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Le Corbusier, history and tradition Rabaça, Armando; Zaknic, Ivan; Rüegg, Arthur; Leatherbarrow, David; Autor(es): Schnoor, Christoph; Passanti, Francesco; Linton, Johan; von Moos, Stanislaus; Candela Suárez, Maria Publicado por: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra URL persistente: URI:http://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/41599 DOI: DOI:https://doi.org/10.14195/978-989-26-1338-3 Accessed : 5-Oct-2021 19:51:28 A navegação consulta e descarregamento dos títulos inseridos nas Bibliotecas Digitais UC Digitalis, UC Pombalina e UC Impactum, pressupõem a aceitação plena e sem reservas dos Termos e Condições de Uso destas Bibliotecas Digitais, disponíveis em https://digitalis.uc.pt/pt-pt/termos. Conforme exposto nos referidos Termos e Condições de Uso, o descarregamento de títulos de acesso restrito requer uma licença válida de autorização devendo o utilizador aceder ao(s) documento(s) a partir de um endereço de IP da instituição detentora da supramencionada licença. Ao utilizador é apenas permitido o descarregamento para uso pessoal, pelo que o emprego do(s) título(s) descarregado(s) para outro fim, designadamente comercial, carece de autorização do respetivo autor ou editor da obra. Na medida em que todas as obras da UC Digitalis se encontram protegidas pelo Código do Direito de Autor e Direitos Conexos e demais legislação aplicável, toda a cópia, parcial ou total, deste documento, nos casos em que é legalmente admitida, deverá conter ou fazer-se acompanhar por este aviso. pombalina.uc.pt digitalis.uc.pt Edited byArmando Rabaça Ivan Zaknic Arthur Rüegg L E David Leatherbarrow C ORBUSIER Christoph Schnoor H Francesco Passanti ISTORY Johan Linton Stanislaus von Moos T and Maria Candela Suárez RADITION L E C ORBUSIER and H ISTORY T RADITION Edited by Armando Rabaça (Página deixada propositadamente em branco) L E C ORBUSIER d n H ISTORY a TRADITION Edited by Armando Rabaça Le Corbusier, History and Tradition Edited by Armando Rabaça Published by Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra / Coimbra University Press Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.uc.pt/imprensa_uc Online sale: http://livrariadaimprensa.uc.pt All rights reserved Graphic Design: Armando Rabaça Cover: drawing by Le Corbusier Printed by www.artipol.net ISBN: 978-989-26-1337-6 ISBN (Digital): 978-989-26-1338-3 DOI: https://d o i .o r g /10 .1419 5/978-989-26-1338-3 @ 2017, Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra / Coimbra University Press Ivan Zaknic Arthur Rüegg David Leatherbarrow Christoph Schnoor Francesco Passanti Johan Linton Stanislaus von Moos Maria Candela Suárez L E C ORBUSIER d n H ISTORY a TRADITION Edited by Armando Rabaça Contents Armando Rabaça 1 Architecture as a Work of Art and the Sense of the Historical Whole An Introduction to Le Corbusier, History and Tradition Ivan Zaknic 26 August Klipstein’s Orient-Reise, companion to Le Corbusier’s Journey to the East, 1911 Arthur Rüegg 60 Living with Objects - Learning from Objects: Le Corbusier’s “collection particulière” David Leatherbarrow 90 Le Corbusier: a Modern Monk Christoph Schnoor 114 Urban History and New Directions The Role of Brinckmann and Laugier for Le Corbusier’s Urban Design Theory Francesco Passanti 156 Hadrian’s Villa and Spatial Dialogue in Le Corbusier’s Houses Johan Linton 188 Le Corbusier and the French Tradition Stanislaus von Moos 222 Ciam’s Ghosts: Le Corbusier, Art, and War World ii María Candela Suárez 276 Between Indian Tradition and Corbusian Modernity: the Case of the Villa Hutheesing-Shodhan 295 Picture Credits 1. Le Corbusier “Palace of the Soviets of 1931, and its vindication, seen from the windows of the Paris-Rome express, on the 4th of June 1934, when passing the Campo Santo of Pisa.” Le Modulor (1950) Armando Rabaça Architecture as a Work of Art and the Sense of the Historical Whole an introduction to Le Corbusier, History and Tradition I had a feeling, which became positively overpowering and could not find wonderful enough utterance, that the past and the present were one. I saw them in a way that brought something ghostly into the quality of the present. This feeling is expressed in many of my larger and smaller works, and always has a beneficial effect in my poems, although at the actual moment of direct expression in life it was bound to appear strange, inexplicable and perhaps even unpleasant to the reader. Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit) Tradition . involves, in the first place, the historical sense . and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity . 1 Le Corbusier, History and Tradition No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists . what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. He [the poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country – . is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route . But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show . [The poet] is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. T. S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”) Look at any building you like, as remote as you like from consciousness of aesthetic purposes, and you will notice how as soon as a choice of alternatives comes before the builder he inevitably conforms to some dimly perceived tradition of formal arrangement. There is no escape. John Summerson (“The ‘Poetry’of Le Corbusier”) 2 Armando Rabaça While in certain academic circles the anti-historical bias of the Modern Movement still presents few riddles, the view of modernism as representing an epistemological break between technology and history and tradition has long been challenged. The influence of the past is recognizable in, for example, the blending of classicism and organicism in Alvar Aalto’s work, the legacy of Dutch town houses in Pieter Oud’s domestic architecture, and the composition of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings.1 In Le Corbusier’s work, however, this influence can be seen on the most abstract level. Le Corbusier’s assimilation of the past is shaped by his creative process which, as John Summerson had already noted in the 1940s, is comparable to the processes of avant-garde poets and painters: his experimental architecture resulted from subverting the logic of every situation, bringing different fragments together and fusing them in a new synthesis. Summerson’s comparison was made with specific reference to Picasso’s belligerent process of creation through destruction and subsequent transformation in order to achieve “a more substantial result and profound possession of form.”2 “Just as in a painting by Picasso, Braque or Léger the appearance of a thing is torn to pieces, broken into bits and reconstituted in a ridiculous jigsaw which has, nevertheless, a perfect logic of its own,” Summerson writes, “so a building by Le Corbusier is a ruthless dismemberment of the building programme and a reconstitution on a plane where the unexpected always, unfailingly, happens. Herein is Le Corbusier’s poetry—or his wit.”3 This comparison with avant-garde abstract art involves issues of form. For Summerson, for example, the tension in Le Corbusier’s plans is comparable to that of Picasso’s drawings.4 More than a problem of form, however, the similarities concern a fundamental problem of method and attitude towards the creative process. It is the interaction between this creative process and the past that would seem to explain why Le Corbusier’s work has proved to be an inexhaustible reference point in the debate on the relationship between modern architecture, history and tradition. In fact, underlying the modernist “creation through destruction” is a deep historical consciousness that was common to Le Corbusier and his 3 Le Corbusier, History and Tradition modern contemporaries. He shared the same sense of the historical whole that can be found in T.