Architecture View; LE CORBUSIER'S HOUSING PROJECT- FLEXIBLE ENOUGH TO ENDURE; by Ada Louise Huxtable (original) (raw)
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March 15, 1981
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March 15, 1981
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I have been to Pessac to see the future and contrary to popular belief and the conventional wisdom, it works. Pessac is the town near Bordeaux, in France, where Le Corbusier designed and built a community of 51 houses in the 1920's under the sponsorship of the French industrialist, Henry Fruges, who meant them to be a laboratory of new domestic, structural and esthetic ideas.
I went to Pessac prepared for the worst. Everything I had ever heard about it led to expectations of a failed experiment and an esthetic slum, a testament to the miscarriage of modernism and the arrogance of its architects. This did not turn out to be the case. The Pessac housing, a landmark of early modernism, is now more than 50 years old. It looks, and it doesn't look, like Le Corbusier's original design.
These are not ''landmark'' houses in the usual sense. They were not commissioned by those who were to live in them, and they are not, like Frank Lloyd Wright houses, objects of curatorial pride, or a responsibility that has led some owners to breakdown, divorce or flight. Pessac was built as experimental ''workers'' housing; there was no personal contract between occupant-patron and famous architect in which the owners' tastes, and even lives, are subordinate to the maintenance of a work of art, in which any change is a violation. With half a century of additions and remodelings, Le Corbusier's houses have been ''violated'' over and over. They have come a long way from his ''prisme pur'' or ''machine to live in,'' and even from their concept as a social experiment. But Pessac is alive and well today and making an entirely different kind of history than intended.
The Quartiers Modernes Fruges, as the project was called, has been put down in the literature of modernism almost since it was built. In his avant-garde 1929 book, ''Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration,'' the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock referred to Pessac as a ''serious disappointment.'' He had some praise for the variety of the planning, which embraced detached, semi-detached and row houses and three-story multiple dwellings that the Bordelaise called ''skyscrapers,'' all with individual gardens. But he scorned the interiors of the houses as ''uncomfortable for the small-salaried employees for whom they were designed,'' and called features like roof terraces more suitable for the artists and millionaires who were usually Le Corbusier's clients.
''Effective Pessac admittedly was,'' he wrote, ''but practical not at all, even in elementary matters ... As the first executed housing scheme of the New Pioneers in France it has actually done more harm than good to the development of modern housing there.'' Over the years, by way of the pilgrimage grapevine, have come vivid descriptions of how disgruntled and uncomprehending occupants have sabatoged the architecture.
With this background, Pessac has become a convenient whipping boy for those who are currently busy singling out every defect of the modern movement while declaring its demise. Pessac is the model failure. Say Pessac now, and you have said everything there is to say about all that ever went wrong with modern architecture. It is grouped ritually with that other example of modernist housing failure, Pruitt-Igoe, the public housing project in St. Louis that was dynamited after severe socio-economic problems made it uninhabitable. Pessac was supposedly finished off by the occupants' rebellious rejection of Le Corbusier's doctrinaire modernist esthetic and elitist ideas about how they should live.
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