Le Corbusier’s Architecture and His Politics Are Revisited (original) (raw)
Art & Design|Le Corbusier’s Architecture and His Politics Are Revisited
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Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse apartments in Marseille, France.Credit...Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times
- July 12, 2015
PARIS — Was the paradigm-changing architect known as Le Corbusier a fascist-leaning ideologue whose plans for garden cities were inspired by totalitarian ideals, or a humanist who wanted to improve people’s living conditions — a political naïf who, like many architects, was eager to work with almost any regime that would let him build?
These questions, long debated by experts, are at the heart of fresh controversy in France set off by three new books that re-examine that master Modernist’s politics and an exhibition on Le Corbusier at the Pompidou Center here through Aug. 3, commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death. In light of the books, the exhibition has been criticized for glossing over, in particular, Le Corbusier’s well-documented involvement with far-right elements in France from the 1920s to the 1940s.
The polemics in the French news media have grown so pointed since the show opened in April that the Pompidou announced that it would hold a symposium next year on Le Corbusier’s politics. Antoine Picon, chairman of the Le Corbusier Foundation, which manages his archive and helps preserve his buildings, said he worried that the debate might affect an application submitted this year for various examples of the architect’s work in seven countries, including France and Chandigarh, India, to be classified as Unesco World Heritage sites. The attacks also come amid the rise of the far-right National Front in France and within a broader debate on that country’s World War II-era past and the legacy of Modernism.
“We were very, very surprised by the violence of the criticism,” said Frédéric Migayrou, one of the curators of “Le Corbusier, Measurement of Man,” at the Pompidou. He said the architect’s politics were well known and the museum never intended them to be the focus of the fairly modest exhibition. It draws on Le Corbusier’s post-Cubist sculpture and painting to demonstrate how he used the human form as an organizing principle in his architecture, from furniture to city planning, a link not generally associated with the clean lines of rationalist architecture.
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Le Corbusier with a model apartment building in 1935.Credit...The New York Times
But from what angle did the architect approach the individual? The authors of “Le Corbusier, a French Fascism,” by the journalist Xavier de Jarcy; “Le Corbusier, a Cold Vision of the World,” by the journalist Marc Perelman; and “A Corbusier,” by the architect and critic François Chaslin essentially argue that Le Corbusier’s aesthetics cannot be separated from his politics, which leaned more to the right than the left, despite work he did in Moscow.
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