The godless temple, 'organon of the infinite'

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 63-90

  Carl, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649147388     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360500063147     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Schiller, Friedrich, 'Letter IX' of the Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man, originally published in Die Horen, as Brief über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen.
2. Eventually published posthumously as Die Philosophie der Kunst in 1859 by his son, Karl F., in Schelling's Sämmtliche Werke. The lectures cover an important transitional period in Schelling's thinking, as he moved away from Fichte's concept of transcendental ego, and began to identify the absolute as God.
3. The published lectures come from the last period, and are edited, translated and introduced by D. W. Stott as The Philosophy of Art, University of Minnesota Press, 1989 (foreword by D. Simpson).
4. 'Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.' Une saison en enfer, 1872, II
5. Alchimie du verbe; in Rimbaud, Complete works, Selected letters, translation, introduction and notes by Wallace Fowlie (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 194-5.
6. 'Des choses sont sacrées, d'autres ne le sont pas, qu'elles soient religieuses ou non.' Le livre de Ronchamp, fourteenth volume of Les cahiers forces vives, directed by Jean Petit, Paris 1961, p. 21 (dedication text dated 25 June, 1955).
7. Heidegger, Martin, 'The Origin of the Work of Art', originally a lecture, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1935;
8. translation of a later version in Poetry, Language, Thought, by Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 15 ff.
9. As footnote 5; l'espace indicible is a central concept for Le Corbusier's later poetics. The subject of an article published in L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, 1946, he claims to have discovered the concept in 1945, according to the 'Preamble' to Le Modulor, Paris, 1950 (English translation by de Francia and Bostock, Harvard University Press, 1954, p. 30;
10. see also Chapter 1 and p. 207 of Modulor 2, Paris, 1955, English translation, Harvard, 1958, p. 25).
11. Knowingly or not, the phrase used in the 'Preamble', p. 32 (and Modulor 2, pp. 27, 207), 'a fathomless depth gapes open' is a decent translation of the Ancient Greek 'chaos'.
12. See also note 46. Le Corbusier's concept requires the interaction of words and space, and therefore differs from the ekphrastic topos of professing an inability to match words to architecture, as in, for example, the praise of Haghia Sophia by Manuel Chrysoloras in the early 1420s, translated and analysed in Smith, Christine, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism. Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence, 1400-1470 (Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, 1992), pp. 166-7 (I am grateful to Fabio Barry for raising this issue and for this reference).
13. Le Poème de l'angle droit (Éditions Verve, Paris, 1955), p. 13.
14. This work awaits proper study; see Becket-Chary, Daphne, 'A Study of Le Corbuseir's Le poème de l'angle droit' (unpublished MPhil. Dissertation, Cambridge University, 1990).
15. Augustine, The City of God, D. Knowles translation, London, 1972.
16. The concluding chapter, 'The eternal felicity of the City of God in its Perpetual Sabbath' (XXII.30) is prepared, in reverse sequence, by Chapters XXII.1 (creation of angels and men), XIX.13 (The Peace of the Universe ...) and XIX.11 (the determination of 'Jerusalem' as 'vision of Peace').
17. James Dunnett argues that Corbusian topographies were meant to institute a condition of meditation in 'The Architecture of Silence: Corbusier's motivations in house and city design', Architectural Review, Vol 178, no. 1064, October 1985, pp. 69-75.
18. Heidegger, Martin, 'Letter on Humanism', in Pathmarks, edited by W. McNeill, translated by F. Capuzzi, pp. 239 ff.
19. In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier had declared, p. 68.
20. 'Geometry is the language of man', London, 1927.
21. F. Etchells translation of Vers une architecture, Paris, 1923.
22. Le Poème de l'angle droit, op. cit., pp 89-91 (punctuation added in my translation): '... un absolu sublime/ accomplissement il est l'accord/des temps la pénétration des/formes la proportions - l'indicible/en fin de compte soustrait/au contrôle/de la/raison/porté hors/des/réalitiés/diurnes/admis/au coeur/d'une/illumination/Dieu/ incarné/dans/l'illusion/la perception/de la verité/peut- être/bien ...'
23. 'Poésie, chef de file de l'économique et maîtresse du social ... la nourriture essentielle des peuples, celle qui donne l'endurance, maintient le courage, entretient la foi ...', Le Corbusier, Poésie sur Alger, Paris, 1950, pp. 10 and 46; essay dated 1942. For a more complete summary of his concept of poésie, and its relationship with 'harmonie' and 'unité', see the essay 'Unité', cited below, note 52. Within German Romanticism, poesie meant not only poetry or the representational arts in general (based on the Greek poiesis), but also included an aesthetic consideration of nature.
24. This list represents a summary of the thematic range of Le Corbusier's dialogue between his arts and the sacred. It affects everything, and accordingly one could cite the whole Le Corbusier literature. However, for an introduction to the themes and further bibliography, see Benton, Tim, et al., Le Corbusier Architect of the Century (Arts Council of Britain, London, 1987);
25. Curtis, William, Le Corbusier Ideas and Forms (Phaidon, Oxford, 1986);
26. Frampton, Kenneth, Le Corbusier (Thames and Hudson, London, 2001);
27. von Moos, Stanislav, Le Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis (MIT Press, 1979);
28. Walden, R., (ed.). The Open Hand, Essays on Le Corbusier (MIT Press, 1977);
29. Saddy, Pierre, et al., Le Corbusier le passé à réaction poétique (Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites, Paris, 1988);
30. and, for general background, Tuchman, Maurice, et al., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (LACMA and New York, 1986).
31. In this Journal, see the essay by Flora Samuel, 'Le Corbusier, Teilhard de Chardin and The Planetisation of Mankind', Vol. 4, Number 2, June 1999, pp. 149-65
32. (as well as her book, with Sarah Menin, Nature and Space - Aalto and Le Corbusier [Routledge, 2002]).
33. Schelling, F. W. J., Nature and Space - Aalto and Le Corbusier, op. cit., p. 45.
34. See, for example, Moore, Richard, Myth and Meta Architecture (Atlanta, Ga., USA, 1977)
35. (a shorter summary in Oppositions 19/20, 1980, pp. 110-139)
36. and Jencks, Charles, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, (Monacelli Press, 2000). Le Corbusier himself is more discrete about such matters than many of his interpreters.
37. Bowie, Andrew, From Romanticism to Critical Theory (Routledge, 1997), p. 33.
38. Gusdorf, Georges, Du néant à Dieu dans le savoir Romantique (Payot, Paris, 1983), p. 121.
39. Compare Schelling, 'art is itself an emanation of the absolute', op. cit., p. 19.
40. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, Second English edition (London, 1979),
41. (eg. Dilthey's biography of Goethe, 1870; his Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung is 1905).
42. Werner Hofmann saw the phenomenon of 'Romantic religiosity [in painting, such as that of Freidrich] ... not as something directly perceived by the eye of the artist himself but as a pre-existent work of art ...' (The Earthly Paradise, Art in the Nineteenth Century [Braziller, 1961], p. 152).
43. On this, see Turner, Paul, The Education of Le Corbusier, a study of the Development of Le Corbusier's Thought 1900-1920 (Garland Press, New York, 1977).
44. The right angle had been the subject of an article by Ozenfant and Le Corbusier (as Jeanneret) in l'Esprit Nouveau, No. 18 (no pagination), of about 1924, to judge from the 'actualité' section. The article is divided into two parts, which seem also to represent the two authors - the second part is an unmistakable Corbusian rant, and is written in the first person. The first part is the more interesting, as it seeks to establish the fundamental ordering principle of the angle droit in archaic writing and art, preferring the term hiératisme to carry le sens du sacré and to distinguish Purist art, with its involvement with les objets-types (banal but perfectly legible), from the extremes of Impressionism/Futurism (both concerned with the ephemeral and the oblique) and de Stijl (meaningless abstraction).
45. Le Corbusier encountered the iconostasis on his journey to the Orient; and his phantasmagoric experience of a night festival of the Virgin on Mount Athos possibly inspired certain aspects of the poem ('A fantastic vision of the sanctuary of the Virgin ... in a dark apse behind the iconostasis.'). See Žaknić, Ivan, ed. and trans. (with Nicole Pertuiset), Journey to the East (MIT, 1987), pp. 202-206
46. Zuccaro, F. L'idea de' pittori, scultori ed architetti (Milan, 1607), I.3, pp. 38 ff.
47. Panofsky, E., Idea, a Concept in Art History (Harper and Row, 1968), pp. 88-91;
48. translation by S. Peake of Idea: Ein Beitrag sur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie, Studien der Bibliotek Warburg, Nr. 5 (B. Teubner Verlag, Leipzig, 1924).
49. See Carnet H1, pp. 78-80 and 85-89
50. Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Volume 3, 1954-57, Françoise de Franclieu (MIT and Fondation Le Corbusier, 1982).
51. Le Corbusier, Precisions (MIT, 1991), p. 51;
52. E. S. Aujame translation of Precisions sur un état présent de l'architecture et de l'urbanisme (Paris, 1930).
53. In a letter to James Johnson Sweeney of 1961, Le Corbusier cites the full title of this poem - Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard - as evidence that Mallarmé thought that 'there was always the possibility to conquer even destiny.' See Jean Jenger, Le Corbusier Choix de lettres (Basel, Birkhäuser and Paris, Fondation Le Corbusier, 2002), p. 474.
54. Mallarmé is the only author, along with Cervantes and Rabelais, to be mentioned in mise au point (see note 44), including the last of several quotations from Mallarmé in Le Corbusier's writings (and on the mural of the Pavilion Suisse) - here from his 'Le guignon'. See the unpublished Dissertation of Lucy Carmichael, Garder mon aile dans ta main: the influence of poetry on the poetics of Le Corbusier (Cambridge, 1995).
55. See, for example, section 16 of the chapter 'l'architecture' and the concluding 'un atelier de recherches' of his Entretien avec les étudiants des écoles d'architecture (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1957), no pagination.
56. In his dialogue with the sculptor Savina, (selected excerpts in Jean Petit, editor, Le Corbusier lui-même [Geneva, 1970], pp. 251-254), one sees that the 'pact with nature' moves from drawing (of items from nature) through materials and polychromy to a species of 'vision' of the statuary against natural surroundings, that forms part of the argument for the synthesis of architecture, urbanism and landscape preached since his early writings, and summarised in the essay 'Unité', cited below, note 52. See also, in the same volume, p. 178, Le Corbusier's account of objets à réaction poétique.
57. The 'prodigious spectacle' of Nature is deemed to have been produced by 'the interplay of two elements, one male, one female: sun and water' in 'Laws', The Radiant City (second edition, New York, The Orion Press, 1967)
58. (translation by Knight, Levieux and Coltman from La Ville Radieuse [Paris, 1964]), p. 78.
59. rd edition, 1981). Any contrast with the distressing circumstances of Von's final years is irrelevant.
60. de Pierrefeu, François (text) and Le Corbusier (illustrations), La maison des hommes (Paris, Plon 1942), p. 120. This is another formulation of the theme of house/city mentioned in the Introduction to this article.
61. Descriptive text, drawings and plates in Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934 (W. Boesinger, Zurich. 1935), pp. 144-153.
62. For a history of the construction and description, see Green, Christopher, 'The architect as artist at home: Porte-Molitor apartments, 24 rue Nungesser-et-Coli', in Tim Benton et al., Le Corbusier Architect of the Century (Arts Council of Britain, London, 1987), op. cit., pp. 127-29
63. and Sbriglio, Jacques, Immeuble 24 N.C. et Appartement Le Corbusier (Birkhäuser, Fondation Le Corbusier, 1996).
64. For a treatment of iconographic aspects of his apartment not considered here, see Carl, Peter, 'Le Corbusier's Penthouse in Paris, 24 Rue Nungesser-et-Coli', Daidalos 28, June 1988, pp. 65-75.
65. On Charlotte Perriand's general and particular influence on the design, see the essays by McLeod, Mary, 'New Designs for Living: Domestic Equipment of Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret, 1928-29', pp. 36 ff.,
66. and Ruegg, Arthur, 'Transforming the Bathroom: Perriand and Le Corbusier, 1927-57', pp. 114 ff.
67. in McLeod, Mary, ed., Charlotte Perriand an Art of Living (New York, 2003).
68. On p. 148 of the Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934, op. cit., Le Corbusier complains that the Parisian regulations regarding the gabarits, the roof-profiles, are left over from an age of wooden construction, and are 'inadmissible in the epoch of construction in steel and reinforced concrete.'
69. However, he publishes in the subsequent volume of the Oeuvre Complète, 1934-38, p. 131, a sketch attributed to 1929, called Ma Maison, whose vast studio is lavishly endowed with vaults.
70. These are indebted to a factory on which he was working and do not yet show the subtlety of the vaults for his apartment or for the subsequent Maison de week-end (1935), opposite which are published the sketches for Ma Maison. The House for an Artist, 1922
71. 'Le vol d'avion = spectacle à thése = philosophie ... indifférance à nos notions millélleniares, fatalité des évènements et élèments cosmiques ...' (Petit, Jean, Le Corbusier parle [Geneva, 1961], p. 78). See note 62.
72. Plato, Symposium, 189D and ff (Plato, Lysis Symposium Gorgias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb [Loeb Edition, Harvard, 1925] et seq., pp. 134 and ff; in conformity with Le Corbusier's reading we find at 192E, '..the craving and pursuit of that unity [of two halves] is called Love'). The sphere - in fact an oval, like the painting - is divided horizontally in the Milan lecture (mise au point, op. cit., p. 90). The Brassai photograph of
73. Le Corbusier's Rue Jacob apartment, taken in the early 1930s, shows this painting over the fireplace (foyer), and was published by Le Corbusier in La Ville Radieuse (Paris, 1935), p. 9 (under the heading 'The Free Man').
74. Le Corbusier's essay, 'Unité', appeared in a special issue of l'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui devoted to Le Corbusier, aged 60, 1948, pp. 17 and 52. 'L'ideal est que l'oeuve atteigne l'éclat du diamant. Une éthique et une esthétique de franchise' (p. 55).
75. 'Introduction', L'Oeuvre Complète 1938-46, (Boesinger, Zurich), p. 8 (repeated in mise au point, op. cit., p. 50). A few lines later, Le Corbusier characteristically also sees this 'temple' as a 'universal objet de fabrication, "produit de consommation feconde" ...'
76. Beyond the obvious similarities of topography and the visual discourse with the paradigmatic woman, the following themes suggest a deeper commonality: The paradigmatic woman: The specifically Mariological aspects in van Eyck's painting - called out by the inscription on the hem of her gown - are only latent in the vague sanctity which attends Le Corbusier's fusion of Von and his Mother. The domestication of the house of the Virgin was well developed in the Annunciation of Robert Campin's Mérode triptych, roughly contemporary with the van Eyck painting. Paradise on earth: Le Corbusier's concept of 'three-dimensional urbanism ... the full flowering of architecture: prelude, chorale and fugue, melody and counterpoint, texture and rhythm' (Modulor, L'Oeuvre Complète 1938-46, op. cit., p. 168)
77. This strategy is more obviously related to the Incarnation in the antecedent Annunciation paintings, which typically place Gabriel in Rolin's position, and allow the viewer to grasp the meaning by gazing between them (see Rawlings, Peter, 'Study of the Iconography and Architectural Setting of the Annunciation in Renaissance Painting', unpublished MPhil Dissertation, Cambridge Department of Architecture, 1992). This symbolic structure is deeply obscured, but still preserved, in the radically open-ended referential field of (Cubist) 'space' which seeks embodiment - or incarnation or hypostasis - in the careful arrangement of forms anchored to earth. The degree to which this process of embodiment is still a matter of visual synthesis in contemplation in the work of Le Corbusier (beyond the reciprocity between A.3 and E.3), is evident, first, in the primacy of the frontal view in his Purist-Cubist images and architectural settings, secondly, in the consequent pervasiveness of the horizon in his paintings and architecture and, thirdly, in the fusion of chaos and geometry, space and word, which comprises the concept of l'espace indicible, which in turn recalls the concetto's fusion of image and word Light and the artist: Insofar as the fiat lux of Genesis refers to the one part of reality God actually created ex nihilo, and insofar as God's creation of the world is the content of God's response to Job, one can see in van Eyck's painting an explicit reference to this creative light as a vehicle of salvation and communication with God (accompanied by the Genesis cycle on the column-capitals), and an implicit parallel between God's creation and that of the painter. Panofsky (Idea) and Cassirer (Individuum und Cosmos) both call attention to the shift, from the time of Leonardo, still concerned to read nature as God's creation, to Mannerism, where natura naturans becomes more directly associated with artistic imagination and a resulting idealisation of nature according to the Humanist conception of the Antique. Nietzsche takes this principle for granted, elevating the theme to the will to power through art, whereby Dionysiac creativity becomes central to authentic humanity, and a means of intramundane salvation. For Le Corbusier, who, for the last thirteen years of his life (as long as his Purist period), identified himself with a Dionysiac Bull, 'The artist is a medium of infinite, extraordinary sensitivity; he feels and discerns nature and translates it in his own works.
78. He is both the victim and interpreter of his fate' (Modulor, Study of the Iconography and Architectural Setting of the Annunciation in Renaissance Painting, op. cit., p. 30).
79. The works of this artist will not only synthesise the major arts (Oeuvre Complète 1946-52, op. cit., p. 67)
80. Paris, Louvre, originally Notre Dame du Chastel, Autun, about 66cm high, generally agreed to be early 1430s. The literature on this work is extensive. For good colour-plates and a brief, sensible description, see Dahnens, Elisabeth, Hubert and Jan Van Eyck (Alpine, New York, n.d. [about 1980]), pp. 266 ff.
81. For a more detailed analysis (mostly Marialogical) and summary of scholarship, see Purtle, Carol J., The Marian Paintings of Jan van Eyck (Princeton, 1982), pp. 59 ff. In virtue of the role of the artist in Le Corbusier's apartment, mention might be made of the body of paintings that orbits about the Boston 'St. Luke and the Virgin', attributed to Rogier van der Weyden and regularly paired with the van Eyck.
82. On these issues, see now Vesely, Dalibor, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, the Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (MIT Press, 2004), Chap. 3.
83. This thought is anticipated in the treatment of utopia in relation to what the authors call the 'gospel' of modernist architectural polemics in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (MIT, 1976).
84. On the phenomenon of modern gnosticism see the fundamental text of Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago, 1952).
85. Valéry, Paul, 'Leonardo and the Philosophers - A Letter to Leo Ferrero', in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé (Vol. 8 of the Collected Works), the 1929 version with marginal notes, translated by M. Cowley and J. R. Lawler (Routlege and Princeton University Press, 1972) pp. 110-157;
86. the publishing history, p. 438.
87. One sees a similar confusion in Panofsky's conception of the first stratum of understanding of what he then called 'iconology' - it is difficult to understand how perception of 'pure form' could lie at the heart of 'practical experience' (Studies in Iconology, 'Introductory', [Oxford University Press, 1939], pp. 3-17).
88. Le Corbusier on Leonardo shortly after the completion of the apartment: 'The obsession of Leonardo da Vinci - painter, sculptor, architect, hydraulic and military engineer - was that man could fly' (Aircraft, Paris, 1935; London, 1985), p. 70.
89. and flying stood for a Nietzschean 'LIVE HEROICALLY! BELIEVE AND ACT!' (ibid., p. 66).
90. Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture, the growth of a new tradition, fifth edition (Harvard, 1967), p. xxxvi.
91. It might be offered that a new tradition is a contradiction in terms, an error arising from the historicistic tendency to think in terms of culturally distinct epochs. The background to Giedion's assertions appears in the exchange between form and psychology (conforming to that between logical reason and experience suggested here) in late nineteenth-century German aesthetics documented and discussed in Mallgrave, Harry and Iconomu, Elefftherios, Empathy Form and Space (Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994).
92. The interesting effort by Martin Buber to cope with the concrete (architecture) and conceptual (space) dimensions of this legacy is discussed in this Journal by Judi Loach and Raquel Rapaport, 'Buber on (looking at) architecture' (Vol. 5, No. 2, June 2000, pp. 189-214), although one hears Siegfried Krakauer's reservations regarding Buber's archaisms again here (The Bible in German', translated and edited in The Mass Ornament [Harvard University Press, 1995], pp. 189-201).