Architectures de l'information (original) (raw)

2013, Études de communication

The Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, wrote "Vers une architecture" in 1923. The book, one of the most successful and controversial pamphlet in the history of architecture and the manifesto of Modernism, was a collection of essays and articles coauthored with purist painter Amédée Ozenfant, most of them originally published on their cubist periodical L'Esprit nouveau. It was a passionate invite to architects to embrace the machine-inspired beauty of modernity and turn it into a novel idea of architecture. Only by leaving palaces 1 behind and becoming "a mirror of the times" would architecture fulfill its role, the creation of a "human milieu" (Le Corbusier, 2007, Introduction). According to Le Corbusier, architecture was stagnating and perpetuating ideals stemming from a "cursed enslavement to the past", turning "eyes that do not see" to the industrial allure of modern life. While social and economic structures were being redesigned by machines, architects were "lost in the sterile pochés of their plans", suffocating in the routine of "(h)ouses (built) like tabernacles". Le Corbusier saw beauty in the calculations of "(a)nonymous engineers, greasy mechanics": mathematical, pure, and natural. Airplanes, ocean liners, bridges, grain silos: constant praise of engineering work flows through the book 2. These, Le Corbusier says, are architectonic examples of beauty architects are incapable of producing. Hence, they do not see the house as the machine for living in it is supposed to be, producing stiff, outof-time bourgeois mansions instead of giving their clients what they need: "(b)aths, sun, hot water, cold water, controlled temperature, food conservation, hygiene, beauty through proportion." (Le Corbusier, ibid., pp. 151-156). The book is not only an endless string of invectives: with its "three reminders" to architects, surface, volume, an increased attention to the plan as the originator of space, Architectures of Information Études de communication, 41 | 2013 Architectures of Information Études de communication, 41 | 2013 19. This is a characteristic of cross-channel user experiences entirely absent from the more passive, unidirectional crossmedia and transmedia experiences.