The Thumbnail Book Reviews

by John Q McDonald --- 14 September 2015

Modern Man

The Life of Le Corbusier, Architect of Tomorrow

by Anthony Flint

Modern architects of the first few decades of the 20th century have a lot to to answer for when it comes to the kinds of domestic and commercial architecture that exploded across the landscape later in the century, particularly in America. It is an architecture characterized by cheap construction, cold facades, lack of street presence, and an overall disregard for the basic ways in which people go about their lives. Modern architects earned a pretty bad reputation because of their cheap imitators. On the other hand, much great architecture has run into the problems of habitation and climate. Famous buildings leak, are unadaptable, or simply are uninhabitable by any real human, rather than some ideal perfect client envisioned by the designer. On the other hand, much modern architecture of that period is marked by brilliance and revolutionary vision. Many buildings were a challenge merely because they were misunderstood. But, by and large, people don't really want to have to think about a building, just live in it.

The author of this breezy biography of infamous architect Le Corbusier acknowledges as much in his thoughtful summing up of his subject's mercurial life. Le Corbusier (the pseudonym of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) was a Parisian architect born in a watchmaking town in Switzerland at the end of the previous century. He was brilliant, driven, creative, disruptive, frustrating, infamous, and, for better and worse, he left his mark on architecture and urban design all over the world. A quick internet search will turn up countless images of his more iconic works, from domestic spaces that presage the tiny house movement, to giant and brilliant apartment buildings that foreshadow failed urban redevelopments based on poorly understood imitations, to ground-breaking homes and at least two brilliant churches. His one original building in America is the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, but his influence on American architecture and urban design is both celebrated and vilified to this day. Anthony Flint endeavors in this brief and complex overview to indroduce Le Corbusier to the people who know little or nothing about him, but the book serves also to give a broad context to others seeking to know something about the story behind the buildings. Rather than give us a straight linear narrative, Flint provides chapters that capture themes in Le Corbusier's life, each based on a particular project (i.e. the Chandigargh city plan, or the United Nations building) or period of his life (such as his disturbingly opportunistic collaboration with the Vichy government of World War 2). So the chapters overlap in time, but create a layered impression of this very busy artist. And there is a lot to be said about him. A collection of his complete works runs to eight volumes and over 1700 pages. Flint gives us the highlights, and tries to capture a sense of who the man was, a young artist devoted to his difficult-to-please mother, to the world-renowned starchitect. And to that end, Flint succeeds out of proportion to the size of the book. Le Corbusier comes across as a lively and driven individual, arrogant at times, but modest as befits his Calvinist background. His devotion to a small cabin on the coast of France seems almost cozy and quaint. And yet some of his buildings are among the most monumental of his century. The story is compelling.

There are many preconceptions about modern architecture, based upon the pitiful sprawl across the landscape, from cookie-cutter ranch houses, to monotonous apartment complexes, to blank strip malls and corporate office parks. Corbu's finer buildings are further belied by black and white historical photographs; people are easily left with the impression that Corbu's houses and buildings were gray, cold and flat. In fact, he embellished his structures with a kind of splashy panels of primary colors that enlivened them, making them look almost like children's playrooms. Later modernist trends didn't catch on to that, and we were left with the many plain, flat and poorly constructed houses that sprawl across, for example, the southern California landscape. Despite a resurgence in popularity of Mid-Century Modern, there are only some structures from that period that warrant preservation and the indulgence of millennial popularity. We look back fondly on the Mid-Century design maybe because we liked Mad Men, but maybe also because the current trend, at least in suburban design, is toward a fake traditionalism, a pastiche of American colonial vernacular, and a Disney-ish dream of Tuscan villa living. It was Le Corbusier's goal to annihilate that kind of traditionalism, to reinvent the way people live. His architecture does have a kind of cleanliness and efficiency that came to revolutionize the notion of domestic life. But it failed, in the end, to adapt to the kind of comforts people demand of their space. In the first decades of the 20th century, Le Corbusier rebelled against 19th century Victorian clutter. In the first decades of the 21st, we still struggle with what we seek in our built environment, discarding movements almost as fast as they crop up. What ever happened to Post-Modernism?

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Also by Anthony Flint: [Wrestling with Moses]

[Other books about Urban Studies and Architecture]

[Other History and Biography]