The Living Tradition of Architecture by José de Paiva

Author:José de Paiva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317265436
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Innovation

It is well known that Le Corbusier was a serious painter, devoting most mornings of his life to this activity. As he put it himself: “Truly the key to my artistic creation is my pictorial work begun in 1918 and pursued regularly each day. The foundation of my research and intellectual production has its secret in the uninterrupted practice of my painting. It is there that one must find the source of my spiritual freedom, of my disinterestedness, of the faithfulness and integrity of my work.”16 This is of course a sort of experimentalism, always dangerous in its obsessions for the new, often in detriment of the familiar. As I have observed elsewhere, however, Le Corbusier’s concern with the “modern space” of painting was never simply transplanted to architecture.17 His work can hardly be reduced to the application of the matrix of axonometry in his purist paintings, for example, as a Cartesian space for modernist syntax, such as the majority of his disciples have often assumed. Relatively early in his career, his true struggle was to find equivalent modes of presencing in the visual/erotic space of architectural situations. His experimentation with projection in the space of representation was a life-long passion that culminated in an awareness of artistic discovery as the unveiling of unexpected relationships between objects of the environing world, rapports emerging from the new contiguities construed in the work. In 1938, he wrote, in terms that recall a surrealist understanding of collage, that the difference between everyday, prosaic spoken language and painting consisted in a different way of denoting things. While the former names things narrowly and specifically, the latter is concerned with the quality of things, bringing them together freely. Thus it is the unexpected relationships, i.e., the space of metaphoric tension, that the artist discovers; this “is what the poet proclaims, that which the inspired being creates.”18 A decade later he wrote again about art in New World of Space.19 He explained the genesis of his Ubu sculptures, deliberately named in honor of Alfred Jarry, the founder of pataphysics: “Stones and pieces of wood led me on involuntarily to draw beings who became a species of monster or god.” Le Corbusier was aware of how the process offered much to his architecture precisely because it revealed “new things”, “unexpected” and “unknown”. He concluded: “When the inexplicable appears in human work, that is, when our spirit is projected far from the narrow relation of cause and effect … to the cosmic phenomenon in time, in space, in the intangible … then the inexplicable is the mystery of art.”20

The cloister and the convent’s interior façades.

Side altars for the celebration of the Eucharist.

This realization, emerging from an ‘experimental’ making that deliberately released itself from the dictates of rational planning, became invaluable for his design of La Tourette. If one compares the temporality in Le Corbusier’s early projects, the well-known promenades architecturales along the ramps of the villas in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, with the experience of walking in La Tourette, one must acknowledge an immense transformation.

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