Theoretical and poetical ideas in Le Corbusier's Une - Maison un Palais

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-30

  Poole, C A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249605377     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/136023698374288     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. The location of these huts has been identified by Christopher Green; see 'The architect as artist', in Le Corbusier Architect of the Century (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987), p. 114.
2. ie, 1928. Reissued Fondation Le Corbusier, 1989. pp. 48-52.
3. The Cathars were persecuted, and survivors are believed to have fled to northern Italy and Switzerland. For Le Corbusier's Albigensian inheritance, see Stanislaus von Moos, Elements of a Synthesis. (MIT, 1979), p. 1.
4. Paul Turner, 'Romanticism, Rationalism, and the Domino system', in The Open Hand, Essays on Le Corbusier, edited by Russell Walden (MIT, 1977) p. 18: 'One view, which could be called rationalist, is concerned first and foremost with objective, worldly matters - structure, technology, function, other human needs - and is suggested by Le Corbusier's famous definition of a house as a "machine for living." The other conception (implied by another of Le Corbusier's definitions, "Architecture, pure création de l'ésprit") could in a general way be called romantic; it sees architecture principally as a spiritual or personal activity - whether as the creation of abstract forms, or in a Platonic or idealistic sense, as the embodiment of perfect spiritual ideas that the architect has intuited or discovered.' In Une Maison - un Palais - the very title containing at least a duality, if not an opposition - the following paired concepts may be found: spirit/function academy/modern school [rotting] flesh/spirit order/disorder man/nature house/palace
5. Une Maison - un Palais, p. 2: 'And this usual conception of architecture: to disturb it is not permitted at this moment by the young, by those who come and who, in open war with the Academy, wrestle over that which is called "architecture". Nauseated by the lies of Schools, driven by a fierce desire for purity, here they deny that which at the bottom of their hearts is their only and special passion.' Later, Le Corbusier was to tangle with the functionalists in the person of Karel Teige - Their 1929 dispute, published as 'Mundaneum' (Teige) and 'In Defense of Architecture' (Le Corbusier) is available in English in Oppositions 4 (MIT, 1974).
6. See Anthony Vidler, in The Writing of the Walls, 'From the Hut to the Temple: Quatremère de Quincy and the idea of Type', (Butterworth, 1989), p. 147.
7. See H. Allen Brooks, 'Le Corbusier's formative years at La Chaux-de-Fonds', p. 27 in the essay collection Le Corbusier, edited by H. Allen Brooks, Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 27.
8. Also Russell Walden, New light on Le Corbusier's early years in Paris: the La Roche-Jeanneret Houses' published in The Open Hand, (MIT, 1977), p. 116.
9. See also Paul Turner's essay, Romanticism, Rationalism and the Domino System' in the same collection, p. 14.
10. Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis (MIT, 1979). The wine bottles, glasses, plates and pipes of those paintings were literally measured once identified. Some of these measurements survive in the archive of the Fondation Le Corbusier, which gives some indication of the importance of proportion in the Purist type-object: the same conjunction of utility and poetry was emphasized eight years later in Une Maison.
11. Paul Venables Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier, doctoral thesis (Garland Publishing, 1977); see the concluding chapter, 'Le Corbusier's Synthesis'.
12. Vers une Architecture. p. 89. The passage follows on from this well-known definition of a house: 'A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on .' [etc.]
13. See Joseph Rykwert. On Adams' House in Paradise (Museum of Modern Art, NY 1981);
14. also Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls;
15. and Donald Drew Egbert, The Beaux-arts Tradition in French Architecture (Princeton, 1980) for the Beaux-Arts interpretation of type and character.
16. This has been noted by a number of writers, among them Kenneth Frampton: 'This transposition of a house into a palace and vice versa is a key notion underlying Le Corbusier's output and the elaborate metaphorical substance of his entire endeavour is incomprehensible if we do not understand that it is grounded in this fundamental notion of a transposable hierarchy. The house/palace syndrome is conceived by Le Corbusier as the archetypal double. On this dialectical base, compounded of both classicism and Utopian socialism, he established his metaphorical fulcrum: a Purist mythology derived in part from the antique and in part from the technology of the nineteenth century'. Frampton, 'Le Corbusier's designs for the League of Nations, the Centrosoyus and the Palace of the Soviets, 1926-1931' in H. Allen Brooks (ed.), Le Corbusier (Princeton, 1987), p. 60.
17. As Patricia May Sekler noted. See Mary Patricia May Sekler, 'Ruskin, the Tree and the Open Hand', published in The Open Hand (MIT, 1977).
18. Also see Sekler's doctoral thesis, The Early Drawings of Charles Edouard Jeanneret, 1902-1908, (Harvard, 1973).
19. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament. (London, Folio Edition, c 1856)