Modern Architecture and Le Corbusier

Modern Architecture: Richly Complex

• Modern architecture is complex and can be explored in different ways.
• Empiricism emphasizes individual insight and inquiry, contrasting with rationalism's reliance on tradition.
• Tension between empiricism and rationalism is central to modern architecture and art.

Key Figures: Shaping Modern Architecture

• Le Corbusier: A creative giant of the 20th century. Along with Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most influential architects. Also includes Alvar Alto.
• Bauhaus and Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion: Making assumptions of form (always set and define context).
• Elio Saarinen: The secret to design - always look at the next larger thing.
  • Designing silverware? Look at the table.
  • Designing a table? Look at the room.
• Empiricism: Giving up preconceived models gives freedom but also challenges one to make it for themselves.
  • Finding a form for a house v. finding a form that's new for town hall and meets the community's needs.

Le Corbusier and Nature

• Cartesian ordering system is present in Le Corbusier's work.
• Nature as Inspiration: Strong in both Mies and Le Corbusier's work.
  • Idealized Nature: Unity and perfection, a classical sense of nature, exemplified in his Ville Savoie design.
• Nature in American vs. European Culture
  • American: Nature has meaning. They are linked to nature.
  • European: Older civilizations; didn't need to objectify nature like Americans did.

Corbusier's Career

• Brief Berlin stint in Peter Baron's office in 1914 when Reichs Wassermuth was published.
• Worked in Paris as a painter in the mornings and architect after lunch.
• Began career in early 1920s, designing a house for his cousin (also a painter) in Paris.
• The design demonstrates program flexibility - shifting from historical type by combining things organically.
• On the upper floor is an idealized painting studio with expansive windows for natural light and a skylight. There's also a ladder to a monk-like cell for writing.
• The poles of creative experience are part of its expression.
• The writing studio offers a view of Paris.

Ordinary Materials

• William Jordy's (American historian) concept of symbolic objectivity.
• European modernist work in the 1920's shows interest in ordinary or industrial materials.
• Factory Window: Plain, simple, ordinary used in works and Corbusier's beginning studio.
  • Used without attempt to cover the ordinariness.
  • Factory window system.
  • Gives access to light.
  • Scale of grid structure.
  • Used to suggest higher metaphysical order.
• $x, y, z$ coordinate system

Steel vs. Concrete

• Mies van der Rohe: Steel frame
  • Exploring logic of steel order as source of meaning.
• Corbusier: Reinforced concrete, rough and brute.
  • Steel strands inside, but not the system of order.
  • Steel is merely a tool.

Domino House

• Coined this concept early in his career.
• Domino: French word somehow related to an automobile manufacturer who funded Corbusier's research.
• 1927 Weissenhof Exhibition in Stuttgart, Mies van der Rohe and others: Invited Corbusier to participate.
• Corbusier built two houses.
  • Devoid of ornament.
  • Visual separation from ground: lifted on columns so that it seems to float.
  • Lots of glass on every side.
  • Two story volume in the front, two-story volume with a balcony looking with a beautiful view over the countryside.
  • Not a big unit.
  • Brings aristocracy features to ordinary houses.
  • Concrete (plastered to give ideal whiteness and destroy materiality).
  • He covers stone walls with plaster so that the materiality of the masonry and its sense of heaviness disappears from your view, and you're led to appreciation of the ideas.

Floor Plans

• Illustrative drawings (show idea of organization) vs. Working drawings (precise relationships).
• Illustrative Drawings: Show the idea of the organization, the pieces, and their relationships.
• Working Drawing: Shows all the pieces in precise relationships as a manual for building; becomes a legal document.
• 3-Dimensionality: Achieved through sections. Indicated by line with arrow showing which way the drawing/model faces.
• Tightly organized / Economical.
• Housing architecture (concrete vs. wood).
• Top Floor: Garden space returned (private sky garden).
• Experiential aspects of a wealthy house reorganized into a simple affordable form.
• Axiometric Drawing: Measures x, y, z coordinate directions on an axiometric.

Five Points of Architecture

• Abstract Ordering: Guide stemming from concrete possibilities.
• $Le Piloti$ (Columns):
  • Building lifted off ground through steel-reinforced columns.
• Free Plan:
  • Walls become choices, not necessities.
• Free Facade:
  • Facade can be whatever you want it to be. Not restricted technically.
• Horizontal Window:
  • Windowns can be very different things.
• Reclaiming the Ground Plan on the Roof.

Villa Stein

• Also known as Ville Garches.
• Gertrude Stein involved.
• Used photos to represent space (like painting).
• The automobile is animated.
• Cartesian system becomes suggestion for movement and engaging/interacting.
• Long horizontal windows.
• The flat front dissolves on the inside (complex).
• Balconies on different levels.

Proportional Studies

• Diagonal lines indicate proportional relationships between sides.
• Corbusier's Modular: Attempt to reconcile: the golden section (1 to 1.618) and square root $2$ (1 to 1.41414).
• A useful system in relation to human needs.
• Purism Painting Movement with Ossenfant: Depicts layers in sequence, establishing order in Cartesian space without historical precedence by looking to experiential possibilities.

Ville Savoie

• One of the archetypal works in modern architecture.
• Idealistic Summer House: Weekends and Summer.
• Open Program:
  • Sits in an open field.
  • Disengages itself from surrounding world by presenting a platonic geometry model.
• Colin Rowe Essay: Compares to Palladio's Villa Capra floor plans.
  • Like historical prototypes
  • Pure Geometry
• Corb's Walking Tour: At 20, took a walking tour of Southeastern Europe, The Balkans and and Greece, spent three weeks camped out on the slopes of the Acropolis.
  • The Parthenon had haunted him all of his life.
• Updating old language of ancient Greece to technological capabilities of modern world to create universal rules that could be applied to all kinds of different forms without the historical associations.
• Landscape: The way the building shapes your view of the landscape.
• Built of reinforced concrete/hollow tile/white plaster (covers everything that becomes apparent).

Ville Sanvoie Sketches Depict

• A flat plane instead of a hill.
• Sweeping automobile movement from city to the site.
• Idealized form with views around.
• Rising spiral staircase transforms the trip from the city to a rising vertical (moving up 2 levels).
• Vision of natural world/raising into natural world.
• Drawing the plans and creating different sketches while exploring the experience of different places.
• Mountain visualization (hundreds of miles).
• Inside/outside is blended when sitting in the area, having tea and croissants, and looking over the landscape.
• All exterior, large living room with glass wall that opens up half the building to the outside.
• Last minutes of setting sun.
• Madam didn't like the house and only stayed for one summer. Now has a checkered past.
• Has been restored.
• Turns house inside out and engages landscape in every way.
• Walls gather sun/protect from the wind.
• Again, archetype of what can be done.

City Planning

• Conceptual order to possibilities (transformative in the 1920's and 30's).
• Figure Ground Idea: The idea is inverted that you start off with big space and secure by infrastructure (govt. provides roads, etc.)
• The building becomes object within.
• A contemporary city of high-rise glass office towers and airplanes objectify the space between the buildings.
• Three of four different scales of buildings in various ways.
• Grid contains roadways, infrastructure, and legal system.
• The system is realized and advantages taken at a larger scale (Political and Economic problem).

Saint Die Master Plan

• Drew plan after World War 2 due to devastation.
• Adapt to local context by leaving church and significant buildings.
• Large Housing Blocks (superimposed). The whole thing is trying to dramatize the sense of the landscape around it at a great scale.
• Reversed Figure Ground Map / Objectify.

Master plan of Marseille

• Plan segregates transportation networks from walking paths to roads to highways.
• Parks that come up from ocean that leave/open some neighborhoods form large collective housing so that there is space for parks.
• Every kid in the city can walk to the ocean or to their friends house without crossing traffic.
• Pattern spread out (unite)
• Carefully Staged w Nature.
• Kindergarten on roof.
• Housing with 2 story space.
• Apartment sees mountain and ocean.
• Clear breeze that blows through.