Becket, February 14, 2014
By 1924 Le Corbusier was 36 years old and had built very
little. Yet, he had already designed a "Contemporary city of three million
inhabitants" (that was roughly the population of Paris at the time) and his "Plan Voisin", a complete tabula-rasa transformation of the
historic center of Paris. For the 1925 Exposition International des Arts Décoratives he set out to build, literally, a house for his vision of the city. On
a tight structural grid--the "ossature domino" that would accompany
him for his whole life--and within an uncompromisingly compact rectangular
plan, Le Corbusier crams together two completely different spaces, one an
exhibition hall of curving walls with large dioramas illustrating his urban
plans, and the other a full-scale furnished dwelling of the new city, complete
with a tree piercing through its roof-terrace.
The Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau is well known, but I'm not
sure people realize what an extraordinarily bizarre project it is. The two
portions of the building are brutally different from each other, in form, in scale, in program, and in every other conceivable way, but rather
than trying to articulate them, Le Corbusier simply attaches them side
by side to then develop an elaborate "promenade architecturale"
coming and going from one side to the other. It is as if he had designed the
building equivalent of a mermaid or
a centaur.
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