Εμμέσως – Η Villa Savoye του Le Corbusier στο Poissy / In a Mediated Manner – Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye at Poissy

Αν είναι γεγονός ότι το έργο του Le Corbusier μπορεί με αρκετή ευκολία να διαιρεθεί στα δύο –το πριν απο την Οικονομική Κρίση περί το 1930, στιλπνό και λευκό, και το μετά την Χιροσίμα, αδρό και γκρίζο– η Villa Savoye είναι εκείνη που κατά κανόνα εκπροσωπεί την πρώτη περίοδο. Και όμως, η Savoye ούτε το καλύτερο έργο εκείνης της περιόδου είναι, ούτε ενδεικτική των γενικότερων προβληματισμών του Le Corbusier περί των μεμονωμένων κτηρίων, ως προπομπών μιας νέας πολεοδομικής τάξης. Κτίσθηκε τόσο πρόχειρα, ώστε δώδεκα μόλις χρόνια μετά την ολοκλήρωσή της είχε ερειπωθεί σε βαθμό που τα γερμανικά στρατεύματα κατοχής στη Γαλλία να την χρησιμοποιούν σαν αποθήκη και γκαράζ. Βρίσκεται σε βουκολικό τοπίο, εντελώς εκτός αστικού περιβάλλοντος, και συνιστά μια ακόμη μομφή κατά των αστικών συνθηκών, που κατ’ επανάληψη είχε στηλιτεύσει ο Le Corbusier, παρά λύση τους. … -- If Le Corbusier’s works are rather easily divided into two sorts –pre-Depression, slick and white; and post-Hiroshima, brutal and gray– it is the Villa Savoye that most often represents the early period. Yet Savoye is not the best work of this period, nor is it representative of Le Corbusier’s larger concerns for individual buildings as candidates for a new urban order. Badly built, within a dozen years of its completion, the Villa Savoye was so dilapidated that it was used as a kind of storage barn by German troops occupying France. Its site is pastoral, removed from the urban environment and as such it stands as an indictment of, rather than solution to, urban conditions that Le Corbusier regularly condemned.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Iowa

Why Wright in Iowa? Are there ways that Wright\u27s Iowa works are distinguished from his built works elsewhere? Iowa is a typical Midwest state, exceptional in neither general geography nor landscape. The state\u27s urban areas are minor, and Iowa has never been known for its subscription to avant-garde architecture. Its most renowned artist, Grant Wood, painted Iowa\u27s rolling hills and pie-faced people in cartoon-like images that simultaneously champion and question the coalescence of people and place. Indeed, the state\u27s most convincing buildings are found on its farms with their unpretentious, vernacular, agricultural buildings

Book Review: LC Foto: Le Corbusier Secret Photographer

Widely regarded as the most influential architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier wrote more than fifty books, nearly all of them with extensive illustrative text. Yet in these books he almost never used the photographs he himself took. Rather, the books are most often illustrated with photographs that Le Corbusier appropriated from other publications, nearly always modifying, cropping, and ordering these images before placing them on his pages. Books made from these pages ultimately formed collections; and these collections became essential toLe Corbusier\u27s promotion of his view of modern architecture and modernist ideals. Photography was at the heart of this endeavor

Uncrating Kahn’s Fisher House

Dr .Fisher tells an amusing story about the house that Louis Kahn designed for him and his wife in Hatboro, just outside Philadelphia. Soon after its completion, two of Fisher’s new neighbors walked past, pausing for a moment to consider this unusual double-cube structure. One condemned the flat-roofed house made of vertically hung natural wood siding, thinking it out of place in a neighborhood of traditional dwellings of white-painted clapboard and stone. The other reserved judgment. “I’ll wait and offer my opinion,” he declared, “when the thing is uncrated.

Waiting for the Site to Show Up

Henry Luce, owner of Life, Time, Fortune and Architectural Forum in 1937, recognized Frank Lloyd Wright’s immense talent, though clearly he did so for his own ends. Author or “The American Century” Luce needed an all-American poster boy for his campaign purposes. Despite Wright’s immense unpopularity at the time, Luce featured him on the cover of Time and promoted him in his three other journals. That Luce’s ideals were not those of Wright mattered little. Wright became the most popular American architect in history. But how very odd that decidedly artificial mediation could so effectively disseminate and popularize an architecture whose essence was authenticity

Authenticity and the popular appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright

The inside cover of the January 17,1938 Life magazine featured a photograph of the recently completed Kaufmann weekend house,\u27Fallingwater,\u27 designed by America\u27s best known architect, the then 70-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright: The house is shown emerging from thick woods, hovering above flowing water.The view is not from the approach to the house or from within, but from the outside, downstream, a vantage point that renders the conceptual idea of the house in its entirety: the magic of immense heaviness levitating; the Biblical metaphor of water from rock; an exclusive retreat alone in acres of wooded paradise

Le Corbusier and ‘Psychically Innovating Space’

In France, in the first quarter of the Twentieth Century, ‘space’ and ‘psyche’ were uncommon concepts. Both originated in German thought, foreign to a French way of thinking. Still, in the early 1920’s, L’Esprit nouveau, a French review of contemporary visual phenomena co-edited by Charles Eduoard Jeanneret, featured articles on Freud, film, Picasso, Einstein and relativity. Yet implications of these novel perspectives to the formation of space were seldom considered in depth; nor did Jeanneret discuss the concepts in his books on urbanism, architecture, decorative art, and painting that followed. In the late 1930’s, and then immediately following World War II, all of this changed. Space and psyche became common currency in both French architectural and in its popular press, and the conjunction of psyche and space could be said to form the basis of Le Corbusier’s 1946 “Ineffable Space,” a theory of architecture that posits ‘space’ as venustus, delight, in Modern Architecture

Single-Cell Space: HLKB Architecture Contrasts the Weight of the Old with the Effervescence of the New

HLKB\u27s renovation for the Des Moines restaurant, Lucca, is a paradigmatic single-cell interior-utterly modern in a decidedly antique envelope

Colin Rowe and another Aalto

On the 29\u27h of May 1995, the preeminent British-American architectural theorist Colin Rowe wrote to his friend Michael Spens in Scotland, sending him a postcard of Alvar Aalto\u27s library at Mt. Angel Abbey. \u27I send you a present from Oregon; he began, \u27James Tice took me here the other day and I became a convert: and I don\u27t mean to the Order of St Benedict but to this particular Aalto library. But have you seen it?\u2

Touch My Axis - Vers une Architecture before, L\u27espace indicible after

In 1946, shortly after the end of the Second World War and as the rebuilding of Europe began, in a special issue of a professional architectural journal dedicated to the synthesis of the arts, Le Corbusier, perhaps the world\u27s most influential architect at the time, published a short, seemingly innocuous treatise titled L\u27espace indicible. It opens with the author recognizing nature\u27s harmonious orchestration of space as entirely phenomenal, as the reflection of light. Ineffable space is, Le Corbusier writes, a vibration between the action of the work (architecture, statue, or painting) and the reaction of the setting: the walls of the room, the public squares ... the landscape. It is a phenomenon of accordance ... as exact as mathematics, a true manifestation of plastic acoustics