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Le Corbusier: from the Primitive Hut to the Cabanon

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Le Corbusier: from the Primitive Hut to the Cabanon » Benton, T. (2018). Le Corbusier: From the primitive hut to the cabanon. A&P Continuidad (8), 1-10. Le Corbusier: From the primitive hut to the cabanon Recieved: April 25, 2018 Tim Benton Accepted: June 20, 2018 English Español Insufficient attention has been paid to Le Corbusier’s search for origins in the La búsqueda que hace Le Corbusier de los orígenes en las viviendas vernáculas e Corbusier associated the simple hut with wasted. […] What nuisance, what un- house through the winter, when his friends vernacular dwellings he observed, drew and inhabited. In parallel with his de- que observaba, bosquejaba y habitaba no ha recibido la debida atención. En for- L creativity and intimacy. Whenever possi- happyness, stupidities ; how many pu- abandoned him, complaining of the cold. Here velopment of a machine-age architecture dominated by geometry and reason ma paralela al desarrollo de la arquitectura de la era de la máquina, dominada ble he escaped from the city to an existence erile, negative and destructive gestures, he worked intensely on the plans for his par- he explored the basis of contentment in the simple life of peasants and fisher- por la geometría y la razón, exploró la satisfacción que sienten campesinos y cut off from stress and turbulence, close to some of them even unintentional! (Le ents’ house and the design of a house for the men, and the rough shacks they built with their own hands. The ten years during pescadores en el marco de una vida simple desarrollada en viviendas rudimen- nature and ‘honest’ men and women. But he Corbusier, 1935: 6) industrialist Georges Favre-Jacot, as well as which he spent his vacations in the little village of Le Petit Piquey on the Bassin tarias construidas con sus propias manos. Los diez años durante los cuales pasó also looked to simple dwellings as a source of several articles and a book about German de- d’Arcachon were fundamental for stimulating a revolution in his painting and, sus vacaciones en Le Petit Piquey -una pequeña población sobre la Bahía de Ar- architectural inspiration and as a means to de- Brought up in a high valley of the Swiss Jura, sign. He had been used to working on texts eventually, his architecture. This article explores the various ramifications of Le cachon- fueron esenciales en la motivación de una revolución de su pintura, y fine architectural value.1 In the grand tradition Charles Édouard Jeanneret2 associated creativ- and architectural plans in the lodging houses Corbusier’s search for a closer connection with nature and with a more primi- finalmente, de su arquitectura. Este artículo analiza las diversas ramificaciones of the search for origins, Le Corbusier tried to ity with leaving the city and taking long walks he had occupied during his travels in Germany tive existence protected from ‘civilisation’. His book La Ville Radieuse is a witness de la búsqueda, que hace Le Corbusier, en torno a un vínculo más estrecho con find in vernacular structures the human values in the hills. In January 1910 he escaped from and Austria, between 1908 and 1912, but this to this patient research, as well as houses such as Le Sextant aux Mathes and the la naturaleza y con una existencia más primitiva que se protege de la civilización. uncontaminated by industrialized society. As La Chaux-de-Fonds to spend three months need for isolation, preferably surrounded by petite maison de weekend, La Celle Saint Cloud. Su libro La Ville Radieuse da testimonio no solamente de esta búsqueda paciente he said in La Ville Radieuse: snowed into a simple farmhouse on Mont Cor- nature and in a vernacular setting, remained sino también de viviendas tales como Le Sextant en Mathes y petite maison de nu, all alone with his thoughts. He spent long with him all his life. weekend en La Celle Saint Cloud. I look out the savages, in the Americas evenings in the windowless fireplace-room in Jeanneret was convinced that these large, low or in Europe, peasants or fishermen, not the centre of the house, known as the chambre farmhouses derived from similar buildings in to discover their barbarity but to judge du tué3. Languedoc, from whence he believed his an- their wisdom. I understand: I go where In the summer of 1912 he rented the upper cestors had fled religious persecution. At some men labour to feed themselves and in- floor of another farmhouse, known as Le Cou- point in the 1920s, Le Corbusier or Pierre Jean- vent in order to ease their sufferings. […] vent, just outside La Chaux-de-Fonds, which neret photographed one of these farmhouses. Key words: Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Bassin d’Arcachon, vernacular, Palabras clave: Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Bahía de Arcachon, vernáculo, I come to man, or rather men, in order to he shared with two of his friends Octave In La Ville Radieuse, Le Corbusier described nature naturaleza learn my trade. The city? But it’s already Mathey and Eric de Coulon, staying in the these farmhouses in glowing terms: 1 Le Corbusier: From the primitive hut to the cabanon / Tim Benton / p. 1 » 10 A&P Continuidad N.8/5 - Julio 2018 · ISSN Impresa 2362-6089 - ISSN Digital 2362-6097 A&P Continuidad N.8/5 - Julio 2018 · ISSN Impresa 2362-6089 - ISSN Digital 2362-6097 Le Corbusier: From the primitive hut to the cabanon / Tim Benton / p. 1 » 10 2 alongside which we find the pen of the author. At the base of the composition is the box of matches which, with the association of smok- ing, always symbolized the work of creation for Le Corbusier. In this romantic search for origins, for the sim- plicity of working people not yet contaminat- ed by urban civilisation and for the directness of expression of their buildings, Le Corbusier was struggling to find an antidote to the radical modernism of the architecture and urbanism with which he was making his reputation in Par- is. On closer inspection. The vernacular was not at all a contradiction of machinist modernism. Rather, it was another way of searching for the same thing: a human measure uncontaminated by the teachings of the academy and the perni- cious effects of industrialised capitalism. In 1928 Le Corbusier gave a lecture, later pub- lished as the first part of his bookUne maison un palais in which he gave a long description of a fisherman’s hut in the pineforests of the Bassin Le Corbusier or Pierre Jeanneret, photograph of a farmhouse in Languedoc, France, 1920s (FLC L4-20-25-001) ©FLC/ADAGP, 2018. d’Arcachon. These shacks, made with the mate- rials to hand, by seasonal fishermen who had no The Toulous farms are composed of an unmade road, were relatively unspoiled. The that he practiced alongside Amédée Ozen- right to the land, were, he concluded palaces. standard elements organised around pine forests that had been planted to stabilize fant from 1918 to 1925, to a more richly co- local conditions. They are strictly func- the dunes were host to an itinerant group of loured, sensual and expressive style of painting. This precariousness places them in the tional. Everything is rigorous and pure. loggers and carpenters and the lagoon was well Sketches he made at Le Piquey were worked up archetypal position of the house builder: They are true. A prodigious architec- known for its oysters and mussels. Le Corbusier into paintings in Paris, in the winter months. By they make a cottage, a shelter, nothing ture emerges from them (Le Corbusier, and Yvonne stayed in the simple wooden hous- 1929, Le Corbusier’s love-affair with reinforced more, quite simply and honestly. They 1935: 322). es that offered demi pension facilities. concrete had begun to wane, and he began to execute a pure programme unencum- He became particularly friendly with the ex- use natural materials expressively in his proj- bered by pretensions to history, to cul- In the summer of 1926, at the height of the tended Vidal family who owned one of these ects (Villa de Mandrot, 1929-31 and project for ture to the fashions of the day […] Truly period of his Purist villas, Le Corbusier began establishments, and he and Yvonne slotted into Villa Errazuriz, 1930) (Benton, 2011: 92-105). they are in the typical condition of the what became a ritual of annual vacations with the daily routines of the group. Many of his paint- One of these paintings, La main et le silex, be- man of anywhere and anytime, thinking his partner Yvonne Gallis in the small fishing ings reflect the courtyard of the Établissement came the frontispiece to his book La ville Ra- about what they have to do, carrying it hamlet on the isthmus separating the Bassin Vidal, with its fig trees, its metal tables and open dieuse, 1935 (Le Corbusier, 1935). The painting out and reflecting on it (Le Corbusier, d’Arcachon from the Atlantic (Benton and Hu- door. He spent his days sketching the fishermen symbolises the workings of the imagination and 1928: 48). bert, 2015; Benton, 2013; Maak, 2011). While and oyster women, the boats and coils of rope creation. The flintstone has itself a biomorphic Arcachon had become a favourite tourist site as well as collecting flotsam and jetsam on the form. The insertion of the hand into a flintstone Le Corbusier even published a sketch by Amédée from the end of the nineteenth century, the beach. This intense annual exposure to natural represents what Le Corbusier would later call Ozenfant of one of these shacks on the cover of fishing villages on the North side of the Ar- forms progressively changed his painting style the contract with nature (Le Corbusier, 1955).
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