Tectonics

Abstract

Although Le Corbusier's debt to vernacular architecture has been frequently discussed, the particular effects that the architect searched for in his postwar buildings have been insufficiently studied. The Maisons Jaoul (1951–1955) are a case in point. Le Corbusier's search for a direct, expressive, and tactile quality of building is here also related to his interest in the ideas and practice of Jean Dubuffet. Le Corbusier was not a regionalist but he particularly admired craftsmen from the Mediterranean basin, who, he believed, retained a vigorous and comprehensive sympathy for materials. This article, using firsthand interviews with Le Corbusier's craftsmen, explores the complex and subtle ways that Le Corbusier and his assistants negotiated the textural effects they desired, which Le Corbusier described ironically as mal foutu (messed up).     

Le Corbusier and Alexander Vesnin

Le Corbusier's world-wide success was unprecedented in twentieth century architecture. His ideas permeated many countries and inspired numerous professionals in the field. This paper considers one aspect of Le Corbusier's conquest of the architectural world: his personal contacts with leading architects around the globe, exemplified by his friendship with Alexander Vesnin, the Russian architect and artist. The origins of the friendship between Le Corbusier and A. Vesnin are analysed through a comparison of their biographies. Their two main points of contact are examined in detail: personal meetings between the two masters, and their correspondence, which casts light on both the history and nature of Le Corbusier's relationships with his correspondents. The paper ends with a discussion of Le Corbusier's impact on Vesnin's ideas and projects. The personal meetings and correspondence between Le Corbusier and A. Vesnin amply demonstrate Le Corbusier's talent for searching out professional contacts throughout the world, approaching them, and establishing personal relationships with them. These relationships enhanced Le Corbusier's influence, encouraged the development of ideas and projects similar to his own in many nations and, in Vesnin's case, contributed to the spread of 'the Le Corbusier myth' in Russia.     

走向勒·柯布西耶—— 青年勒·柯布西耶(1917～1933)的人格解析

在勒·柯布西耶赢得建筑大师“神话”的同时,他也被贴上“柯布式错误”的标签。我们该如何在这两者之间寻找理解大师理念和形式的平衡点？本次研究试图进行一个时段探索,选择勒·柯布西耶人生中非常特殊的一个演变阶段(1917～1933)进行观察,即从脱离家乡拉绍德封(La Chaux-de-Fonds)的让纳黑到巴黎的勒·柯布西耶的蜕变。正是在这一时期,他初显了作家、画家和建筑师的人格完整性。让纳黑成长为勒·柯布西耶既需要时代的推动,也需要其特殊的人格力量。这是一个在挫折和失败中快速成长的勒·柯布西耶,一个在理想和现实之间抗争的勒·柯布西耶。     

Le Corbusier, Teilhard de Chardin and The Planetisation of Mankind'

The modern world has made all things interrelated, the relations are continuous and contiguous around the globe, affected by nuances and diversity... The question is man and his environment, an event of local as well as of global order. 1 Le Corbusier was very interested in the ideas of the Jesuit priest and distinguished palaeontologist Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 'Do you know this man and his research (Palaeontology, the human condition, the future)?' wrote the architect to his friend and collaborator Andreas Speiser on 22 December, 1954.2 In this letter (Fig. 1) he relates that he spent the whole journey back from India reading the priest's works. 'I was very favourably impressed by him' he wrote, 'I must get in touch with him before long.' Le Corbusier includes in the letter a list of papers by Teilhard, which he must have believed to be of particular interest. The 'etc' at the end of this list is of interest, indicating the extent of the architect's reading of this profoundly religious man. Le Corbusier asterisked the first essay, linking it with the word ' avenir ' or future and also the word ' definitives ,' definitive answers, a word which he then crossed out with one line, leaving it clearly legible. It is as though he believed that Teilhard had the answers that he was so desperately looking for, but years of disappointment, secrecy and disillusionment had made him wary. Being first on the list, the essay La Planetisation Humaine , 'The Planetisation of Mankind' is probably the most important in terms of Le Corbusier's reading of Teilhard.3 In this paper I will focus on the essay in an attempt to deduce just why Le Corbusier was so impressed by the works of this radical priest. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on Le Corbusier's spiritual agenda for architecture, an aspect of his work which still remains remarkably obscure. In particular I will focus on the concept of community expressed in the Unite block in Marseilles (1952). It should be mentioned that Le Corbusier does make other references to Teilhard, for example in an interesting stream of consciousness in one of his sketchbooks of 1960.4 Incidents such as this indicate that the priest's ideas were a continuing source of inspiration for the architect.     

新建筑五项原则与结构体系——谈1910～1929年柯市西耶住宅设计的发展

建筑大师柯布西耶在他的建筑作品中将空间、形式、结构及理念完美地统一起来,因此建筑作品能够充分揭示柯布西耶的建筑理念、建筑形式与建筑结构等之间的联系。本文分析1910～1929年间柯布西耶早期的住宅作品,从结构方面剖析新建筑五项原则形成的历程及背景,透视柯布西耶不为人熟悉的一面,即自始至终对结构关注的设计思想。     

对柯布西耶设计的修道院中的非理性场景解析

通过对柯布西耶的Sainte Marie de La Tourette修道院中提取的三个建筑场景的分析,揭示了柯布西耶在修道院这类具有理性空间的建筑类型中的非理性操作,以提升人们对柯布西耶作品的认识。     

解读柯布西耶遗作——费尔米尼的圣皮埃尔教堂

文章叙述了柯布西耶遗作费尔米尼的圣皮埃尔教堂的设计与建造历程。作者通过分析揭示了柯布在宗教建筑中对用光手法的不断演进与突破;此外通过对柯布一系列草图的分析,试图理清建筑师设计思路的发展,并阐述其建筑设计体系的开放性。     

拉图雷特修道院与影响其设计过程的三个先例

拉图雷特修道院是勒·柯布西耶设计生涯乃至现代建筑史上的一个经典。国内此前对此作品的关注往往聚焦于该建筑空间和形式的强烈现代感上。那么,对于修道院这种传统类型而言,柯布西耶在设计这座建筑的时候是创造了一个新的建筑类型还是沿袭了既有的类型?柯布西耶有没有受到其他先例的启发?如果有,这些先例对设计过程产生了怎样的影响?笔者试图通过收集和整理柯布西耶在设计拉图雷特修道院之时以及他早年游学过程的史料,来从设计分析的角度诠释拉图雷特修道院的设计与探索。     

Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius: contacts prior to the Second World War

Le Corbusier left neither memoirs nor a life history written with his own pen. Nonetheless, he did leave hundreds of boxes filled with diaries, letters, notes, drawings with comments attached, designs and sketches – a wealth of documentary evidence upon which future historians might reconstruct his biography. When Le Corbusier decided that he was destined to become a great architect and appointed to bring a new architecture into the world, with full deliberation, he therefore meticulously kept every shred of documentation of his life, as had Stendhal and Thomas Mann before him. Most of this vast body of information is stored at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris. The author of this article had the opportunity to examine this material in depth, as well as the sources found at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin and the CIAM-Archiv in Zürich. The extensive documentation available made it possible to study Le Corbusier’s contacts with leading architects in many countries. This paper focuses on one of these contacts – the relationship between Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.     

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

Une Maison - un Palais , published in 1928, is at once an extension of Le Corbusier's campaign for his project, and an exposition of his architectural ideas as extended from the private house to the public building and, ultimately, to the city. His view of architecture, as developed through the 1920s, is set out in a highly condensed form in the These , the first section of this tripartite book. Une Maison- un Palais is Le Corbusier's last book of the 1920s, and all his concerns of those years are gathered up and displayed here. But Une Maison is not just a coda to the three L'Esprit Nouveau books. It is a bridge between L'Esprit nouveau and the books and journals of the 1930s; between the Purist houses of the 1920s and the larger buildings of the following decade; between the relatively anonymous geometries of the Ville Contemporaine and the much more site-specific and curvaceous structures of the Algiers projects. The project for the Palais des Nations led Le Corbusier not only from maison to palais but also to a much more developed consideration of the place of the public building in the urban plan.     

关于勒·柯布西耶的周末住宅分析

该文以勒·柯布西耶1935年设计的周末住宅为线索,从建筑形态,结构体系等方面展现这一时期的住宅的特点,揭示勒·柯布西耶在设计乡土建筑中的思维和创作方法。     

'Beyond the clichés of the hand-books': Le Corbusier's architectural promenade

This study places Charles-Edouard Jeanneret/Le Corbusier's concept of the architectural promenade within the culture of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887-1917. It is based on in-depth empirical research being currently carried out in private and public archives in La Chaux-de-Fonds and in other Swiss towns. The paper also considers to a lesser extent specific aspects of the architecture of Le Corbusier in Paris after 1917, which are in accord with the La Chaux-de-Fonds period of 1887-1917, based on current in-depth research in private and public archives in France. The essay, which thus presents completely new empirical evidence, is part of research in progress towards a monograph in preparation for the MIT Press. By extrapolation, through its analysis of Jeanneret/Le Corbusier's architectural promenade within the cultural and intellectual context of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887-1917, the study addresses the problematics of the architectural language of the Modern Movement.     

Voices in Architectural Education: Cultural Politics and Pedagogy

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was a contemporary of Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He gave Le Corbusier a copy of his most celebrated book, La Part Maudite (The accursed share) and inscribed it with a warm dedication. At the time he received this gift, Le Corbusier was about to embark on the planning of Chandigarh in India. On his way to India, Le Corbusier read the book; he read it autobiographically, the same way he had read his copy of Homer's The Iliad and Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Le Corbusier's reading of La Part Maudite is a significant event in his late intellectual life. This essay reflects on the nature of Le Corbusier's reading. It traces the circumstances of the friendship between these two very different thinkers and speculates on the origin of their affinities and the confluence of the ideas that brought them together. I argue that the notions of the gift and potlatch in La Part Maudite, coming to Bataille from Marcel Mauss, are at the origin of the idea of the Open Hand in India.     

浅议柯布西耶的建筑与绘画

勒·柯布西耶是二十世纪建筑界杰出的人物．通过探讨柯布西耶的绘画与建筑的关系,找寻其间的联系和相互作用,有助于深刻地理解柯布西耶的建筑,理解其深层的观念、精神实质及其突出的创作与巨大成就的原因。     

The Cultural Politics of Aerial Vision: Le Corbusier in Brazil (1929)

The early twentieth-century invention of the airplane brought on a cultural euphoria that influenced the works and writings of urbanists, architects, artists, and science-fiction writers during the 1920s and 1930s. Le Corbusier's urban design for Rio de Janeiro—which he sketched, so he claimed, from an airplane—offers a visual basis to study how the aesthetic experience of flight was translated spatially, visually, and politically into his design of the future city. The polemics informing Le Corbusier's aerial "discovery" of South American geography revealed that there was a new empowerment in the act of looking from above, and that the spatial characteristics of his subsequent design interventions evoked that empowerment.     

浅谈居住机器的发展

提出了柯布关于"居住的机器"的名言,分析了其概念的时代局限,同时提出了人类心理需求与居住环境在历史发展中的相互对应关系,从历史角度分析了柯布理念的局限,得出目前"居住的机器"仍然适用,但需要提高其灵活的适应程度,最后提出关于"灵活的居住机器"的对策,对于我国住宅建设具有一定借鉴意义。     

Le Corbusier,Teilhard de Chardin and The Planetisation of Mankind'

The modern world has made all things interrelated, the relations are continuous and contiguous around the globe, affected by nuances and diversity... The question is man and his environment, an event of local as well as of global order. 1 Le Corbusier was very interested in the ideas of the Jesuit priest and distinguished palaeontologist Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. 'Do you know this man and his research (Palaeontology, the human condition, the future)?' wrote the architect to his friend and collaborator Andreas Speiser on 22 December, 1954.2 In this letter (Fig. 1) he relates that he spent the whole journey back from India reading the priest's works. 'I was very favourably impressed by him' he wrote, 'I must get in touch with him before long.' Le Corbusier includes in the letter a list of papers by Teilhard, which he must have believed to be of particular interest. The 'etc' at the end of this list is of interest, indicating the extent of the architect's reading of this profoundly religious man. Le Corbusier asterisked the first essay, linking it with the word ' avenir ' or future and also the word ' definitives ,' definitive answers, a word which he then crossed out with one line, leaving it clearly legible. It is as though he believed that Teilhard had the answers that he was so desperately looking for, but years of disappointment, secrecy and disillusionment had made him wary. Being first on the list, the essay La Planetisation Humaine , 'The Planetisation of Mankind' is probably the most important in terms of Le Corbusier's reading of Teilhard.3 In this paper I will focus on the essay in an attempt to deduce just why Le Corbusier was so impressed by the works of this radical priest. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on Le Corbusier's spiritual agenda for architecture, an aspect of his work which still remains remarkably obscure. In particular I will focus on the concept of community expressed in the Unite block in Marseilles (1952). It should be mentioned that Le Corbusier does make other references to Teilhard, for example in an interesting stream of consciousness in one of his sketchbooks of 1960.4 Incidents such as this indicate that the priest's ideas were a continuing source of inspiration for the architect.     

拉图雷特修道院建筑中的互文性

本文以勒·柯布西耶晚年的作品拉图雷特修道院为对象,借用文学批评中的互文性概念,考察柯布在创作过程中援引的4个历史先例:爱玛修道院、索伦特修道院、雅典卫城、阿索斯圣山的西蒙·佩特拉修道院,梳理出这4个历史原型中哪些词汇进入到了柯布的视野中,并转化、熔铸成他独特的新建筑语汇,最后编织出了一首壮丽恢宏的现代建筑史诗——拉图雷特修道院。     

情感建筑--纪念勒·柯布西耶逝世40周年

该文通过纪念勒·柯布西耶逝世40周年,指出在当今的建筑发展历程中更加全面地重新认识柯布西耶的可能性、意义和途径,并指出柯布西耶的建筑的真情感属性,正是他的作品超越时间的原因。     

An exemplar for modernism: Le Corbusier's Adelaide drawing,urbanism and the Chandigarh plan

The paper closely examines a plan drawing of the city of Adelaide, South Australia, made by the architect Le Corbusier in 1950, shortly before he took up the commission to design the city of Chandigarh in the Indian Punjab. A series of parallels are made between the Adelaide drawing and the production of the Chandigarh master plan, which are used to re-open questions of Le Corbusier's famous design for the city and aspects of his urbanism. In doing so the paper also points to Adelaide's peculiar status as an exemplar for critical modernist agendas regarding the organisation and planning of cities subscribed to by Le Corbusier and earlier city reformers like Ebenezer Howard. The paper concludes by offering a fresh assessment of the role of technique and process in Le Corbusier's urban projects including Chandigarh, which the architect's Adelaide drawing can help to evidence.