spaces in the flesh is likely to be much smaller than the number of eyes that saw the architecture through publications.

The photographic recording of Le Corbusier’s architectural works became an attractive source of inspiration as well as imitation by the generations of architects and designers that followed. The photographs were utilized as primary material for architectural criticism rather than using the actual physical experience of the work to inform the critique. The widely publicised images of Le Corbusier’s buildings allowed multifarious interpretations of them. Until the mid-1940s when magazines started to request colour for their layouts, only black-and-white photography had been employed, omitting in this way his sensitivity to coloured intervention of which were many.210 For example, Le

Corbusier made use of wall polychromy in the exterior and interior of his Les Quartiers

Modernes Frugès (Figs. 4.16-20). One of the most appealing aspects of the housing complex – remained unseen, perhaps because of the lack of colour reproductions in the architectural publications of the 1920s. Le Corbusier also applied colours to the interior walls of his residential villas of the same period. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s subtler introduction of colour via frequent inclusion of seasonal trees punctuating the architectural site/sight seems to have been disregarded. Trees, foliage, and grass offered a limited palette of hues, but nonetheless enhanced and improve the living environment physically and aesthetically.

Photographs in the printed media have certainly sold Le Corbusier’s architecture as a product of progress and technology, fuelling the dissemination of Modern architecture, but photographs cannot replace the physical comprehension of space. A rigorous critique of architectural spaces cannot be made on the basis of images. This view was expressed by Adolf Loos, who believed that architecture should exist in a separate

210 Joseph Rosa, ‘Architectural Photography and the Construction of Modern Architecture’, History of Photography vol 22, n 2, Summer 1998, p. 103.

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realm from the contexts where art, museums, galleries, exhibitions, and publications existed. He stressed the purposeful stand of architecture, which for him could only be truly expressed through experiencing the building itself. Beatriz Colomina notes that,

Architecture was culturally disseminated through publications, a phenomenon, as Loos was early to realize, that in turn affected the design of architecture. His critique was directed to that confusion of architecture with its image that was infecting architects infatuated with the magazines.211

The constructed realities rendered in the images created by the photographer and her/his camera surrogates the bodily experience of the building in real space. The early photographs of Le Corbusier’ spaces worked to document those environments as favourably as possible, selectively revealing and obscuring things. Le Corbusier published interior shots of his buildings with or without the staged human figure, but always including some furnishing. He used photographic composition as a means of understanding different facets of objects and how they operate in relation to each other, to space and to people. Through these images, he expressed how he envisioned the space being used. By making strategic use of the inherent seductive character of the photographic image, the architect teased the awakening of a desire in people to physically place themselves in those types of Modern environments he was creating.

His photographs brought to light the qualities of some particular aspects of the space by the careful selection of camera’s point of view and lighting. The photograph, with its inherent control of the physical perception, as Le Corbusier himself had concluded from his early journeys findings irrevocably eliminated details, limited sensation, and

211 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Introduction: On Architecture, Production and Reproduction’, Joan Oackman, Architectureproduction, op. cit., p. 15, italics mine. It was known that Loos did not usually finish architectural drawings. He preferred to finish his building projects by determining features in situ during construction.

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lead in many instances to the weakening, or the veiling of the actual architecture rather than revealing its most charming strengthen.212

Subsequently, many within the next generation of architects adopting the Modern style, created buildings that greatly misinterpreted the ideas of Le Corbusier. The compound forms of the architecture of Le Corbusier are the realisation of the Modern ideal and lifestyle that he proposed rather than understanding the ideal. Many architects worldwide simply imitated the image of Le Corbusier’s architecture through the available black and white photo-constructions.213 In making this kind of pastiche, the new Modern architects were merely imitating the image and not the architecture. The resulting works known as Le Style Corbu were imitations and variations of the

Corbusian aesthetic, but most lacked his vision. This unfortunate shortfall in the later interpretations was exemplified in the great number of public housing built in that imitative style that not surprisingly had catastrophic repercussions.

Photography is used in my practice to test the possibilities of the sculptural representations. What would it be like to build your own chair out of rejected packaging? Or to reinvent the clothes you no longer wear due to their unfashionable

212 During 1907-1908, influenced by his mentor Charles L’Eplattenier, Le Corbusier set off on his first experiential journey backpacking around Italy and Vienna. It was then that he started to realise the gap between architecture and its representation, on how photography can mislead judgment. At the same time the experience of spaces in the flesh aroused both reactions – amazement and disappointment. Considering what he had learned about the architecture of those places via the published image, he arrived at the conclusion that the images he saw provided a distorted view in comparison with the originals he saw in the flesh. In some cases, the reproductions did not do justice in proving the beauty of the thing, in others it created a false impression by the masking of certain details and for not allowing a complete sense of the atmosphere created by the architectural ensemble. In his letters to L’Eplattenier reporting his collected perceptions of the journey, he confessed that from the photographs he had taken of selected architectural sites in Florence and Siena, none stood up to match the buildings in real life. Conversely, he thought that the magazine pictures of Joseph Hoffmann’s modern interiors in Vienna were inspiring, but when he visited Hoffmann’s building and could closely inspect and analyse them, Le Corbusier discovered a masked trickery in the construction of elements comprising those interiors. 213 As it was written by contemporary architect Zaha Hadid in an essay, which accompanied the exhibition The Photography of Lucien Hervé held in Sydney at the Ray Hughes gallery between October and November 2003, “It is known that Le Corbusier was interested in the metamorphic process unique to photography: the inverting of black and white from negative to print. It offered the analogy of the conciliation of opposites, a theme underlying much of his work.” Lucien Hervé is best known for his extensive photographic recording of Le Corbusier’s works and activities from the late 1930s to the early 1960s.

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status? As advertising has become so ubiquitous, so versatile and hyper-creative in our time, I have used consciously and maybe subconsciously some of its tropes.

Above all, I use photography to record and to rescue the sculptural assemblages from transience. Within the contemporary art discourse, my practice may fit with Mark

Godfrey’s observation:

Sculpture and photography emerge now not as foes – the one criticising and supplanting the other – but as partners, both refusing transcendence, both rooted in matter, which is to say, rooted in the economic and geographic reality of our world.214

The ‘negative’ connotation ascribed to Modern architecture and to Le Corbusier needs re-evaluation to be qualified analysis, as has seldom been moments undertaken with respects to when and where the architecture was employed, who the clients or the inhabitants were, the viability of the urban (physical and social) structure to connect with that architectural complex, and the quality of the materials and methods of construction adopted.

Gradually, after the 1920s, the rational aspects of Modern construction techniques evolved in a direction shaped by the social restructuring of capitalism as a system, which allowed those methods and techniques to be appropriated and controlled by the ideological needs of real state development. Component-part construction practices shaping simple geometries became the most economical and the most profitable way to develop the built environment worldwide, due in part to the booming industrial production of standardised components. It was a move that fully discarded the utopian underpinnings embodied in the pioneer Modernism of Le Corbusier. As expressed by

214 Mark Godfrey, ‘Mark Godfrey on Photography and Sculpture’, Artforum, February 2005, pp 147-153.

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Paul Greenhalgh, this move “should rather be seen as a move from idealism to pragmatism”.215

The de-prioritising of quality in order to increase the supply of housing after World War

II was used by city councils and public authorities worldwide. This had disastrous effect on the lives of the inhabitants of public housing in many parts of the world. Some nations had a planned national service for housing their citizens that worked better than in other countries. As it was well stated by Alex Stetter,

Unlike storytellers and painters, architects do not have the luxury of total control over the execution of their ideas: their creations are all too easy compromised by outside factors like money, time, politics, climate, geology, and above all people. Although these factors are the very elements that help bring a scheme to life, they contribute to the inevitable gap between the original vision and the 216 built reality.

Debased imitations of the Corbusian utopian idea of vertical urban communes abounded. However, in these social conditions it is problematic to generalise that all of these housing complexes, regardless of place, have caused alienation and psychological debilitation in their inhabitants. What may have been bad for the unprivileged class of the United States for example (Fig. 4.11), may have worked well for the lower middle classes of a metropolitan city in Brazil (Figs. 4.12-13). What may be good and right for some may be sublimely disastrous for others. But, we continue to be reminded of the failures in the attacks made not only by acclaimed cultural critics, but also by practicing visual artists.

215 Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, op. cit., p. 22. 216 Stephen Coates and Alex Stetter, Impossible Worlds – The Architecture of Perfection, Birkhäuser Publishers for Architeture, Basel, Berlin, Boston, London, 2000, pp. 6-7.

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The Australian artist Callum Morton has had a very successful practice over the past ten years, drawing largely from the mythological ‘bad’ of Modern Architecture. Morton creates immaculate and precise scale models of iconic Modernist buildings from various periods. His versions of them “stand in as models for the failed projects of a utopia-driven modernity.”217 Utopianism has been ascribed negative resonances by

Morton, or at least he is implying that the architectural projects of ‘Modernity’ failed for being of a utopian lineage. Morton claims that the spaces created by Modern architects were against the human body and psyche. People did not inhabit these spaces, but were imprisoned, “trapped like a caged animal.”218 His sculptures often include a sound component, which is crucial to fulfil the artist’s subjective intention of creating an ensemble that encapsulates the notion of the anxious, ghost-like, sad, sadistic, and moronic. These are the emotions that he believes, represent the character of the original spaces created by the Modern architects. As Morton says,

The sounds that come from these works, come from the nasty interiors of Modernism.219

Rejected goods are found out in the world, selected, rescued and taken to the studio where they are transformed and invested with unusual functionality and nobility, recalling designs, sculptures, and interior spaces of a bygone cultural Modernism.

Despite having surface imperfections and being unclean (as usually happens to objects that have been dumped), these objects in reconstruction possess a dignified aura, which I reconnect with the beautiful and noble object envisioned and produced by Le

217 Juliana Engberb, editor of catalogue essays of the Melbourne International Biennial 1999 – Signs of Life, The City of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, p. 64. Callum Morton, the son of an architect, had also studied architecture and urban planning before taking the path of a visual artist. His model/sculptures of Modernist buildings, usually made up of laser-cut pieces of Perspex and wood, are accurately recreated according to original plans in a 3D computer-modelling program. 218 Callum Morton, quoted in Juliana Engberb, Melbourne International Biennial 1999 – Signs of Life, The City of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1999, p. 64. 219 Callum Morton, quoted in Edward Colless, ‘Callum Morton: Interior World’, Australian Art Collector, no. 25, 2003, p. 49. Italics mine.

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Corbusier. For example, his armchair Grand Confort, Model LC3 (Fig. 4.21), first manufactured in 1929 by Thonet, is reinterpreted through the assembled pieces of coloured spongy packing material in the photographic image Mini-Flex Super-Comfort

(Fig. 4.22). The images that I create emerge from a desire to propose a conceptual process of constructive (as in positive) adaptation within sometimes detrimental local, personal, and global circumstances. The critical perspective of my work involves aesthetic experimentation linked with the display of constructed social roles. The formal and political concerns here involve questions of fashion, obsolescence, and consumption.

By considering Modernism, I am investigating a historical past to better understand the ideological lineages in relation to the contemporary paradigm. Subject matter is not framed through direct appropriation, for example, the Modernist tropes and archetypes attached to the quest for simplicity referenced in the work are invoked obliquely through the reconfiguration of found material that was selectively gathered, assembled, and later photographed.

The photograph Detergent Cells (Fig. 4.23) consists of a pair of generic white packaging Styrofoam of perpendicular planes placed alongside each other and contrasting against the orange paper background. The objects are reinvented looking into the past, present and future. The depicted oscillates between abstraction and figuration evoking the monotonous, reductive, and severe Minimalist geometric sculptures of the 1960s and 70s, and being a celebratory, yet ironic, generic architectural model conceptualising the reduced geometry with which the iconic

Modern house is mostly remembered. The title hints at the cleansing process idealised by Le Corbusier and Adolph Loos (see Loos example in Fig. 4.24).

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Another contemporary art practice that acerbically targets Le Corbusier is the one of

American Tom Sachs. His work Nutsy’s Unité d’Habitation, of 2001, as implied by its title, deals with Le Corbusier’s residential block Unité d’Habitation Marseilles (1947-52)

(see Figs. 4.25 and 4.26-7 respectively). The main element of this installation is a crudely cut and assembled model, but accurate to 1:25 scale. It is the world’s largest model of this building. Sachs’ full exhibition installation placed the Unité model side-by side with another scale model sculpture of a McDonald’s fast-food stall, from where someone served burgers and fries at his exhibition’s opening nights. When asked about the rationale behind the juxtaposition, Sachs said that,

They [Le Corbusier and Ray Krok, the founder of McDonalds] are both examples of successful models blamed for dehumanising the world and replacing local culture with an international (soulless) style.220

In my photographic image Blueprint 1 (Fig. 4.28), a blueprint drawing is given an alternative representation through the photographic image of a model. It evokes the isolated, tall building syndrome which post-second war Modernism was known for. This mock of a model pays homage to the controversial and widely despised Harry Seidler’s post war International Style apartment building Blue’s Point Tower (Fig. 4.29), completed in 1961. It plays of the notion of a sculpture or a 3D object being photograph, but also of being a generic architectural notation. Blueprint 1 addresses the possibility of initial ideas and dreams for architectural projects coming from readymade forms and the complex array of challenges posed by the limitation of the already existing shapes.

I lived on a Seidler’s studio apartment through the 1990s and for most of those 10 to 12 years, I was not aware that I was living in one of his buildings. Without favouritism, I

220 Tom Sachs, quoted in Adam Mendelsohn, ‘Tom Sachs Exhibition Review – Bohen Foundation, New York’, Frieze, Issue 76, 2003, p. 119.

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declare that experienced one of the greatest pleasure in domestic living – the feeling of contentment with the space and atmosphere in Seidler’s kindly proportioned, light bathed, well ventilated, bachelor flat. At college, I started to research on Seidler’s architecture to find out what else had he done in Sydney. Blue’s Point, an 85-metre monolithic tower still stands on Sydney’s harbour foreshore, a miracle, considering it is ranked one of the ugliest buildings in Sydney. Concrete and bricks, BPT’s structural and cosmetic make-up, have traditionally been associated with harshness, an assumed lack of refinement or brutality that can threaten the lives of its inhabitants.

Perhaps the threatening scary giant is likely to be the widely available plastic products and its derivatives, as well as the smoothly finished but low-quality high and low rising buildings that subscribe to the ‘logic’ of economic efficiency vindicated by the market prophets, rather than being the futuristic architectural vision and a very distinct logic, which is alluded by the Styrofoam model in Blueprint 1.

The strategy of directing a scornful attack on Le Corbusier’s works, ideologies, and persona, I am tempted to read as a form of intellectual fashion. It increasingly resonates as mere propagandistic slogans belonging to a strain of a reactionary culture of oppositionalism. These slogans have been disseminating compelling readings of

Modern architecture that do no more than perpetuate the anti-Corbusian cannon without inciting a breach for thought, for the possibilities of looking into Le Corbusier’s ideologies without the obvious repudiation. Le Corbusier’s Purist period was abjured by this antagonistic form of authoritative criticism, which has resulted in the exaltation that his architectural practice of the period belonged to an inhumane and technocratic agenda. This situation has exerted substantial suppression of the dissemination of the utopian strength underlining all his theory and practice, the agenda within which I see the flourishing of fundamental principles informing his architectural ideology.

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The lack of focus on the ideology, with emphasis instead in the pragmatic aspects of

Le Corbusier’s practice has eventuated due to the Postmodern position that eschewed the credibility or capacity of utopian ideas of being capable of influencing the transformations in society that they saw as eminent. Jameson interpreted Le

Corbusier’s new spaces for living as,

Utopian anticipations, over and beyond the limits of our mode of production, introduces welcome historiographic complications which, in the present context, merely confirm the “failure” of the Modernist project in the here-and-now of the spaces of actually existing capitalism.221

Jameson interpreted Le Corbusier’s architecture in terms of its stylistic, innovative presence, choosing to concede a fail grade for his ideals of reform, which stemmed from the architect’s concern, while full of hope, for the pertinent social ills of his time.

Le Corbusier’s impulse towards constructing a utopian balanced society did not rely on the certainty of successful outcomes, but on a personal commitment to be of an active contribution to the improvement of human living. His movements were based on intention and faith in the possibilities of a better future free of the persisting monstrous anomalies such as war and the arms race.222 In his seminal book of 1923, Towards a

New Architecture, Le Corbusier explained:

Society is filled with a violent desire for something which it may obtain or may not. Everything lies in that: everything depends on the effort made and the attention paid to these alarming symptoms.223

221 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia’, in Albert Bierstad… et al., Utopia PostUtopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography, Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, p. 20. 222 La Direction, “Ce que nous avons fait, ce que nous ferons,” L’Esprit Nouveau no. 11/12, p. 1212. Quoted in Mary Caroline McLeod, ‘”Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change’, Art Journal, vol 43, n 2, Summer 1983, p. 139. 223 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, op. cit., pp. 288-9.

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The Functional Debate

Within the rationality attributed to Le Corbusier’s architecture and design there is also to be found a great dose of feeling and artistry, which is pertinent in his creative impulse, as declared by him:

…I have insisted on Order as being the key to every action, and Sensibility as the directing force of every impulse.224

The functionality that the architect understood to be a prerequisite for any building and object of use did not entirely dictate or were overpowering in his works. As he declared:

Building is to make things hold together; architecture, to move. …In this age: invention, courage, and creative genius particularly attached to things of building, in those things in which reason and poetry coexist, in which wisdom 225 and enterprise form an alliance.

Functionalism and application of new construction techniques were among the many variables he utilised in the process towards the final product. Functionalism was not the only aim of Modern architecture, at least for Le Corbusier, as it was conversely stated by Heinrich Klotz, who in a generalised manner defended Postmodern architecture contrasting it with its predecessor:

…‘Modern’ architecture is seen as equivalent to technically constructivist forms and Postmodern architecture as equivalent to historicizing forms. In the end,

224 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, op. cit., p. 307. Italicisation of impulse is mine. 225 Le Corbusier, in Lucien Hervé, Le Corbusier as Artist as Writer, trans. by Haakon Chevalien Editions Dugriffon, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1970, p. 82.

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what is decisive are the intentions and the successes of the different vocabularies.226

This Postmodern critique inflated a view of Le Corbusier’s architecture as one quite reductive in scope. It avoided recognition of the existence – or the possibility of existence – of any worthy artistic expression and the array of subjective factors connected with the Modern/Corbusian production. The myth of an exclusively utilitarian and pragmatic line of work without historical lineage permeated and dominated the general perception of Le Corbusier’s ‘austere’ period works. The thought that functionality fused with the aesthetic, producing ‘more than interesting’ aesthetic propositions of richer meanings beyond the obvious utilitarian, has often been neglected by Postmodern critics.

The alleged functionalistic weight in Le Corbusier’s architectural productions, pointed by the Postmodern critique, may have existed more in theory than in practice. Not that

Le Corbusier renounced architectural precepts of space and structure, but he was far from being an orthodox constructivist or a ‘die-hard’ functionalist. When someone said,

“Architecture is a suit which has to fit”, Le Corbusier replied,

No, architecture is more than a suit. The value of architecture does not depend on material and body size. Of course, both are elements in it: the technique and the spatial program. But the essence of architecture is the expression that can be achieved through it, the design. Architecture is a crystallization.227

I borrow formal and conceptual platforms such as the Corbusian exemplified throughout this thesis. It is my intention to incite reflective thinking about utilising

226 Heinrich Klotz. ‘Postmodern Architecture’, in Charles Jencks, The Post-Modern Reader, op. cit., p. 239. 227 Le Corbusier, extracts from an article by Heinz Rasch in the Stuttgarter Neus Tagblatt on November 29, 1926. In Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung – Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927, op. cit., p. 103.

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materials, energy, and space in conscious, efficiently, and creative ways. My art practice conflates standardisation with customisation, utility and aesthetics, design and architecture with fine arts, through a process in which the industrial standardised found object is re-made not only to fit the bodies of my friends recorded in the photographs, but to fit personal propositions for an alternative engagement with the material world and consequently with life at large.

Belonging to a creative and pragmatic tradition, which adopted a formally reductive vocabulary, Le Corbusier’s architecture had strong conceptual and aesthetic connections with both the Classicism of bygone eras and the Modernity he was experiencing in the inter wars era. His aesthetic decisions were not limited to engineering and construction. Despite visual and formal reduction, his buildings were rich on intermeshing complexities – historical, programmatic, aesthetic – perhaps not so obviously presented, but certainly deeply embedded in this architect’s research. In this subtle manner, Le Corbusier stretched the discourse on functionalism as he was able to generate a personal lyrical expression by making use of reductive forms and materials. His buildings referenced the regimented plan and lifestyle of medieval monastic cell units and industrial buildings, as well as the ideas expressed in Platonism

– search for abstraction, attainment of truth via universal vision, and the aim of attaining relationships of balance and perfection through a sublime connection of plastic elements. Le Corbusier saw the past as source, having admitted several times the importance of the past on his personal and professional formation:

I shall confess to you that I have had only one teacher: the past; only one 228 education: the study of the past. Reverence for the past is …natural to one 229 who is himself creative.

228 Le Corbusier exert from one of his lecturers in Buenos Aires, 1929, in Richard Weston, Modernism, op. cit., p. 107.

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Le Corbusier, argued Tim Benton, was clearly not a functionalist of the exclusive kind,230 as British writing from 1927 to 1939 had invariably described the architect. The

English critic John Gloag, who in 1934 declared,

The works of Monsieur Le Corbusier promoted an exaggerated respect for industrial architecture, so that some people were prepared to lavish extravagant admiration upon such utilitarian objects as gas-holders and factory chimneys.231

Gloag’s was an early voice of attack on the functionalism of Le Corbusier’s architecture. The abstinence of aimless ornament and the elimination of superfluous objects was considered by Gloag to be the poorest contribution certain architects and designers had offered to the Modern movement. At the time the engineering-machine aesthetic of tubular-steel furniture was emerging within the home environment of

Modern architecture, Gloag declared that this type of furniture should be confined to commercial or institutional spaces only, as they were not appropriate to the home:

The metal furniture of the Robot Modernist School… [which] expresses with lucidity and relentless logic its utter inhumanity. … Metal is cold and brutally hard … it gives no comfort to the eye.232

Postmodern architecture was seen by its supporters as much more challenging than the Modern predecessor, as Frederic Jameson declared,

229 Le Corbusier, ‘Architecture’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., p. 57. 230 Tim Benton, ‘The Myth of Function’, in Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, op. cit., p. 43. 231 John Gloag, Industrial Art Explained, George Allen and Unwin Limited, London, 1946. 1st ed. 1934, p. 165. 232 John Gloag, “Wood or Metal”, The Studio, vol.97, 1929, pp. 49-50. In Christopher Wilk, Thonet: 150 Years of Furniture, Barron’s, New York, 1980, p. 99.

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It stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs to expand our sensoria and our bodies to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions.233

Abundant use of reproductive technology with allegorical devices, such as reflective glass, escalators and elevators, were intentionally deployed by Postmodern architects in order to underscore older forms of seeing, sensing and moving. There was excitement about the new technology, new media, its new gadgets and the special effects they offered.

Postmodern architectural spaces were emerging as the locus of a massive public entertainment industry intrinsically connected with shopping and high consumption

(Fig. 4.30 and 4.32). These buildings, as it was explained by Jameson, “celebrate their insertion in the heterogenous fabric of commercial strip and the motel and fast-food landscape…”234

The maze-like environments of shopping malls – an ubiquitous space in the everyday lives of every urbanite – induce a kind of disoriented interaction between the human subject and the blast of mixed flashy signs, lights, reflective surfaces, and the diverse and abundant merchandise dispersed and displayed within a multi-level architectural space (Figs. 4.31 and 4.33). As Celeste Olalquiaga has noted:

Dislocated by this ongoing trompe l’oeil, the body seeks concreteness in the consumption of food and goods, saturating its senses to the maximum.235

She pointed at the pernicious side effects of Postmodernism:

233 Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in The Cultural Turn – Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998, op. cit., p. 11. 234 ibid., p. 30. 235 Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis – Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, Oxford, 1992, p. 2.

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An artificial fulfilment of space, obsessive repetition is at the core of the process of simulation in which Postmodern culture is engaged. It is not by chance that just when the body is struggling to survive referential loss, obsessive compulsion disease and its bodily fixation should emerge so dramatically.236

Postmodern cultural production with all its frills was supposed to offer a world of complexities, and because of that it contained the “humanism” that its defenders were certain could not be found within the limitations of Modernism.

Conclusion

How relevant are visual excess and chaotic charm in terms of creating new meaning for architecture and life today? How much more should we continue to contribute to the pumping-up of the local economies, enlarging its commercial fabric without deep concern for the serious damage it has been doing to the planet and its ecosystems including ourselves?

Does the extensive choice and variety of easily accessible media images and consumer products equate to richness of ideas and perspectives? Since hybridity, multiculturalism, revivalisms and ethical ‘choices’ have been engulfed by the world of advertising, fashion, and commercialism, how can today’s cultural discourse move beyond supporting the excessive development of commercial production directed almost exclusively to promote and provide economic growth?

236 ibid., p. 7. Olalquiaga explains that, “obsessive compulsion disease (OCD) is a “doubting disease”…. A nervous disorder, obsessive compulsion is a disconnection between body and mind, a situation of mutual distrust where all acts are suspects and self-perception unreliable. This uncertainty provokes an extreme worry that acts itself out in the form of rituals.” ibid.

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Excess consumption needs to be decentered from the economic and cultural discourse. The notion that symbolism and poetic content in art, architecture, and design is only obtainable through adopting obviously complex visual languages, historical mannerisms, or cheesy sentimentalist approaches sounds intellectually repressive and unimaginative. This belief has influenced people to insatiably desire quantities in detriment to discernment, resulting in mass tastelessness and emotional confusion. The importance that Le Corbusier placed on the development of an awareness of the self may appear reinstated in a subverted form, one of perpetual modulation and adaptability to local circumstances, through initiating and maintaining activities that are socially, humanly and ecologically sustainable today. This move is in opposition to the high consumption strain suggested in the populist legacy of the

Postmodern architectural urban landscape, whose engagement to a democracy of consumption is helping to generate compulsive habits and a perpetual state of material need. As claimed by Roland Kapferer, “Postmodernist theory is more an apology for wild capitalism than anything else.”237

It is not so intellectually sound to pigeonhole a particular figure of an incredibly diverse movement and period – in this instance Le Corbusier – as the one to blame for the failure of the ideals of equality, civil rights, humanitarianism, etc. entrenched within the misfortune of public housing development. Why should the ‘more machine, less human’ dictum continue to trigger an automatic association in people’s mind with Le

Corbusier’s works from his Purist phase? It is becoming clearer to me that there has been a colonization of thought in the establishment and dissemination of the association of Le Corbusier with the inhumane discourse. It calls now for a fresh revisiting of his written theories of the 1920s along with physically experiencing some of his habitats of the same period, so we may unveil some of his deepest concerns. At

237 Roland Kapferer, in the review of a conference titled ‘New Moderns?’, at The Showroom, London, Frieze – Contemporary Art and Culture, Issue 92, June/July/August 2005, p. 106.

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the same time, to dismiss the possibility of uncontrollable, unpredictable reinventions of ideas whether they approach or move away from their source of inspiration, or the creative role the original source embodied in influencing the opening up of new currents of thought ever more complex, is to evade a more encompassing evaluation of these source ideas. It is also to ignore the importance of the utopian paradigm subsumed in many examples of the architecture that tried to re-interpret preceding architectural currents. Inventive negotiation of life impositions of space, possessions, time and technology can shift the ingrained dystopic Postmodern condition to a belief in the world and its possibilities.

The role of art/architecture is not to save the world or to bring to light perfect life solutions, but to open up new platforms of vision that problematise clichés and unreflected general assumptions, so that we might regain consciousness of the primordial fact that we must remain inquisitive human beings. It may be in modelling on the utopian search for the essential vindicated by Modernists who had similar perspectives to Le Corbusier, that we are able to offer some resistance to the overarching logic of economic expansion. It is more a matter of regaining a deeper knowledge of the world through a bit of material abstinence. Perhaps more complex and richer cultural experiences will surface both as condition and as consequence of taking this immense challenge. We may be ready to struggle.

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CHAPTER FIVE – Indulging Nations, Bulimic Notions – The Economy of Waste

Introduction

Having discussed the Postmodern critique in relation to Le Corbusier’s architecture of the 1920s and having challenged its negative stake, I will now turn this dissertation to the economic paradigm of excess that shapes our lives today, to the market-drive, fashion-subservient, dysfunctional relationship that we have with the world of things. I use the concept of bulimia as a metaphor for the diseased state in which things and us are revolving around.

From the 1960’s on, an explosion of visual information and the marketing of youth have vastly increased our awareness of beauty and provided opportunities as never before to compare and contrast. Our sense of a discrepancy, of flawed physical being, has been sharpened.238 From this time hence, the human body has been viewed more overtly as a commodity, just like any other manufactured item. By the 1980’s, the world had entered the greedy capitalist revolution of the market era, where the marketplace was given the role of the ruler and the saviour of society. Nations continue to follow this tendency, imposing market mechanisms and principles on a global scale. Political and economic leaders perpetuate the same orthodox credo worldwide – the idea that all that can be made ought to be made and sold, for the sake of development, growth, and expansion. In the present period, there is an enormous emphasis on always consuming more than yesterday, and very little commitment to developing awareness through knowledge, cultivating intelligence and the faculties of understanding. In particular, there often seems to be very little awareness that would move us to question why we consume so much.

238 Peter Dormer, The Meanings of Modern Design Towards the Twenty-First Century, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 173.

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I noticed that contemporary relationships between consumables, individual consumers, and production in the market economy share similar dynamics of operation. Economic growth demands that we form a necessary engagement with the habit of throwing things ‘away’. This is also a key activity within the culture of ‘throwing up’, which

(making use of the emblematic term ‘bulimic’) has become a central concept in this investigation. Bulimia is used in this thesis as a metaphor for capitalist freedom and capitalism’s obsession with economic growth, a trait that has now been absorbed by almost the entire world.

Today there exists a ‘multi-stylisation’ of life along with supposedly ‘meaningful’ and constantly furtive doses of material-induced pleasure, which are accessible to an increasing number of people around the world. There is so much to consume from a great diversity of products that are becoming cheaper every day. Material happiness, or the illusion of it, is based on acquiring things as well as discarding and replacing things with newer ones in intermittent cycles.

In one of my photographic images, Feedback (Fig. 5.1), a vomiting bag rescued from a

Swiss Airline flight stands up for the shot. It has the word ‘waste’ in five languages imprinted in its crisp white paper body. This image is symbolic of the economy of waste in which not only our bodies are expected to engage with, but it also stands for the rationalised and sanctioned production of waste in our fluid, current times.

Our search for fulfilment has been reduced to a vicious system of idiotic and selfish intent. If we spend time and money buying goods we might be better off without,239 as suggested by Thomas Hine, why do we continue to do so? Why do we choose to act

239 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2002, p. xi.

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unwisely? Why are we so often renewing, replenishing and renovating our surroundings (including our physical image)? Where does this urgency come from?

Our desire to possess something has equalled our desire to dispose of something else.

The inflated state of manufacturing industries and their economic success is dependent on the irrational motion/emotion cycle of insatiability/boredom that seems to pertain to contemporary human beings.

Is it possible to think that we might not necessarily need to engage in this economic paradigm? Thought and reflection are the important tools that can help us regain a more humane awareness of our own resources, of other peoples, and of natural resources in general. A vision of the world as a valuable organism that transcends economic parameters is a notion that we are not often encouraged to explore by the market-driven forces of late capitalism.

Streamlining Disorder

240 Unceremoniously, a living being is sometimes called a ‘digestive tract’.

Consumerism as an implied system of control, creatively and continuously asserts new guises, which are imposing bizarre ways of living upon many populations. What I call a

‘bulimic lifestyle’ is one of the most ingrained forms of contemporary regulation (tied to the economic paradigm) which we have absorbed without much resistance as a concept or metaphor, as well as a disease, bulimia has a role in paving the way to a healthy market economy. While clinically bulimia is a serious problem – it depletes the body and mind of the sufferer – culturally it seems to have reached a standard of normality, albeit one of absurd goodness, as perversely, bulimia contributes to

240 Le Corbusier, ‘Architecture’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., pp. 46-47.

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economic health. The bulimic practice is not exclusive to a particular social class, education or nationality. The bulimic self, who struggles to conform to new body-image conventions, ignores the moral, societal and physical damage resulting from engagement in bulimic acts. Indulgence implies energy dispersion. It cycles around euphoria, depression, and vulnerability. At the same time, the ubiquitous ‘bulimic’ activity of purchasing (taking in) and discarding (throwing up) matter is preferably seen and accounted for as profitable, at least for businesses capitalising on the hitherto globally widespread compulsion to consume and discard.

As noted by Thomas Hine a reverse gear on the speed of consumption would suggest a ‘gutless’ society:

When people stop shopping, not only are the results economically ruinous, but the culture is signalling that it doubts its ability to succeed.241

If the majority of people in the world consumed only what they strictly needed to live, the world’s economy, as we know it, would quickly disintegrate. What is keeping the economy-driven world functioning (chaotically and sadistically), is our entrenchment in a lifetime of indulgence in excessive consumptive habits.

The notion of ‘bulimic’ practice was first suggested by Christine Frederick in her discussions of domestic economics. Frederick observed in 1929 that,

The Modern housewife is no longer a cook – she is a can-opener. She doesn’t prepare food, but dispenses it.242

241 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, op. cit., p. xvi, (from introduction). 242 Christine McGaffey Frederick, Selling Mrs. Consumer, New York, 1929, p.5, italics mine. In Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, op. cit., p. 171.

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She defended the instantaneous, effortless ‘making’ of ready-to-eat food and the almost non-inexistent cleaning up after eating, as one needed only to throw away the packaging. Frederick wanted to convey a kind of freedom allowed by the convenience of consuming packaged foods at home.

Around the same time as Frederick made her propositions, a new aesthetic and economic sensibility was emerging in Europe, and more vigorously so in America. It marked the rise of a Streamlined design style and system of production. Streamlined design seduced consumers until around the Second World War. Its priority was not technical innovation, but a look that suggested a consumer-oriented version of modernity (in particular, the dynamic, smooth look appropriated from aerodynamics).243

Modern design became another exchangeable commodity within the overarching system of the fashion industry. The influence of the machine aesthetic was shaping the visible contours of daily life, and the style easily infiltrated nearly all fields, as noted by Earnest Elmo Calkins:

Modern colour and design are styling not only products hitherto in the style class – silk, prints, fabrics, textiles, gowns, hats, shoes, and sport clothes – but social stationery, foods, motor cars, building materials, house furnishings, book 244 binding, interior decoration, furniture, and bric-a-brac.

Stuart Ewen notes that,

The smooth, lubricated look of streamlining …became the look of the future… it represented a dramatic break with the prior commitments of the machine aesthetic. …If the initial mission of Modernism was to strip the object world of its

243 A range of hybrid styles subsequently replaced the Streamlined style of the 1930s. They became iconic of the lifestyle culture of plenty in Post War United States, and later were exported to the rest of the capitalist world. 244 Earnest Elmo Calkins, ‘Beauty the New Business Tool”, The Atlantic Monthly 140, August 1927, p. 153, in Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, op. cit., p. 143.

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deceptions, to reveal and aestheticise its inner workings, streamlining was a 245 return to the cover-up.

The priority given to body image became more apparent in the highly charged curved surfaces of streamlined design. The public were sent strong messages by advertisers implying that the individual also needed to update her/ his self-image and performance with aesthetic innovations and enhancements, if she/he wanted to keep pace with the mode of the times (see Figs. 5.2-4).

Streamlined designs, akin to the domestic economy of Frederick’s, were created as desirable objects in order to stimulate the production cycle and to make existing functional objects appear obsolete. This process of elimination submerged the use value of the commodity into its appearance value. In other words, streamlined designers’ interests remained almost exclusively within the area of re-styling products and packaging in order to improve sales at a time of economic recession. The curvilinear, smooth surfaces appropriated from aerodynamic shapes characteristic of the streamlined aesthetic, borrow from the aesthetic of contemporary manufactory innovation. Rather than representing a genuine technical breakthrough, streamline design concentrated on the look above the technical function of the object.

Since the Streamlined era, planned obsolescence has continued to inform the agenda of the market driven philosophies of design. Built-in obsolescence has gradually assumed the status of a normal and inevitable ongoing state of affairs within the production and consumption cycle. Garbage therefore takes on a crucial role: it becomes a necessity. The gap or empty space that emerges when items are shifted to the trash, opens the way for an increase in design and production of a wider variety of supposedly new product models. Consumer demand is fuelled by prescriptive product

245 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, op. cit., p. 145.

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obsolescence. Consequently, a disastrous culture of over-consumption is today’s norm.

In 1933, Le Corbusier expressed his concern for an industrial productivity that was expanding beyond reason:

Contemporary society has, to its own misfortune, given itself up to endless manufacture of objects of varying degrees of stupidity, which only clog up our lives – senseless production of sterile consumer goods.246

Fifty years later, in a rather opposite line of thought to Le Corbusier’s, Ettore Sottsass, the Italian Postmodern designer declared: Obsolescence for me is just the sugar of life.247 Such statement aligns with the platform of ephemeral, novelty-planned redundancy inscribed within the wild decoration of most Postmodernist design of the

1980s. Le Corbusier’s concern with the perils of excessive production seem to be regarded as outmoded by most Postmodern designers, who strategically tapped into people’s growing fascination and demand for variety and rapid change in fashion.

Sottsass followed the rationale, which in the words of Raymond Loewy: …was the

248 shaping of everyday life with the marketplace in mind.

Private, market-driven entities are devoted to the kind of progress and development associated with the ‘active’ and the ‘dynamic’. In simple terms, production requires constant consumption. The shopper is not a passive spectator, but an active participant

246 Le Corbusier, speech to the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 1933, quoted in Petit, Le Corbusier lui- même, p. 181. In Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘A Vision of Utopia’, in Russell Walden, The Open Hand Essays on Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 225. 247 Ettore Sottsass, quoted in Peter Dormer, The Meanings of Modern Design Towards the Twenty-First Century, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 56. 248 Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design, 1979, p. 8, quoted in Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, op. cit., p. 51. Loewy was a key figure from the Streamlined era, having designed industrial products, which were acknowledged as epitomes of the movement’s aesthetics, as for example his teardrop-shaped pencil sharpener (Fig. 5.4).

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in the economic spectacle. A person’s free time is regularly used for performing the rituals of shopping – browsing, choosing, and buying goods. In this everyday habit, fulfilment and enjoyment exist as a fleeting event, obsolete even before it can be thoroughly experienced (just like the bulk of mass-produced goods). Justifications for excessive production and high levels of consumption have been made solely on the basis of economic growth and expansion of markets. Production is rarely understood as something that impacts on human welfare. The global economic paradigm sums up to a prophylactic ‘looking-good-of-figures’, which renders aspects of life not worthy of investing serious care (as if they exist independently of an aesthetic and marketable imperative as in the social, the psychological and the organic functioning of the self, society, and nature).

In the early days of industrial production, domestic utilitarian items were humble in number and in variation of style and materials. Nowadays, product shape is virtually unrestricted in terms of the possibilities of materials and form. Any shape, from blobs to fractals can be devised and produced in massive quantities. Having become a cheap source of raw material, plastics are being used more than ever before for the manufacture of an enormous variety of objects. Its low cost and malleable physical constitution have led to an enormous increase in the production and variety of contemporary design.

Mass production is capable of making things cheaply, but it can also inundate the world with products of dubious quality (Fig. 5.5). Market competition and the use of cheap raw materials and labour have led to a lowering in the quality of manufacturing. The proliferation of “Two Dollar” shops with their shelves stocked with a plethora of poorly manufactured goods is testament to the fact that there is not much concern with mass

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producing goods following the standards of good workmanship and humanitarian intentions advocated by Le Corbusier in his utopianism:

The techniques called to rescue, the choice of materials, the resolution of the program, etc.: the value of the finished effort will depend solely on the quality of 249 your intention. …The sentiment of dignity carries the day!

As pointed out by David Pye,

Mass-production is capable of making things both cheap and of very good quality, but mass-production does not essentially depend on machine tools or any other sort of tool. It depends upon the size of the market for your product and on how much you can afford to spend on organising manufacture.250

In the present context, the question of being good design has taken a less important role. The look of a designed item and its association with the latest trends are what really matters for a design to exist in the marketplace, as well as the product’s potential to achieve good sales backed up by market research. This emphasis on the value of aesthetics and on the priority of the surface is intrinsically related to the aggressive reality of an economy reliant on the marketability of new products – the bread and butter of our capitalist economy. Aesthetic sensibility of this kind ignores other possibilities of aesthetic pleasure through experiences beyond prescribed market- validated appreciation. As has been suggested by Virginia Postrel, delighting the senses is enough: “‘I like that’ rather than ‘that is good design’”251 In her book The

Substance of Style, Postrel, an American writer on the field of economics, laid open our

249 Le Corbusier, ‘Architecture’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., p. 66-67. 250 David Pye, The Nature of Design, Studio Vista, London, 1964, p. 60. 251 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2003, p. 10.

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present engagement with the aesthetic imperative. Utility is marginalised when the focus on the surface of the design is greater.

Utility exists today largely in a ‘bondage’ type of relationship with economy, a subservient role in a market driven by short-term aesthetic imperatives. “Aesthetics, whether people admit it or not, is why you buy something”252, says a shopper, assuring that we tend instinctively toward the looks of a thing when purchasing, rather than dwelling on long term imperatives of value in pleasure of functionality/utility of enduring objects.

The immense proliferation of commercial design that we are experiencing, is said to have a positive effect, helping us to build our own personalities through identifying with a greater diversity of things styles. Good design is not about the perfect thing anymore, but about helping a lot of different people build their own personal identities.253 The world is exploited by design and design is exploited by a profit-making obsessed world.

This situation has found its sense of normality due to the fact that our lives increasingly revolve around shopping and style. A designer’s creativity is directed to objects of convenience, economy, and appearance.

Aesthetic sensibility is mostly linked to shallow emotional reactions to a surface’s scenery; therefore the object to be designed is only expected to accommodate that superficial landscape. Some objects of use have reached a state of outstanding performance being as simple in form as they can be, i.e., a shovel, in which no refashioning will surpass its actual design. Anything else added to the reductive constitution of the universal shovel would be deemed unnecessary, useless. Design which, shows a “commitment to human service beyond the predatory grasp of

252 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, op. cit., p. 8. 253 Says an influential industrial designer (identity not revealed). ibid., p. 9.

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commerce”254, is surviving only as a subculture, or sub-economy. It does not receive over embracing support. The long lasting, the resilient, and the purposeful are seen by many as boring (Figs. 1.9, 1.35, and 1.37). These objects defy the cycle of dynamic, ultra-fast revolutions in style and fancy, a consumption driven by the market rules of capitalism.

Systems, whose structure predisposes self-discipline in relation to minimizing the purchasing and accumulation of commodities, are often associated with fascism and/or communism. Such structural systems are routinely regarded as the enemy, to be made invisible, avoided, discarded, since they pose a threat to the structure of capitalism.

According to Georges Bataille,

Capitalism in a sense is an unreserved surrender to things, heedless of consequences and seeing nothing beyond them.255

This view of capitalism as a system that lacks sensibility and equilibrium, thriving on the notion of insatiability, has also been expressed by Slavoj Zizek:

The elementary feature of capitalism consists of its inherent structural imbalance, its innermost antagonistic character: the constant crisis, the constant revolutionizing of its condition of existence. Capitalism has no ‘normal’, balanced state: its ‘normal’ state is the permanent production of excess; the only way for capitalism to survive is to expand. Capitalism is thus caught in a kind of a loop, a vicious circle, that was clearly designated already by Marx: producing more than any other socio-economic formation to satisfy human

254 Arthur J. Pulos, The American Design Adventure 1940-1975, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1988, p. vii of his book introduction. 255 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share – An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, transl. By Robert Hurley, Zone Books, New York, 1988, p. 136.

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needs, capitalism nonetheless also produces even more needs to be satisfied; 256 the greater the wealth, the greater the need to produce more wealth.

Today, while exposed to an excess of information and goods, compulsion to access and consume things is turning many people towards avoiding contact with a life of less materialistic concerns. Merchandise catalogues may be pinnacling the top ten favourite readings worldwide. It can be said that this ‘literature’ is one of the most democratic forms of education, and these catalogues are ubiquitous as well as free of charge.

Invention and imagination exist today in a slaved relationship with economic growth. As it was noted by Stuart Ewen,

…. Democratic choice, like grocery shopping, has become a question of which product is most attractively packed, which product is more imaginatively merchandised.257

George Bataille suggested that,

It is not so much the increased danger of catastrophe, but rather the absence of ideas, that abandon modern thought to impotence. … The general belief in indefinite progress made the entire planet and all time to come a domain that seemed at one’s disposal without restriction.258

Le Corbusier desired that people engaged in the process of developing their own potential for critical thinking, so they would not have to live their entire lives relying on the answers and dictates, mores and fashions coming from the “outside” world. In his words,

256 Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993, p. 209. 257 Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture, op. cit., p. 22. 258 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share – An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, op. cit., p. 147.

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Postrel sees the sensorial overload we are surrounding ourselves with voluntarily or involuntarily, as something “genuinely valuable”, something that is allowing us to feel aesthetic pleasure. The offering of universal aesthetic pleasures to the consumer public at large is what generates high success ratings in any segment of business venture, thus, Postrel exemplified it with the truism: beautiful movie stars and spectacular special effects are the makers of box-office success in no matter what part of the globe. She added that clever dialogue, which is cognitive and culture-bound, does not travel as well.260 She later in her book suggested that the joys of aesthetic pleasure do not gel with intellectual pursuits:

Aesthetics is the way we communicate through the senses. Hence, aesthetics differ from entertainment that requires cognitive engagement with narrative, word play, or complex, intellectual allusion.261

Bataille stated that,

The multitude has surrendered to the somnolence of production, living the mechanical existence – half-ludicrous, half-revolting – of things. But, conscious thought reaches the last degree of alertness in the same movement. On the one hand it pursues, in an extension of technical activity, the investigation that leads to an increasingly clear and distinct knowledge of things. In itself limits

259 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 31. 260 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, op. cit., p. 6. 261 ibid., p. 6.

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consciousness to objects; it does not lead to self-consciousness (it can know the subject only by taking it for an object, for a thing).262

Deeper questioning on the nature of enjoyment and the roots of desire are seldom called upon during our processes of consumption. Shopping and choosing what to buy are said to be the exercise of a person’s own taste and personality.

It is interesting to notice that even with so much product diversity, freedom to choose is a shared business between the consumer and the “fashion options, as opposed to mandates.”263 Options are offered by the also incredibly large, diverse, and democratic world of magazines and advertising campaigns in general. Their suggestive articles and ads are designed to help people to make better choices. These mediated choices are seen as fluid manifestations of personal taste, personal expression, personal imagination and personal initiative. The politicisation process of the public was (and still is) limited to the ‘political’ choices prescribed in the ads. The politicisation of value is determined not by the consumer, but ‘democratically’ outspoken by the ‘educators’.

Today, despite excessive and diverse manufacture of products including entertainment, we are experiencing a narrowing in the spectrum of an individual sense of discernment, of creativity, and of initiative. Pressure to belong to mainstream commercialism, at the same time generates the fear of being excluded for choosing any path that diverges from the lineage that the global media networks have approved or rated as successful choices.

262 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share – An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, op. cit., p. 134. 263 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, op. cit., p. 11.

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Cheap Thrills Time Kills

The post-industrial economy is sustained by consumer spending, which must be excessive.264

Economies of scale in manufacturing create an abundance of cheap products. In this democracy of cheaper goods, available to the masses, desire is heightened and money-spending becomes the palliative in the satisfaction of desire. Excessive shopping is a fast growing leisure activity. Shoppers are constantly seduced by the upsizing bargain ploy used by retailers: buy two and get the third one free, spend more than a certain amount and get a free gift from the store, and so forth. We learn to believe there are advantages in these deals, it makes us feel bonded to the business whose strategic bonuses offer us whimsical satisfaction and the desire to consume more. We thrive in being pampered with goods; we get bonus of instant gratification with the purchase of extra goods. (See Fig. 5.6). The gratification of the act of shopping is much more needed than the actual material purchase. We tend to ignore the difference between what we need and what we desire to be able to keep on choosing and acquiring new things.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, as department stores were becoming a popular feature in metropolitan centres, the activity of shopping has also absorbed the role of providing public entertainment. The shopping mall experience is more than just shopping. Shopping malls are distraction paradises. Places made for conspicuous consumerism, to wander through gazing and to be gazed at. These acclimatised built environs have architectural plans strategically designed to make us a little disoriented,

264 Mark C. Taylor, ‘Duty-Free Shopping’, in Christoph Grunenberg and Max Hollein, Shopping – A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Germany, 2002, p. 42.

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so that we spend more time there; some are large and luxurious, others super-large and run-down. They house not only shops, but the whole smorgasbord of mass entertainment: cinemas; game arcades; food halls; bars; night-clubs; massage parlours and plasma screens showing TV broadcast and advertisements. (See Figs. 5.7-9). For many it is a way of killing time. It is a time for getting a buzz out of becoming ‘lost’ in the sensorial overload of the usually shiny interior architecture, large and reflective glass windows, sales signage, bright coloured lights, loud loudspeakers, and artificial sweet smells.265 Sensorial overload is a strategy for switching one’s mind off, that is: by working the senses out to exhaustion-provoking states of confusion, indecision, and convolution. It is intended to distract the possibility of critical thought and therefore critical choices. In this state, our minds function in a hyperactive mode conditioned by the constant absorption of new shapes, colours, forms, sounds, and smells of the fluctuating environment. Change is normalcy, as is the hyperactivity of our minds.

Expectant of instant gratification, our existence is subject to the fast pace of cycles in the marketplace.

In this context, it is not surprising that people are choosing environments, products and services offered by transnational/multinational franchises, such as McDonalds and

Burger King, which offer a formulaic experience highly tuned to the marketing of consumer preference. Starbucks is another of these sans frontier commercial food and drink providers whose success has a lot to do with its “welcoming aroma and a distinctive look and feel” as well as its impression of offering “something special.”266

Making our lives ‘special’ through crudity is the function of a number of powerful franchises. Think for example of the street commercial dominance exerted by

Macdonald’s, Target, and Woolworths. They are the new despotic leaders to a

265 Simulating smells (Subway fast-food sandwich chain, for example) is a retail strategy for seducing the passer-by’s sensorial glands not to resist consumption. 266 Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style, op. cit., p. 8.

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populace, whose political standing is a democracy of conspicuous consumption. The well-established culture of advertising has deeply penetrated the core of our everyday existence by assigning an endless variety of ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ that keep shifting at the will of the multinational’s latest agenda. The attitude of the head marketeers is driven by the obsession with supply control and capital growth, which demands and at the same time depends on the continual expansion of consumptive habits.

Within the privacy of the home (and the office), the Internet has allowed the emergence of the “24-7” virtual shopping centre. In conjunction with television broadcast, the

Internet brings products, services, and entertainment to the domestic space through a flat screen/shopping window for maximum convenience. The home is becoming a place where the rate of consumption escalates most rapidly, as one does not need to leave the home to purchase goods and diversions. A credit card and a mobile phone at hand while facing the screen are the only requirements for shopping sprees. The illusion of having control and freedom of choice is heightened by the extension of the mall into private spaces.

The actual shopping mall or the electronic mall (e-bay, TV hotlines), are pleasure domes where individuals gain quick and regular escape from their emotional holes. For a significant number of the people, in Thomas Hine’s view, shopping is something that they do for fun, for recreation, or because they can’t think of an alternative way of spending their time.267 Hine added that,

People shop during their leisure time; a handful of people spend nearly all their vacations doing nothing else, and many more shop when they’re relaxing.268

267 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, op. cit., p. 189. 268 ibid., p. 202.

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In the mid 1920s, Le Corbusier expressed his concerns about this kind of escapism:

The cinema, the café, the theatre, the stadium, the club, the ‘five o’clock’, suppers, dance halls, domestic wireless – all are diversions which flourish in exact proportion to the amount of leisure permitted by daily work; ‘Good Lord, I hope we won’t be all by ourselves!’ is a common enough thought, expressed by people terrified at the prospect of having to fill time alone with their own thoughts for 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours.269 …First of all regularity, our daily bread. Then background noise to fill in the holes, the emptiness. Musical noise, coloured noise, embroidered or batiked noise. A low volume noise, a high volume noise, reading the newspapers (description of the action of others), cinemas, dance-halls, Pigall’s… in order to get away from oneself, never be alone. ‘If I were to come face to face with my soul (fearful thought)? What would I say to it? Watch out!’270

To consume in excess almost always signals that there is an increase in the lack of significance or value given to utility. Human desire is more related to variety than quality. The pursuit of quantity is believed to provide quick and frequent relief to insatiable desires. Instant gratification through excessive consumption can be said to have become perversely useful in the role of patching up psychological and spiritual

‘holes’.

Full?

It is said that unhappiness is universally felt in hunger, thirst, lack of sleep, pain, excess heat or cold, and sickness, but happiness is a concept and state difficult to define. To

Le Corbusier,

269 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., pp. 29-30. 270 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., pp. 30-1.

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… Since happiness is our objective, let us propose an alternative definition of happiness: happiness lies in the creative faculty, in the most elevated possible activity.271

The act of filling up one’s life with little ‘luxuries’ is assisting the economic program of capitalism, but this need-fulfilment cycle contributes very little to the ‘progress’ of human life experience and happiness. With time to kill and more conveniences, do we have a key to happiness? A life surrounded by enormous diversity of goods and non- stop entertainment, leads to an engagement in excessive consumerism amounting to merely an illusion of wellness. The quantitative scope of material possessions and of monetary transactions in the purchase of goods throughout a person’s life does not equate to a life engendered in wellbeing. In the end, these possessions are only stuff, things cluttering one’s life.

Le Corbusier envisioned a considerate and reticent humanity, which in time would want to distance from the amusement, fashion-driven, consumer-oriented society that we inhabit today. His preoccupations were mostly turned to the possibility of people getting to know their inner qualities, of getting in touch with them. At the same time, people would be recreating themselves, and applying these personal discoveries for the good of society. The domestic spaces created by Le Corbusier in the 1920’s, when radical changes in the dynamics of fashion and mass production were influencing people towards a greater consumerism, were conceptual platforms that privileged the experience of interior space individually and communally, in the flesh and in spirit. Le

Corbusier’s understanding of human character or the self as inherently connected to the abstract qualities of intelligence, creativity, honesty, and moral judgement, clash with today’s myopic view of ascribing character based exclusively on a prevailing

271 ibid., p. 73.

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notion of physical beauty, surface appearance, and the material value of possessions.

We tend to value what is visible, the obvious normative appearance over explorations in looking at the world beyond its surface presentation.

Full engagement in consumption does not often lead to a happy existence. At the same time, there is immense self-imposed pressure to be fully involved with mainstream commercial dictates, as people fear not being accepted for not complying with the over-consumerist lifestyle. Obsessive consumerism produces an untiring caprice in individuals who are desperately trying to keep up with prescribed images of “cool” and prestige. These people seek a status quo within which they are no less than anyone else and/or that allows them to be accepted into groups they see as fashionable or important. Caught in a status conscious trap, people will gravitate towards buying any fashionable item that strikes them. Joanne Finkelstein states that, in doing so, individuals lose a sense of personal purpose, proportion and direction. The relentless pursuit of material pleasure, facilitated by the wide availability of credit, goods and advertising is weakening our moral self-mastery and the capacity to judge value.272 The marketplace is now oversupplied with trinkets, and herds of cheep new original models as well as ‘designer’ fakes. By embracing the fake or imitation of the more expensive and exclusive fashionable item, which is in itself a packaged formula, our society and its individuals are expressing a lack of initiative to create something original, to be genuine and spontaneous.

Individuals are often considered to be suspicious, eccentric characters if they choose not to conform to support mega-stores and transglobal labels, or choose not to make

‘hard-core’ shopping a habit. ‘What is wrong with you? Why aren’t you buying from the cheapest and best advertised goods in the marketplace?’ Today if you act frugally,

272 Joanne Finkelstein, Slaves of Chic an A-Z of Consumer Pleasure, Minerva, Australia, 1994, p. 51.

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and/or have passionate concerns for our environment, you might even be labelled as a freak. Not to bow to a life that glorifies materialism accompanied with endless purchasing of private property is a very unusual path to take. No matter if natural or synthetic, everything exists today to be taken, consumed with an abhorrent barbarism, as if there is no tomorrow. Opportunism, gluttony, and selfishness rule rampant. Nature seems to have been given the role of a plastic sex-dummy – not expected to respond, servicing when needed, and being discarded when no longer arousing excitement.

Whoever regards the non-conformist with suspicion, does not understand that

‘violating’ the norms of consumption stems from ethical values as well as personal taste. Pierre Bourdier defined taste as …

… The propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of lifestyle, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic sub- spaces, furniture, clothing, language or body hexis.273

More in tune or reflective of our contemporary relationship with taste is that “a great many people enjoy having taste, but too few of them really enjoy the things they have taste about.”274 Perhaps because, as Thomas Hine said,

One looks to the people at the top, or more likely, to those who slightly outrank you, and seeks to have the same things they do, and sometimes more besides. Your taste in goods is thus determined entirely by people with power and wealth.275

273 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, transl. by Richard Nice, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1985, first edition 1979, p. 173. 274 Russel Lynes, The Tastemakers, The Universal Library, New York, 1972, first published in the U. S. in 1949, p. 338. He goes on saying that this embrace of taste is like “textbook taste, not personal taste, and while it may be safe, it is satisfying only to the unadventurous and the unimaginative.” ibid., p. 339. 275 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, op. cit., p. 157.

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Today, ‘personal taste’ or individuality is highly malleable, controlled by one’s perception of status-giving purchase, and by one’s impulse to consume the enormous variety of ephemeral styles and shallow ideals available. Fashion reflects our need to belong, and our fear of striking out within our referential world.

Aping the Celebrity

Each consumer is free to make his own economic decisions, to allocate his specific income as he chooses among goods and services. Implicit in this reasoning is the idea that consumer preference is independent of the economic behaviour of others, although it may be subject to social custom or usage. 276

People desire what other people have, in particular, we are influenced by celebrities who have their lives and lifestyles poured out into tabloid magazine pages. In Martin

Pawley’s opinion, public life today is the glimpse of the celebrity linked with the product.277 Choices are made under the influence of society’s sanctioned displays of habits that obviously try to inculcate and perpetuate mediocre standards of social conformity (Fig. 5.10). Decadent options are offered to a public living in an era where cultural education and knowledge are undergoing serious decline. As an example, lets pay attention to the declaration given by American pop star Jessica Simpson (Fig.

5.12):

When my ex-‘boyf’ took his life away, bulimia became my best friend.278

276 Carolyn Shaw Bell, Consumer Choice in the American Economy, Random House, Inc., New York, 1967, pp. 159-160. 277 Martin Pawley, The Private Future – Causes and Consequences of Community Colapse in the West, Thames and Hudson, London, 1973, p. 8. 278 Jessica Simpson appeared on the image cover and the words were headlines of Girlfriend Magazine, April-May 2004. Jessica Simpson believes that indulging her guts with enormous amounts of food and vomit before digestion starts gives her control of her body weight as well as it sooths her pain.

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Through the headlines of Girlfriend magazine, Simpson sold the idea to people, especially to teenage girls who are Girlfriend’s major readership that it was ok to be

‘sick’, to throw up in order to soothe the pain from loosing a loved one. Simpson’s mainstream antics positioned bulimia at a level of normalcy, a celebrity-made-accepted activity. Bulimia in this case, has a similar role to what prescription drugs like Prozac have within the context of contemporary palliatives that can effectively make one’s life better. Bulimia and starvation are eating disorders that perpetuate ill health and emotional distress, but in hindsight they have become successful commercial enterprises.

The universal shape of anorexic bodies, emptied out of nutrients, surviving by the disturbing strengthening of a cacophony of nervous impulses, is the predominant ideal of beauty in the early twenty-first century (see Fig. 5.11). This standard of beauty – emaciated bodies – does not fit with an ideal standard of physical or mental health, but at the same time, it is successful in the advertising of a wide range of products.

Anorexia is a nervous illness where the sufferer is perpetually focused on a narrow field. This one-dimensional obsession with slimming-down does not allow the mind to see broader realities or exercise other alternative perceptions – it corsets the thinking.

It is a condition that stops the person from opening up to challenges other than the endless saga of slimming the body. The mind of the anorexic is limited to the merciless criticism of one’s own body, which is barely able to sustain its carcass with nervous energy, so that the self can remain uncritically functioning in a fat world, not worthy of debating.279

279 “Obsessive compulsion paralyses people to the point where most of their time is spent mechanically repeating their fixation – in other words, trying to exorcise the emptiness left by doubt with the multiplication of its figure.” Quote by Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis – Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, op. cit., p. 7.

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Advertising and a market-oriented culture appropriate everything from the most mundane to the most bizarre fact, behaviour, or thing, creating a narrative drama around them with the aim of generating sales and consequently financial profit for those industries’ moguls. Fashion is what makes merchandise move. Advertising appropriates innovative traits, looks, and activities and makes them look ordinary, so that the majority feel they can be “different” in normalcy and surely accepted. The market homogenises every category of things, although we tend to believe there is a concern with promoting multiculturalism and diversification of experience. When there is focus on differences – ethnic, political, aesthetic, etc. – it is for the sake of mass entertainment and corporation profit, devoid of intentions that are more profound.

Changes in fashion also determine a change of the ‘individuality’ of the consumer.

While a business sells a stable and identifiable image attached to particular products and the selling of goods provides a stable and identifiable image for the business, the consumer is expected to intermittently move from one image today to a new one tomorrow.

Roughly since the first years of this millennium, marketing has been associating glamour and ‘stylish’ or hip lifestyle with a minimalist look. In a time now beyond

Postmodernism, we may see the re-emergence of the minimal looks of early Modern architecture and design as a retro stylistic reshuffle. This resurgence is made overt in the guise of the modish ‘international chic’, bastardised Bauhaus style boutique apartments embodying a surfeit of glass and white surfaces. Belgium designer Maarten van Severen stated in 2000,

… Minimalism today is less an art of thinking and more an art of selling things. It is very fashionable to be a minimalist.280

280 Maarten van Severen, stated in Form, April 2000, quoted in Abitare, n. 428, 2003, p. 219.

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Home units as such are selling at outrageous prices, but the quality of materials being used in the construction of many of these buildings is very low: plasterboard walls, imitation timber, synthetic flooring, particle board cabinets, etc., which means that they are not made to last. These buildings are sprouting in every corner of the world and are desired by everyone wants to have “style”. In a perverted way, the new image for the home – of an elegant spareness – pays homage to the Modern dictum “less is more”.

The aesthetic simplification of designs happening in the world today, as for example with the Neo Modernism of boutique apartments and the Retro Futurism of computer design aesthetics, are both market driven. The marketplace is unashamedly tuned to the incessant production of the updated and upgraded, followed by insistent research and investment into sophisticated ways to persuade and recruit an always-growing number of avid consumers. Nowadays we shop and buy the idea of simplicity; it is attached to the products listed by the trendsetters in the pages of magazines selling the ‘simple living’ lifestyle. If you desire the simple life they advertise you must be willing to spend lots of money on goods that suggest that way of living.

Simplicity for Le Corbusier did not imply a world made simplistic. Neither mediocre or the contemporary “cool” minimal design fashion. The content of his simplicity was associated with an intense psychological experience akin to mysticism as well as the mundane. This simplicity without pretentiousness was proposed through his habitats and the type of subdued living engendered by them. It was an attempt at inciting contemplative moods at an individual level that could influence the larger collective whole to a massive slow-down. It was a simplicity born out of an ambition for a pure and uncomplicated life, that created an aesthetic, not a simplicity born out of ambition for an aesthetic. A similar notion of simply being without the pretence of labels and obsession with fashion can be found in some of my photographic images (see Figs.

1.6, 1.27, and 1.35)

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The profusion of media images promoting the ‘look’ of the moment, the fashionable definition of the ‘right’ measures and weight for our bodies, what to wear, how and when to wear, what to eat and how much to eat, are making us extremely self- conscious about our shell. Our goal is to reach a timely conventional appearance in order to be accepted by the majority.

Saturation, the appearance and sensation of being bloated due to excessive quantities, leads to the bulimic act. Self-indulged saturation is likely to take place when one attempts to fill up psychological gaps caused by anxiety, which may well have arisen from experiencing the chaotic and coercive nature of a world where to consume hard and to ‘belong’ in consumptive habits is the norm. Filling-up the gap in one’s life with quantities of products in desperate cycles of legitimised escapism soothes the feeling of emptiness inside oneself, as suggested by the celebrity Jessica Simpson. The problematic of the habit is that the void one has is never kept filled for a long period: through acts of self-sabotage, the ‘confident’ bulimic consumer makes sure her/his bridged gaps are perpetually going back to the stage of emptiness, which ‘demands’ endless cycles of saturation. Slavoj Zizek pointed out that Michel Foucault in his last works,

Showed how the ancient Master embodied the ethics of self-mastery and ‘just measure’: the entire pre-capitalist ethics aimed to prevent the excess proper to the human libidinal economy from exploding. With capitalism, however, this function of the Master becomes suspended, and the vicious circle of the 281 superego spins freely.

281 Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, op. cit., p. 210.

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The idea of freedom suggested to people through outside influence like the media, was detected by Le Corbusier when describing how a commoner living in Paris full of distractions felt free:

…He is delighted with everything; he feels free, they tell him so all the time in his newspapers, and proclaim it in all the Revues. It is a state of life. It is a philosophy. All’s well, I’m free!282

Le Corbusier saw this kind of freedom, as a myth. The living conditions of an average

Parisian was that of utter discomfort. Most houses had no electricity, were dark and damp, with no hot water, no bathroom, and when they had a kitchen it was very sketchy.

How much longer will we allow our passions to be overlaid or erased by the effect of massive advertising and the published stories of celebrities? These influences have no basis in the improvement of the quality of human life. Instead they are crippling the possibilities for individuals to produce their own stories, stories that would reflect not only the society they live in, but also their true sense of selfhood. The regaining of lifestyles that are more conscious may be possible if we resist the temptation to follow blindly, and place less importance on self-indulgence through consumption.

Having talked about contemporary society’s excessive production and consumption habits and what has influenced those damaging behaviours, in the next chapter I will extend this research by focusing on the ubiquity of waste.

282 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, op. cit., p. 225.

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CHAPTER SIX – Shadowaste

Introduction

Landfills are being filled up very quickly everywhere, while the savage extraction of natural resources to produce more rubbish is contributing to environmental disasters.

This final chapter discusses the ridiculous amount of waste being generated in the world today due to excessive production and consumption. The speed of technological advancement together with the similarly rapid cycles of fashion, means that by the time products get to the consumer’s hand they are already obsolete or superseded by the next model/generation.

It is from within this zone of waste production and mismanagement that my practice has taken shape. I transform waste placing it into another life cycle to question its fate and meaning within our present discourse. The “dead” is resurrected and propelled towards the future through the suggestion of other livelihood (Figs. 1.10, 1.12-3, and

1.15).

Wastefield

Product obsolescence generates an overwhelming amount of discarded matter, most of it still in good shape. The age of objects, as pointed by Celeste Olalquiaga,

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…Is not measured by the passing of time, but rather by the speed of production. Often made for a very short life span, these artefacts die without age marks, still shining new.283 Computer hardware is an obvious example of this death-by-abandonment that we witness in relation to products made obsolete. The turnover of models and brands for image monitors, hard drives, ports, cables, and the specially designed packaging housing them, is cataclysmic. For convenience, the rejected skeletons are disposed of conveniently anywhere. The suburban curbside of any large city today has become a receptacle for regular pockets of trash consisting of old techno-ghosts. They evoke a kind of sad beauty – in the recent past they were perhaps the most powerful, the hippest, and the latest of all versions or models, as it was vehemently advertised (Figs.

1.19 and 4.22). These apparatus made redundant are bodies still able to perform (as seen in my works), to serve, and in many cases have not lived enough to age in a literal and pragmatic way, however in relation to the speed of industrial production they are old, and due to that society has sentenced them to ‘death’. Many of the millions of new objects being made available everywhere are built for a short lifespan, and their redundancy keeps landfills overflowed throughout the world. The likelihood of more ecological disasters is eminent.

Attributed to present ‘economic development’ are intensified urbanization, alienation of the individual and economic distress. There is also environmental deterioration as a by- product of extremely high rates of production of goods. Industry gets rid of goods – the populace consumes, removing the production from stones. As David Pye points out,

The primary concern of all manufacturers is not with making things but with getting rid of them afterwards.284

283 Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis – Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, op. cit., p. 67. Italics mine. 284 David Pye, The Nature of Design, op. cit., p. 61.

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Things get disposed by consumers and make way for the next purchases. Today as

“confident consumers” – a term coined by several economists worldwide – we steadily continue to boost economic growth without taking into account the costs of this over- production and over-consumption. We continue to consume and throw away with increasing frequency.

There is a general lack of interest in the consequences of this materialistic and egocentric behaviour. The lack of a sense of responsibility for consumer habits highlights society’s entrenchment with individualism to the detriment of channeling energy and resources towards more communicative and collaborative associations among human beings. The expansion in commercial relations is not necessarily leading people to expand the realm of their interpersonal relationships. Within the fear- bound and controlling space of our present life, deep connections and trust between people is diminishing, so are our exchanges involving affection, mutual respect, and communitarian bonds (Figs. 1.26 and 1.29).

The more the privatised lifestyle in society is favoured, the more the sharing and communication about needs and surplus of goods becomes an unimportant aspect of everyday life. Privatization, to the detriment of cooperation, results in an enormous amount of products not being used to their full potential before their inevitable arrival at the status of aesthetic or technological obsolescence. The more intensely, impulsively, and selfishly we consume, the more wasteful we become. Far too much energy and material resources are wasted due to our ‘inefficient’ use of these items turned to trash prematurely. According to a national survey carried out by the Australia Institute,

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Australian households threw out $2.9 billion of fresh food, $630 million of uneaten take- aways, and millions of dollars of leftovers, drinks and frozen food in 2003285.

As noted by Hine,

We participate in a culture of wastefulness that may shadow the lives of generations yet to come. Yet, the local Wal-Mart is a wonder of the world. Never before have so many goods come together from so many places at such low cost. … We go to Wal-Mart to acquire things that prove our own power. It is a place where people really do get to choose.286

Positive social intercourse is said to be provided by these corporations. Contemporary writers like Hine and Prostel defend an idea of social and political betterment that is mostly reliant on our loyalty to consumerism. Gaining greater monetary power as our ultimate life-goal is also a common commandment in popular culture – Get rich or die trying – what is the point in living if you cannot have it all…287

Possibilities of change are dependable on the shifting of social, aesthetics and environmental priorities, which in their turn requires radical reformulation of the political, social, and economic processes. For instance, the circulation of goods and services through non-monetary exchanges among communities is not an ‘in’ or hip practice. Instead, the practice of individually purchasing cheap thrills in hedonistic style has become the lingua franca of our times. The will to develop caring attitudes founded in humanitarianism instead of egotistical and superficial attitudes, may be the radical minimal lifestyle of the future. It is a challenge that requires a new and more sophisticated awareness regarding the deeper roots of the problems. A shift to a way

285 Clive Hamilton, Richard Denniss, and David Baker, ‘Wasteful Consumption in Australia’, The Australia Institute, Discussion Paper Number 77, March 2005, p. 18. 286 Thomas Hine, I Want That! How we all Became Shoppers, op. cit., p. xi, and 19. 287 Title of a feature film released in 2006 with American hip-hop artist 50 Cent as the main character.

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of living where honesty, depth, and a concern for the life and longevity of all things, may perhaps play a substantial role in countering the rapidity of change, superficial attraction, and the fickleness of our present relationships.

In the light of a present tendency that imposes market mechanisms and principles on a global all pervasive and flourishing scale, intuitively and playfully through my art practice, I proposed alternative ways of participating and exchanging within the larger economic structure, without resorting to a mindless, exclusively body and status-driven existence (see Chapter One for examples of my work).

Digestive tract bypass

Body image and the image allowed by fashionable items are being obsessively incorporated in everyday life. Fashion and planned obsolescence continue to operate in our society in increasingly shorter time spans regardless of the growing scarcity of natural resources that the planet is experiencing. Today, interest is concentrated on the visual form and the massive market success that is expected from the sequences of styles on vogue and the ones still to come – their content is not relevant at all, nor the length of time that they will hold popularity. Forms are produced and consumed without knowledge and understanding of historical background, the lineage that informs the current products. There is an evident emergence of bad taste in products even in relation to the regurgitation of minimal designs, whose precursors were about the good taste in eliminating crudity by promoting the development of knowledge.

The search for things is in itself an activity. In order to acquire contemporary possessions, most human beings seem to be committed to a life frequently dedicated

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to the act of looking for things. This commitment has no other aim than the activity of achieving material wealth and higher self-image status. The practice leads to states of endless and ungraspable need, where a “necessary” condition is never satisfied, perhaps due to the limitless nature ascribed to the notion of need. The things we consume are the things that are currently being propagandised; the intimacy, the profound dynamics of discovery and exploration of the relationship between humans and the world of things tends to recede ever more to the background. Circulation of goods and capital through production, sales and shopping, implies perpetual movement.

Le Corbusier’s desire for peace and quiet contrasts with the need for uninterrupted sound and visual emissions, and the hyperactive lifestyle of today. For a growing number of human beings, silence reads as stasis and boredom, something they must combat. In his words:

Let me recall to your mind that man of our seated at his table: he has just gotten up and walked through all his rooms. He listens to the language spoken by the objects around him, his companions, the witnesses to his aspirations. Arranged in his home like a beautiful thought, they speak to him as he moves 288 about.

That purposeful and close relationship between humanity and things advocated by Le

Corbusier is for most a dated condition, economically unviable, however it can be recovered as a humble, but nonetheless sovereign activism, one that partakes with sustainability of the planet.

288 Le Corbusier, ‘Architecture’, Le Corbusier Talks with Students from the Schools of Architecture, op. cit., p. 54.

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By favouring the slow act of contemplation and with it the development of awareness about each object surrounding us without succumbing to the screaming titillations promoting material surfeit, Le Corbusier’s austerity sat in contrast to the speed and volatility of capitalist frantic production and consumptive habits. While technology advanced and the rhythm of consumption beat faster, his ways were posing resistance to them.

The liberal-democratic “new world order”, shaping life today is continually exercising pressure on whatever is outside the constraints of capitalism, to desire its own inclusion into the picturesque space of consumerist identity. Beyond the immediate

‘advantage’ of allowing us to have more things and more variety, the wide availability of goods at cheap prices, if we look from a more scrutinizing perspective, we may notice that this excess in commodification is entrapping us more and more in a ‘comfortable’ life embedded in conveniences. Convenience in this instance is akin to effortless journeys, not only physically, but mentally, towards the satiation of one’s never-ending cravings boosted by the excess of information and advertising to which we are constantly exposed. Convenience associates more closely with the quick, unburdened purchase of things or with the solution of problems magically, by the push of buttons.

While engaging compulsively with the process of consumption, people mimic the chaotic velocity of the production of goods executed by industry. We pay for convenience that saves us time for more conveniences.

Most people living in metropolitan centres regardless of class have made the ephemeral pleasures resulting from mindless consumption a vital component of their daily lives. Convenience is a lethargic notion of comfort and generally does not promise progress for the mind and soul. Surrender to a life of convenience leads to a forgetting or discrediting of the positive aspects of focussing effort toward achieving something,

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of getting somewhere via a longer journey, or of dealing with the unexpected, unpredictable, and the challenging (Fig. 6.1). The increase of convenience in society and people’s increasing desirability of having more of it, are signalling a reduction in the scope of lived experience, of contact, of self-discovery. These shifts in behaviour are narrowing the spectrum of self-initiative, and of creativity in relation to personal and communal development. We forget how to find our own system by channelling our free time into play, which may incur unexpectedly amazing discoveries289. Instead, we are opting for the calculated path based on the market logistic of success.

Within the set of future projections of the utopian social democracy envisioned by Le

Corbusier, our present insatiable taste for consuming the new was not predicted. He optimistically believed in a future where we would consume sensibly. He noted:

…Today we seem to realise that however rich we are, we cannot eat a whole chicken each. The chicken fixes the key to the human scale. The whole oxen that were once roasted at ancestral banquets now fill no more than the centre of a dinner-plate: the beef steak. We are tending to rediscover the human scale; and in the world of appearance and consumption, of thought and of deed, of joy in the heart and gesture in the hands, to rediscover the human scale is to approach wisdom.290

Instead of becoming the envisioned learned gourmet - the soothed, balanced, vigorous souls, products of harmonious environments enabled by mass production, as he aspired - we ended up as gourmand, the voracious opposite gourmet double, who is continuously seduced by whatever appeals despite having an already overloaded gut.

There has been a growing appetite for quantities in our lives.

289 Discoveries are inventions, unexpected results that may surface through playing. 290 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, op. cit., p. 42.

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It is necessary that a shift in the opposite direction occur as soon as possible.

Wellbeing has to become a quest of social organization rather than industrial production. Paul Greenhalgh noted that the technological paradigm is now a far more ambivalent one when compared to the climate of fascination that the new machines and methods of production had provoked in the first decades of the twentieth century:

The potential which computerisation has given us for shorter, individualised runs of objects would have made Modernists less confident in the regulating harmony of the machine and would perhaps have provoked a different approach to mass-production techniques. …And ecology would surely feature in a way that it did not in the 1920s.291

We must start to see ourselves as capable of understanding that we are organic bodies with souls in need of balanced doses of nourishment through intellectual inquiry and maturity, as well as through genuine social exchanges. In this light, we may start to question the degree of control that we have been submitted to while being over stimulated by commodity channels, and how much touch with the reality of being human we have forgotten.

We need moral commitment to acknowledge and to recover from the obvious damages

– mental, physical, environmental – caused by incongruous and inhumane economic imperatives, and to engage with more positive, less greedy proposals, which are concerned with the improvement of life at large, in caring for all sorts of living systems in humanitarian ways instead of in egotistical and superficial ones (see Figs. 1.11 and

1.29). Activities and states of mind that perpetrate humane contents, such as connections of mutual aid and exchange, remain outside the realm of capital exploitation and excessive life commodification. The achievement of these ways of thinking and being may be considered to be linked with a ‘slow’ form of development if

291 Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, op. cit., p. 23.

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compared with the speedy nature of the predominant forms of capitalist exchanges.

The private, material profit-driven entities are devoted to a kind of progress and development, which is associated with the ‘active’ and the ‘dynamic’. In this rationale, fulfilment, be that material or psychological, may only exist as a fleeting event, obsolete even before it can be truly felt. As individuals, we are not reflecting on the impact of our actions. There is a lack of interest connected with a lack of responsibility in relation to the consequences of this materialistic bound, egocentric behaviour, which dominates today the different levels of our existence – health, economy, and ecology.

Life has become metaphorically an endless roller coaster and it seems that we are struggling to adapt to dynamic cycles of fast and sinuous revolutions in order to survive. Our contemporary speed and its consequential characteristics impose on us another corporeal/intellectual gravity. Conforming to or combating this new gravity is one of our major choices (Figs. 1.1 and 1.31).

Conclusion

Through my practice, I intend to trigger insights by implications, suggesting rather than offering the assembled package, or a transparent solution, which in the other hand seems to be common place in a world where problem solving and decision making is relying more and more from sources outside oneself. I seek to bring to life the possible transformative power of the utopian spirit through my experiments in an attempt to recover naïve forms of consciousness. German philosopher Herbert Marcuse pointed out that,

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The work process can become subject to the free play of the mind, of imagination, the free play with pleasurable possibilities of things and nature.292

This alternative process works in opposition to a space where rational society has imposed its rigid controls. Knowing that I am living in an increasingly and openly corrupt world, I long to find examples of a lost innocence, of a gifted lack of certainty on the “success” of end results – traits that are the trade marks of experimental works.

This attempt at recovering innocence I see as a move towards liberation from the muffled restraints imposed by the material-plenty of our globalised societal experience.

Herbert Marcuse also pointed that,

Art can be called revolutionary in several senses. …A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).293

It is my intention to recuperate the structure and tendencies of the utopian thought caring less for their actual manifestation in real terms and more for the expression of imagined possibilities, at a time when Utopia is mostly seen as ineffective, naïve and passé, a ‘thing of the past’.

As pointed by Zigmunt Bauman,

292Hebert Marcuse, ‘The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity’, Praxis 5, n. 1-2 (Zagreb, 1969), p. 23, quoted in Joan Alway, Critical Theory and Political Possibilities - Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Hokheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, Greenwood Press, Connecticut and London, 1995, p. 85. 293 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Macmillan, London, 1979, p. x, (original German publication, 1977). In Liz Wells, (ed.), The Photography Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2003, p. 82-3.

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Utopia is an image of a future and better world, which is not at all inevitable so much as it is desirable; which is critical of that which exists, and in this sense is beyond practical realization…294

Agreeably, I see utopia as a culture, in which idealists seek to show that alternative ways exist as possibilities, as thought provoking. Rather than having a concrete plan to change the world, utopians – myself included – seek to generate insight. Propositions are put forth here as symbolic options rather than compulsory methods, as interesting inquisitions rather than correctives. Sadly, corporations also create commercial utopias aimed at consumers and turning their life into a race for material acquisitions and a giant bill that they cannot afford.

Le Corbusier warned and advised us about the possibility of being free from a solely economic existence, as he put:

One wonders if there can be any limit to the extraordinary menus now served up daily on the world’s table. There is such a limit. The solar day of 24 hours provide a saturation point. When people are satiated and no longer want to consume or to swallow, they cease to buy and then comes an economic crisis. What are we to do about it? We must produce less. Let the machine do the work. Let it liberate the individual and cease to make a slave of him. Let there be a shorter day’s work; six hours, perhaps five. Let us dominate the machine instead of letting it crush us.295

Most commonly today, value is consumed as pleasure via paid possession. Many people seem to feel better or surer of they existence when they perform the act of purchasing things. Things are consuming more space than people are. I subscribe to

Wolfgang Sachs opinion:

294 Zigmunt Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia, Allen and Unwin, London, 1976, p. 17. In Peter Beilharz, Zygmunt Bauman Dialectic of Modernity, Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 2000, p.59. 295 Le Corbusier, extracted from his archives at Fondation Le Corbusier, FLC A2-19-87 (1933-1937 period), p. 3.

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Having too many things makes time for non-material pleasure shrink; having much contradicts living well. The art of living demands a limited but skilful use of material objects, suggesting a subterranean relationship between pleasure and austerity. Consciously cultivating a lack of interest in excessive consumption is a very future-oriented attitude, for oneself and also for the world.296

Fed of the uncertainties of the present, I suggest that we can live differently by focusing our attention to rethinking excess consumption. Quality moments in life can be experienced through performing activities outside formal economy, such as developing strong friendships and vocational personal pursuits, as well as through spending time and energy re-inventing the left overs of an increasingly dated consumerism. These activities are socially and ecologically sustainable, inductive of a human perception of well being which opposes the popular assumption that high consumption is the main link to satisfaction.

I hope that my work is able to inspire people to turn into restoring their instinctual power, their bodily and intellectual sensibilities for the sake of reversing the destructive course of life that we are experiencing in the present. Complacency to an ultra- commodified life committed to excessive and thoughtless material acquisition is a well- absorbed clichéd model of human conformity. It distances people from understanding basic notions to do with life in its very primacy of physical and emotional functioning.

To me an ecologically efficient, closed-loop economy, is a sustainable and ethical form of operating. There are many possibilities, much that can be re-fashioned, re- elaborated within the realm of left over excess of production and consumption.

296 Wolfgang Sachs, ‘Being and Buying’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 17, n. 4, Fall 2000, p. 26. Sachs is a contemporary German researcher and author of many books on sustainable development.

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Williams, R., The Politics of Modernism – Against the New Conformists, ed. By Tony

Pinkney, Verso, London and New York, 1989.

Wogenscky, André and Besset, Maurice, Le Corbusier Carnets Vol 1, 1914-1948,

Herscher/Dessain et Tolra, Paris, 1981.

Wolfe, Tom, From Bauhaus to our House, Jonathan Cape Ltd, London, 1982.

Woodham, Jonatham M., Twentieth-Century Ornament, Rizzoli, New York, 1990.

Woodham, Jonatham M., Twentieth-Century Design, Oxford University Press, UK,

1997.

Zaknic, Ivan, Le Corbusier – The Final Testament of Père Corbu a Translation and

Interpretation of Mise au point, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997.

Zizek, Slavoj, Tarrying with the Negative, Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology,

Duke University Press, Durham, 1993.

Zygas, Kestutis P., Form Follows Form – Source Imagery of Constructivist

Architecture 1917-1925, UMI Research Press, Michigan, 1981.

203

Journals

Badovici, Jean and Geoges, André, ‘Constatations’, L’Architecture Vivante, Éditions

Albert Morancé, Paris, Printemps et Été, 1924, pp. 7-13.

Benton, Charlotte, ‘Le Corbusier: Furniture and the Interior’, Journal of Design History n. 2-3, vol. 3, 1990, pp.103-124.

Benton, Tim, ‘Dreams of Mchines: Futurism and l’Esprit Nouveau’, Journal of Design

History n. 1, vol. 3, 1990, pp.19-34.

Buck, Louisa, ‘Nappy Change for Art’, Art Newspaper, v. 12, n. 112, March 2001, p.

44.

Colless, Edward, ‘Callum Morton: Interior World’, Australian Art Collector no. 25, 2003, pp. 47-9.

Colomina, Beatriz, ‘The Media House’, Assemblage, n. 27, August 1995, pp. 55-66.

Deshairs, Léon, ‘Vers le Métallique – une Étape vers le Meuble Métallique?’, Art et

Décoration Revue Mensuelle d’Art Moderne 1897-1939 les Années “Mémoire” 1ère

Époque’, La Collection “Un Siècle d’Histoire”, Guillemette Éditions Charles Massin,

Paris, 1996, pp. 221-227.

Godfrey, Mark, ‘Mark Godfrey on Photography and Sculpture’, Artforum, February

2005, pp 147-153.

Hamilton, Clive, Denniss, Richard and Baker, David, ‘Wasteful Consumption in

Australia’, The Australia Institute, Discussion Paper Number 77, March 2005, p. 18.

Horne, S., ‘Thomas Demand- Catastrophic Space’, Parachute, n. 96,

October/December 1999, p. 21-4.

Kapferer, Roland, ‘New Moderns?’, Frieze – Contemporary Art and Culture, Issue 92,

June/July/August 2005, p. 106.

Loos, Adolf, ‘L’Architecture et le Style Moderne’, L’Architecture Vivante, Éditions Albert

Morancé, Paris, Automne et Hiver, 1923, pp. 26-34.

204

McLeod, Mary Caroline, ‘”Architecture or Revolution”: Taylorism, Technocracy, and

Social Change’, Art Journal, vol 43, n 2, Summer 1983, pp. 132-147.

Mendelsohn, Adam, ‘Tom Sachs Exhibition Review – Bohen Foundation, New York’,

Frieze, Issue 76, 2003, p. 110.

Neagle, Daniel, ‘Le Corbusier and the Space of Photography Photo-murals, Pavilions

and Multi-media Spectacles’, History of Photography vol 22, n 2, Summer 1998, pp.

127-138.

Peterson, Tanya, ‘Working Backwards’, Broadsheet Contemporary Visual Arts +

Culture, vol. 36, number 2, June 2007, 129-131.

Porcher, Jean, ‘La Maison Nouvelle en France’, Art et Décoration Revue Mensuelle d’Art Moderne 1897-1939 les Années “Mémoire” 1ère Époque’, La Collection “Un

Siècle d’Histoire”, Guillemette Éditions Charles Massin, Paris, 1996, pp. 238-245.

Ramirez, Juan A., Duchamp Love and Death Even, transl. Alexander R. Tulloch,

Reaktion Books, London, 1998.

Rosa, Joseph, ‘Architectural Photography and the Construction of Modern

Architecture’, History of Photography, vol 22, n 2, Summer 1998, pp. 99-104.

Ryan, David, ‘Enzo Mari and the Process of Design’, Design Issues, vol 13, n. 3,

Autumn 1997, pp. 29-36.

Sachs, Wolfgang, ‘Being and Buying’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 17, n. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 14-26.

Dissertations

McLeod, Mary Caroline, Urbanism and Utopia – Le Corbusier from Regional

Syndicalism to Vichy, a dissertation accepted by the School of Architecture Princeton

University, Princeton, 1985.

205

Osman, Hazem S., Crossings: Journey Through Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche, a thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies Master of Architecture, Carleton

University Ottawa, Ontario, 1999.

Videos

Barsac, Jacques, Le Corbusier, Parts 1-4 (four video cassettes: U-Matic, 176 min, black-and- white and colour, Ciné Service Technique, copyright Fondation Le

Corbusier, Paris, 1987.

206

Illustration Credits

Chapter One

Figures 1.1-1.13, 1.15, 1.19, 1.26, 1.27, 1.29, 1.31, 1.35, and 1.37: Vanila Netto,

Sydney, 2003-06.

Figure 1.14: Courtesy of Anatolii Strigalev, in Richard Andrews and Milena Kalinovska,

Art Into Life – Russian Constructivism 1914-1932, Rizzoli, New York, 1990, p. 9.

Figure 1.16: Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, in Juan Antonio Ramirez, Duchamp Love and Death Even, transl. Alexander R. Tulloch, Reaktion Books, London, 1998, p. 53.

Figures 1.17, 1.20, and 1.21:, Friederich T. Bach, Brancusi – Photo Reflection,

Worldwide Books, USA, 1991, plate 80, plate 73, and ill. 19, unnumbered pages.

Figure 1.18: Courtesy of Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden,

University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Gift of Mrs Olga N. Sheldon in memory of Adams

Bromley Sheldon, in Carmen Giménez and Matthew Gale, Constantin Brancusi – The

Essence of Things, Tate Publishing, London, 2004, p. 93.

Figure 1.22: Anna C. Chave, Constantin Brancusi – Shifting the Bases of Art, Yale

University Press, New Haven and London, 1993, plate 12, unpaged.

Figure 1.23: http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/structuringtheself%2076-81.jpg,

(Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 1.24: Courtesy: Clark Family Collection, http://web.ncf.ca/ek867/lygia- clark.dialogue.jpg, (Website accessed on June 1, 2009)

207

Figure 1.25: www.artnet.com/.../ntm3/Images/ntm5-1-18s.jpg, (Website accessed on

June 1, 2009).

Figures 1.28 and 1.29: MCA Now – Guide to the Museum of Contemporary Art

Sydney, Winter 1998, unpaged.

Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. http://www.albersfoundation.org/Albers.php?inc=Galleries&i=A_1, (Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 1.33: Die Neue Sammlung Staatliches Museum für angewandte Kunst, Munich

York. http://www.albersfoundation.org/Albers.php?inc=Galleries&i=A_1, (Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 1.34: Frank Whitford, Bauhaus, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984, p. 176.

Figure 1.36: Cook, Peter, Archigram, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, p.

65.

Figure 1.38: Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main. David Crowley and

Jane Pavitt, Cold War Modern Design 1945-1970, V&A Publishing, London, 2008, p.

265.

Chapter Two

Figs. 2.1-2: Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low - Modern Art and Popular

Culture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1991, pp. 300 and 241.

Figure 2.3: Artwork by André Wilquin, 1925. Postcard image edited by the Société des

Amis de la Bibliothèque Forney, Paris, 1993.

Figure 2.4: Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 107.

Figure 2.5: Le Corbusier, Almanach d’Architecture Moderne – Collections de ‘L’Esprit

Nouveau’, Editions Connivences, Paris, 1926, unnumbered plate.

208

Figure 2.6: Le Corbusier and François de Pierrefeu, The Home of Man from La Maison des Hommes, first edition in English, 1945, Architectural Press, London, 1958, p. 83.

Figs. 2.7 and 2.10: Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, first published in 1925 by Editions Crès, Paris, transl. by James I. Dunnet, The Architectural Press, London,

1987, pp. 158 and 100.

Figs. 2.8, 2.16, and 2.32-4: Willy Boesiger and O. Stonorow, Le Corbusier and Pierre

Jeanneret – The Complete Architectural Works 1910-1929 Vol I, Thames and Hudson,

London, 1966, pp. 145, 186, 57, 102, and 66.

Figure 2.9: William J. R. Curtis, Le Corbusier – Ideas and Forms, Phaidon, Oxford,

1986, p. 36.

Figs. 2.11 and 2.30: Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920-1930, Yale University

Press, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 75 and 73.

Figs. 2.12-3: Vanila Netto, Sydney, 2001.

Figs. 2.14, 2.17-28, 2.31 and 2.35-7: Vanila Netto, Poissy and Paris, France, 2004-5.

Courtesy of the Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

Corbusier, Paris.

Figure 2.29: Arthur Rüegg (Ed.), Le Corbusier – Polychromie Architecturale,

Birkhaüser, Basel, Boston, Berlin, 2006, p. 28.

Chapter Three

Figure 3.1: Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin. In Frank Whitford,

Bauhaus, Thames and Hudson, London, 1984, p. 131.

Figure 3.2: AEG-Telefunken. In Frank Whitford, Bauhaus, Thames and Hudson,

London, 1984, p. 21.

Figure 3.3: Photograph by Martin Charles. In Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon

Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 44.

209

Figs. 3.4-5 and 3.31: Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, translated from the thirteenth French edition by Frederick Etchells, Dover Publications, Inc., New York,

1986, pp. 135 and 99.

Figure 3.6: Keneth Frampton, Modern Architecture – A Critical History, Thames and

Hudson, London, 3rd ed., 1992, p. 113.

Figure 3.7: Alison and Peter Smithson, The Heroic Period of Modern Architecture,

Thames and Hudson, UK, 1981, p.6.

Figure 3.8: Photograph by Dennis Gilbert. In Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon

Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 119.

Figs. 3.9, 3.25-8, 3.38-43: Willy Boesiger and O. Stonorow, Le Corbusier and Pierre

Jeanneret – The Complete Architectural Works 1910-1929 Vol I, Thames and Hudson,

London, 1966, pp. 55, 107, 159, 134, 134, 146, 150, 153, 153, 139, and 67.

Figs. 3.10, and 3.34-5: Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon Press Limited, London,

1996, pp. 109, 134, and 97.

Figure 3.11: www.arcspace.com/.../corbusier/mam/mam.html, (Website accessed on

June 1, 2009).

Figs. 3.12-5: Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, first published in 1925 by

Editions Crès, Paris, transl. by James I. Dunnet, The Architectural Press, London,

1987, pp. 94, 15, 98, and 57.

Figs. 3.16-8: Jonatham M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Ornament, Rizzoli, New York,

1990, pp. 80, 41, and 65.

Figs. 3.19-20: Jonatham M. Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design, Oxford University

Press, UK, 1997, pp. 80 and 78.

Figure 3.21: Carol S. Eliel, L’Esprit Nouveau – Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, Harry N.

Abrams Inc Publishers, US, 2001, p. 93.

210

Figs. 3.22-3: Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, translated from the eighth French edition of Urbanisme by Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Press, London, 1947, p.

236, p. 237.

Figure 3.24: Photograph by Betty Fleck, Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich. In Arthur

Rüegg (Ed.), Le Corbusier – Polychromie Architecturale, Birkhaüser, Basel, Boston,

Berlin, 2006, p. 56.

Figure 3.29: Klaus-Peter Gast, Le Corbusier: Paris - Chandigarh, Birkhauser, Basel,

Berlin, Boston, 2000, p. 70.

Figure 3.30: Vanila Netto, Sydney, 2004.

Figs. 3.32-3: Photograph by Vanila Netto, Poissy, February, 2004.

Figs. 3.36-7: Michael White, De Stijl and Dutch Modernism, Manchester University

Press, Manchester and New, York, 2003, unpaged.

Chapter Four

Ltd, London, 1982, p. 81.

Romance with Design, Tate Publishing, London, 2005, p. 103.

Figure 4.3: www.arcspace.com/.../out_of_the_ordinary/ (Website accessed on June 1,

2009).

Figure 4.4: Photo: Graydon Wood, www.arcspace.com/.../out_of_the_ordinary/

(Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 4.5: Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism – Architecture in the Age of Globalization,

Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p. 68.

Figure 4.6: Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism – Architecture in the Age of Globalization,

Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p. 29.

211

Figure 4.7: Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism – Architecture in the Age of Globalization,

Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p. 70.

Figure 4.8: http://www.hollein.com/index1.php?lang=en&l1ID=2, (Website accessed on

June 1, 2009).

Figure 4.9: Architectural Press/EMAP Construction, in Richard Weston, Modernism,

Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 217.

Figure 4.10: Aerofilms, in Richard Weston, Modernism, Phaidon Press Limited,

London, 1996, p. 217.

Figure 4.11: http://fourstory.org/content/2/0/2/2.jpg, (Website accessed on June 1,

2009).

Figs. 4.12 and 4.13: Lauro Cavalcanti, When Brazil was Modern - Guide to Architecture

1928-1960, trans. by John Tolman, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2003, p.

384 and p. 388.

Figure 4.14: Callum Morton, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery,

Melbourne. In Edward Colless, ‘Callum Morton: Interior World’, Australian Art Collector no. 25, 2003, pp. 47-9.

Figure 4.15: Callum Morton, courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney. In

Edward Colless, ‘Callum Morton: Interior World’, Australian Art Collector no. 25, 2003, pp. 47-9.

Figs. 4.16-17: Marylène Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas, Bernard Le Roy and Jean-Luc

Veyret, Le Corbusier: The Quartiers Modernes Frugès, transl. from French by Sarah

Parsons, Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris, Birkhäuser Publishers, Basel, Boston, Berlin,

1998, p.14 and p. 17.

Figs. 4.18-20: Willy Boesiger, and O. Stonorow, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret –

The Complete Architectural Works 1910-1929 Vol I, Thames and Hudson, London,

1966, p. 82 and p. 86.

Figure 4.21: Charlotte and Peter Fiell, 1000 Chairs, Taschen, Köln, 1997, p. 191.

212

Figs. 4.22-23 and 4.28: Vanila Netto, Sydney, 2004-06.

Figure 4.24: http://www.mcah.columbia.edu/dbcourses/publicportfolio.cgi?view=2328#,

(Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 4.25: www.deutsche-guggenheim.de (Website accessed on June 1, 2009).

Figure 4.26: Photograph by Peter Cook/Archipress, in Richard Weston, Modernism,

Phaidon Press Limited, London, 1996, p. 218.

Figure 4.27: Photograph by Vanila Netto, Marseille, 2004

Figure 4.29: http://www.sydneyarchitecture.com/NOR/NOR24.htm (Website accessed on accessed 22 June 2009).

Figure 4.30: Peter Coleman, Shopping Environments – Evolution, Planning and

Design, Architectural Press and Elsevier Ltd, UK, 2006, p. 183.

Figure 4.31: Peter Coleman, Shopping Environments – Evolution, Planning and

Design, Architectural Press and Elsevier Ltd, UK, 2006, p. 306.

Figure 4.32: Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism – Architecture in the Age of Globalization,

Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, p. 73.

Figure 4.33: Ronald A. Altoon, International Shopping Center Architecture – Details,

Concepts & Projects, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, 1996, p. 174.

Chapter Five

Figure 5.1: Vanila Netto, Sydney, 2004.

Figure 5.2: Ellen Lupton and J. A. Miller, The Bathroom The Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste - a Process of Elimination, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1992, p. 69.

Figure 5.3: Donald J. Bush, The Streamlined Decade, George Breziller, New York,

1975, plates 142 and 143, unpaged.

Figure 5.4: Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images – The Politics of Style in

Contemporary Culture, Basic Books, US, 1988, p. 148.

213

Figure 5.5: Courtesy of Gallery Monika Sprüth, Cologne. Christoph Grunenberg and

Max Hollein, Shopping – A Century of Art and Consumer Culture, Hatje Cantz

Publishers, Germany, 2002, p. 214.

Figure 5.6: Photograph by Dallas Kilponen, Sydney Morning Herald, March 19-20,

2005, p. 10.

Figures 5.7-5.9: Peter Coleman, Shopping Environments – Evolution, Planning and

Design, Architectural Press and Elsevier Ltd, UK, 2006, pp. 318, 323, and 305.

Figures 5.10 and 5.11: Wallpaper Magazine, September 2004, pp. 9 and 54.

Figure 5.12: Cleo Magazine, April 2007 (cover).

Chapter Six

Figure 6.1: Photograph by Vanila Netto (Sydney, 15 January 2006)

Plate1.i

Fig. 1.1 Camaski, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 85 x 104. 28 cm

Fig. 1.2 Site-geist, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 110 x 85.6 cm Plate1.ii

Fig. 1.3 Breaking the Frozen Pattern (Rampage), 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 85 x 107.97 cm Plate1.iii

Fig. 1.4 Beyond Fission Lies Fusion (Untamed), Fig. 1.5 Freezing to Death (Transcommunication Pack), 2004, digital print, mounted on aluminium, 40 x 40 cm 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 40 x 40 cm

Fig. 1.6 Desert State (Mountainn), 2003, digital print mounted on aluminium, 85 x 110.75 cm Plate1.iv

Fig. 1.7 Aerodynamic – Existential Technique (H + C) and Atomic – Existential Technique (H2 + C), 2004, digital prints mounted on aluminium, 72 x 86.7 cm each

Fig. 1.8 Look, No Hands, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 72 x 86.59 cm Plate1.v

Fig. 1.9 Rocking Well, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 90 x 74.07 cm

Fig. 1.10 Metal Skelterr, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 80 x 87 cm Plate1.vi

Fig. 1.11 Bricklaying, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 70 x 88.16 cm Plate1.vii

Fig. 1.12 The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 1 - Contraption), 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 133 x 100.9 cm Plate1.viii

Fig. 1.13 The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 2 - Expansion), 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 133 x 100.9 cm Plate1.ix

Fig. 1.14 Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the Third International, circa 1920, never built to scale. It encapsulated the image of the Soviet State’s aspirations of progress based on industrialisation and socialism. Tatlin’s utopian sculpture is re-imagined within the context of personal associations and contemporary living in my Magnanimous Beige Wrap series. Photograph courtesy of Anatolii Strigalev Plate1.x

Fig. 1.15 The Magnanimous Beige Wrap (Part 3 - Collaboration), 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 133 x 100.9 cm Plate1.xi

Fig. 1.16 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, urinal made of sanitary porcelain, 61 x 48 x 36 cm. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

Fig. 1.17 Constantin Brancusi, View of the studio, 1925. Photograph by Brancusi. It includes two versions of his Bird in Space Plate1.xii

Fig. 1.18 Constantin Brancusi, Princess X, 1915, white marble, 55.9 x 27.9 x 22.9 cm

Fig. 1.19 Milestone Frontier: Brancusi Emaculated Here, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 80 x 80 cm Plate1.xiii

Fig. 1.20 Constantin Brancusi, Self-portrait, c. 1933-34

Fig. 1.21 One of Brancusi’s Fig. 1.22 Constantin Brancusi, Hand, 1920, marble photographic documentation of his sculptures, being used here as plinths Plate1.xiv

Left to right, Fig. 1.23 Lygia Clark, Structuring the Selff, 1976 Fig. 1. 24 Lygia Clark, Dialogue: Goggles (Diálogo: Óculos), 1968, glass, metal, rubber, 20 x 30 x 10 cm Fig. 1.25 Lygia Clark, Relational Object – Stone and Airr, 1966

Fig. 1.26 Lumbar Hi-Fi Receivers, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 103.59 x 81.78 cm Plate1.xv

Fig. 1.27 Little Rugged Red Rocking Rooff, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 72 x 99.22 cm

Fig. 1.28 Lucy Orta, The Unit, performance intervention Cartier Foundation, Paris, 1996, microporous polyester, diverse textiles, zips, variable dimensions Plate1.xvi

Fig. 1.29 Two Hands, One Head, Twice, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 90 x 104 cm

Fig. 1.30 Lucy Orta, Collective Wear Survival Sac, 1992-94, textiles and text, variable dimensions Plate1.xvii

Fig. 1.31 Sobremanta Sol, 2006, digital print box framed, 133 x 105.7 cm

Fig. 1.32 Anni Albers, Fig. 1.33 Anni Albers, Fig. 1.34 Ruth Hollos-Consemüller, Black-White-Red, 1964, Wall Hanging, 1925, gobelin tapestry produced at the reproduction of a 1927 wool and silk, Bauhaus weaving workshop, c. 1926, original, cotton and silk, 235.9 x 96.04 cm cotton and wool 175 x 118 cm Plate1.xviii

Fig. 1.35 In Metal We T(rust), 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 111 x 132.1 cm

Fig. 1.36 Archigram (Michael Webb), Cushicle, 1966-7. A personal enclosure that could be inﬂ ated, deﬂ ated and carried around on one’s back Plate1.xix

Fig. 1.37 In Curiosity We Fit, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 111 x 137.7 cm

Fig. 1.38 Superstudio, Continuous Monument, New York, 1969, colour lithograph on paper Plate2.i

Fig. 2.1 Billboard advertising at full street scale in Paris, 1925

Fig. 2.2 Posted wall, Paris, c. 1908 Fig. 2.3 Dentclair toothpaste. Image and lifestyle advertising. Artwork by André Wilquin, France, 1925 Plate2.ii

Fig. 2.4 Cover of the ﬁ rst issue of L’Esprit Nouveau, Fig. 2.5 Advertisement in L’Esprit Nouveau journal: Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant’s journal Solomite, a new construction material used by Le Corbusier in his buildings of the 1920s

Fig. 2.6 The essential joys advocated by Le Corbusier: sun, space, air, and greenery Plate2.iii

Fig. 2.7 The liner Paris, 1921. Illustration used by Le Corbusier to talk about simple lines and balanced design, in his book The Decorative Artt of Today, 1925

Fig. 2.8 Le Corbusier’s Villa à Garches, 1927-8. Entry and main hall evoking the promenade spaces found in the Moder ocean liner Plate2.iv

Fig. 2.9 Le Corbusier’s sketch section of a typical cell of the Monastery of Ema, 1911

Fig. 2.10 Cabin in a ship, reproduced in Fig. 2.11 Raoul La Roche’s bedroom, Spartan as a monk’s The Decorative Artt of Today, 1925 cell, Villa La Roche, 1923-5 Plate2.v

Fig. 2.12 Vanila Netto, Normal Distractions from Good Conversation (Part 1), 2001, digital print mounted on aluminium, 76 x 100 cm

Fig. 2.13 Vanila Netto, Normal Distractions from Good Conversation (Part 3), 2001, digital print mounted on aluminium, 85 x 100 cm Plate2.vi

Fig. 2.14 The Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-30. Façade seen on arrival (south-east)

Fig. 2.15 The Villa La Roche, Paris, 1923-5 Plate2.vii

Fig. 2.16 Ground-ﬂ oor plan showing how the Fig. 2.17 Wash basin in the entry foyer of the Villa movement of a car has affected the development Savoye. A hygiene reminder of Villa Savoye’s program

Fig. 2.18 Entry foyer with immediate aspect to the garden atthe Villa Savoye Plate2.viii

Fig. 2.19 Living room at the Villa Savoye with access to light and air and greenery

Fig. 2.20 Living room detail showing piloti piercing through, table designed by Le Corbusier, metalic casiers (found in almost every room of the house), yellow tiled ceramis ﬂ ooring, and light blue wall at Villa Savoye Plate2.ix

Fig. 2.21 Internal stair and view to terrace and ramp Fig. 2.22 Integrated coloured cabinets in the Villa at the Villa Savoye Savoye

Fig. 2.23 The kitchen at the Villa Savoye with integrated work surfaces and cabinets Plate2.x

Fig. 2.24 Detail of main bathroom showing Fig. 2.25 Detail of main bathroom with Maison Pirsoul the same light feature used in the kitchen at bidet facing a wall coloured in burnt sienna. Villa Savoye the Villa Savoye

Fig. 2.26 Sun favoured bathroom with tiled reclining bed. Villa Savoye Plate2.xi

Fig. 2.27 Terrace adjacent to living room and framed green patches viewed from the roof terrace at the Villa Savoye

Fig. 2.28 Framed view to sky through window. Concave wall at roof terrace accessed via the ramp Plate2.xii

Fig. 2.29 (top) Villa La Roche’s picture gallery in present conditions Fig. 2.30 (middle) Perspective of the La Roche gallery showing the ‘v’ leg- ged table, divan, lighting through. and shelves under the ramp, 1928 Fig. 2.31(above) La Roche gallery today with same table, pink linoleum ﬂ ooring, LC3 Gran Confort chair, and metalic casier under the ramp Plate2.xiii

Fig. 2.32 Readymades staircase and metal doors at Ozenfant’s Fig. 2.33 Readymades staircase and House, 1922 metal doors at L’Esprit Nouveau Pavil- ion, 1925

Fig. 2.34 Same type of metal doors used at the Ozenfant’s House and at the L’Esprit Nouveau Pavilion, were used at the Villa La Roche (left hand side of the image) Plate2.xiv

Fig. 2.35 Boudoir aspect, integrated storage and leading view towards the master bedroom with blue wall at the Villa Savoye

Fig. 2.36 Son’s bedroom aspect and integrated storage. Villa Savoye

Fig. 2.37 Living room showing same metalic storage units found in the bedrooms and kitchen at the Villa Savoye Plate3.i

Fig. 3.1 Bauhaus designers, J. Jucker and Fig. 3.2 Peter Behrens (founding member of W. Wagenfeld, table lamp, 1923-4 Werkbund), trade mark for the AEG company, electric fan, c. 1908

Fig. 3.3 Victor Horta, Hotel Tassel, Brussels, 1893, Art Nouveau icon Plate3.ii

Fig. 3.4 (top) The Parthenon, 447-434 BC; Fig. 3.5 Delage ‘Grand-Sport’, 1921. The two images are juxtaposed as such on page 135 of Le Corbusier’s book Towards a New Architecture, 1923 Plate3.iii

Fig. 3.6 (top left) Peter Behrens, AEG Turbine Factory, Berlin, 1908-09 Fig. 3.7 (top right) Walter Gropius, Fagus Works Factory, Alfeld, 1911 Fig. 3.8 (middle) Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-6 Fig. 3.9 (above) Le Corbusier, Ozenfant House Studio, Paris, 1922 The inﬂ uence of factory functionality and aesthetic is evident in the Bauhaus complex and Le Corbusier’s residential architecture of the 1920s Plate3.iv

Fig. 3.10 Amédée Ozenfant, Accords, 1922, Fig. 3.11 Le Corbusier, Red Violin, 1920, oil on oil on canvas canvas

Fig. 3.12 Commercial glassware and crockery were staple subject matter in the Purist paintings off Ozenfant and Le Corbusier Plate3.v

Figs. 3.13-14 (top) Products of industry endorsed by Le Corbusier: Maison Pirsoull bidet and Innovation storage trunk Fig. 3.15 (above) Excess decoration which did not enhance the functionality of the object. Illustrations from catalogue merchandise of the period used by Le Corbusier in The Decorative Art of Today, 1925 to support his anti-ornament argument Plate3.vi

Fig. 3.16 Light ﬁ ttings from Electrical Review, Fig. 3.17 Plaster workshop of G. Jackson & Sons Ltd, 1927. The catalogue illustration reveals the 49 Rathbone Place, London W1, circa 1928. Ornamental conservative ornamental taste even in light plasterwork manufactured according to any historical ﬁ ttings associated with the homes of most in dress that customers desired Britain during the 1920s

Fig. 3.18 Entrance lobby of New Oxford Fig. 3.19 Jaap Gidding, foyer of the Tuschink Cinema, Street Corner House, London, designed by Amsterdam, 1918-21. Highly colourful and glitzy design Oliver Bernard, late 1920s, Art Deco styling of Art Deco lineage Plate3.vii

Figs. 3.20-21 Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, salon included in his stand in the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, Paris. It contained pastiche of historical French furniture style as well as exotic and rare materials, which clearly contrasted with Le Corbusier’s Spartan pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau Plate3.viii

Figs. 3.22-23 Le Corbusier’s proposal for ‘hanging gardens’ or roof terraces ﬁ rstly expressed in drawings for the Contemporary City (Plan Voisin), 1922 (top), later made real through L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion (above) Plate3.ix

Figs. 3.24 Le Corbusier, Pavillon L’Esprit Nouveau, Paris, 1925. Living room reconstruction with original colour scheme, furniture and paintings by Juan Gris (left) and Ozenfant (right), Arthur Rüegg and Silvio Schmed, 1987

Figs. 3.25 Le Corbusier, Pavillon L’Esprit Nouveau, Paris, 1925. Living room with paintings by Fernand Leger (left) and Le Corbusier (right), opposite wall to the one in Fig. 3.24 Plate3.x

Fig. 3.26 (top) Plainex House, Paris, 1922. Interior detail, showing pilotis, simple light ﬁ ttings, and ribbon windows Figs. 3.27-28 (middle) Cook House, Boulogne-Sur-Seine, 1926. Entrance and garage (left), and living room detail (right), showing pilotis being applied to exterior and interior Fig. 3.29 (above) Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-30. Pilotis are prominent in the façades, also appearing in almost every room of this house Plate3.xi

Fig. 3.30 Vanila Netto, Geometry (No Buttons, Considering Pressures), 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 40 x 40 cm Plate3.xii

Fig. 3.31 (top) The Lamoriciere. Le Corbusier was inspired by the contrast between solids and voids, and the slender elements found in ocean liners Fig. 3.32-33 Viilla Savoye (details). Allusion to the ocean liner with the chimney, external concave wall at the roof garden, ramp and tubular balustrade Plate3.xiii

Fig. 3.34 (top left) Walter Gropius’ study, Director’s Ofﬁ ce, 1923, Bauhaus, Weimer. Furniture and light ﬁ tting by Gropius, wall-hanging by Else Mogelin, and rug by Gertrud Arndt, both Bauhaus’ students. The room shows restrained, although poetic use of colour and sculptural elements within a living space Fig. 3.35 (top right) J.J.P. Oud, Café de Unie, 1924-5, Rotterdam, demolished in 1940. Façade elevation drawing shows abundant use of colour Fig. 3.36 (above left) Gerrit Rietveld, Schroeder House, 1923-4, Utrecht. Interior detail showing also wide use of colurs folowing the precepts of Neoplasticism. Unlike any domestic space seen before Fig. 3.37 (above right) Gerrit Rietveld, Schroeder House, axonometric view Plate3.xiv

Fig. 3.38 (top) Le Corbusier, Villa à Garches, 1927-8, external stairs connecting ground with suspended garden Fig. 3.39 (bottom) Le Corbusier, Two Houses at Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927. Axonometric drawing showing external stairs on the right Plate3.xv

Figs. 3.40-1 Le Corbusier, House at Weissenhof, Stuttgart, 1927. Living room and bedroom detail (left to right) showing inclusion of Thonet chairs and very simple ﬁ ttings

Fig. 3.42 Le Corbusier, Guiette House (detail), Anvers, 1926 Fig. 3.43 Le Corbusier, Villa Jeanneret (detail), Paris, 1923-25 Again, illustrations show Le Corbusier’s frequent use of Thonet chairs and simple ﬁ ttings such as spotlight lamps and casiers in different projects over a number of years Plate4.i

Fig. 4.1 The blowing up of the Pruitt-Igoe housing block, July 1972, St Louis, US

Fig. 4.2 Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, 1954-8, New York, a landmark of the International Style Plate4.ii

Fig. 4.3 Robert Venturi, Eclectic House Fig. 4.4 Robert Venturi, Gothic Revival Series (Elevations), 1977, colored plastic Chair for Knoll, 1978-84, bent laminated ﬁ lm on photo-mechanical print wood and painted plastic laminate

Fig. 4.5 Michael Graves, Portland Fig. 4.6 Frank O. Gehry & Associates, Building, 1980, Portland, US Nationale Nederlanden ofﬁ ce building, 1991-1996, Prague, Czech Republic Plate4.iii

Fig. 4.7 Charles Moore, Plazza d’Italia, 1976-1979, New Orleans, US

Fig. 4.8 (left and right) Hans Hollein, Austrian Travel Bureau, 1978, Vienna, Austria

Fig. 4.9 London County Council, Roehampton Housing Estate, Fig. 4.10 Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, 1952-5, London, UK Park Hill, 1961, Shefﬁ eld, UK Plate4.iv

Fig. 4.11 Minoru Yamasaki, Pruitt-Igoe Housing Estate, 1955 St Louis, US

Fig. 4.12 (top) Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, city of Brasilia (detail) 1958-60, Brazil Fig. 4.13 (bottom) Oscar Niemeyer, Super Squares, residential blocks in Brasilia, 1956-60, Brazil Plate4.v

Fig. 4.14 Callum Morton, Gas and Fuel, 2002, wood, acrylic paint, aluminium, perspex, paper, and sound, 220 x 91 x 600 cm

Fig. 4.15 Callum Morton, International Style, 1999, acrylic, wood, lights, sound, dimensions variable Plate4.vi

Figs. 4.16-17 (top) Le Corbusier, Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès, Pessac, France. Photographs of the 1980s showing exterior and interior colour scheme following Le Corbusier’s original program (1924-26) Figs. 4.18-20 (bottom) Le Corbusier, Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès, 1925. Although black and white photography was the best type of documentation available at that time, it did not make obvious the use of colour Plate4.vii

Fig. 4.21 Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, Grand Confort, Model LC3, 1928, chromed bent tubular steel frame with leather-upholstered cushions

Fig. 4.22 Vanila Netto, Mini-Flex Super-Comfort, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 75 x 93.22 cm Plate4.viii

Fig. 4.23 Vanila Netto, Detergent Cells, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 90 x 108.4 cm

Fig. 4.24 Adolf Loos, Steiner House, 1910, Vienna, Austria Plate4.ix

Fig. 4.25 Tom Sachs, Nutsy’s Unité d’Habitation, 2001, 1:25 scale model

Figs. 4.26-7 Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation Marseilles, 1947-52, Marseilles, France Plate4.x

Fig. 4.28 Vanila Netto, Blueprint 1, 2006, digital print mounted on aluminium, 100 x 80.79 cm

Fig. 4.29 Harry Seidler, Blue’s Point Tower, 1961, Sydney, Australia Plate4.xi

Fig. 4.30 Polychromatic marble clad inspired by Fig. 4.31 ‘The Orient’, a large ocean liner-themed Italian hill towns, Horton Plaza, 1985, San Diego, food court, The Trafford Shopping Centre, 1998, US Manchester, UK

Fig. 4.32 The Jerde Partnership, Fig. 4.33 Group Ciputra, Citraland Universal CityWalk, 1990-1993, Mall, 1993, Grogol, West Jakarta, Los Angeles, US Indonesia Plate5.i

Fig. 5.1 Feedback, 2004, digital print mounted on aluminium, 60 x 39.42 cm Plate5.ii

Fig. 5.2 “The bowel, like a Modern railway, must have a regular schedule of operation.” 1937 ad for Petrolagar, a gentle laxative that offer a quick ﬁ x to Modern “high speed living” and “unfavourable eating and working conditions”

Fig. 5.3 Left: General Electric, Model T-7 refrigerator, manufactured from 1927 to 1938. Right: its streamlined version, Model V-7 of 1936 Plate5.iii

Fig. 5.4 Raymond Loewy, pencil sharpener, 1933 Plate5.iv

Fig. 5.5 Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II (detail of diptych), 2001, C-Print, 206 x 341 x 8 cm. Stores such as this are proliferating all over the world. They sell cheap and mostly unnecessary goods

Fig. 5.6 ‘Out with the old, in with the takeaway’: Harriet Alexander’s article for the Sydney Morning Herald, in which she reveals that many people are eating takeaway instead of cooking the food that they bought Plate5.v

Fig. 5.7 (top left) The Gate Retail Entertainment Centre contains nightclub and casino. Newcastle, UK, 2002 Fig. 5.8 (top right) The Galleria Shopping Mall has an Ice Skating Rink adjacent to the ground ﬂ oor shops. Houston, Texas, USA, 1970 Fig. 5.9 (above) Canal Walk Century City has a vast range of fast food chains and multimedia screens around its themed food court areas. Capetown, South Africa, 2000 Plate5.vi

Fig. 5.10 Celebrity and pop icon Paris Fig. 5.11 Anorexic-looking model poses for Hilton selling upmarket Guess products the slick Dolce & Gabbana label

Fig. 5.12 Jessica Simpson, mainstream female role model, stands for diets, cosmetic surgery, and the latest fashion Plate6.i

Fig. 6.1 ‘Why do things the hard way?’: Advertising campaign by BPay (pay bills by phone or internet). Image posted on a Sydney bus. A great visual metaphor for our culture of conveniences and its consequences.