Architectural Drawings and the Intent of the Architect

Abstract

According to Le Corbusier, “certain poets and prophetesses” cried out against his work saying, “Monsieur, you are a dirty engineer, without soul or sensibility; you have no artistic conscience.” A victim of his own early ‘functionalist’ propaganda, he answered the charge with a single sentence and a series of sketches for the Villa Meyer project of 1925. “This house,” he wrote, “rose from garden to roof-garden opposite the park of the ‘Folie Saint-James,’ with its artificial ruin, and the pond which has reflected it since the days of Louis XVI.”1 His sketches (Fig. 1) present the villa as a series of pictures, including a ‘picture window’ framing a prospect of the pond and tempietto worthy of Claude himself. By using his building as a frame, Le Corbusier made a picture of an eighteenth-century park inspired, in turn, by seventeenth-century paintings. Linking himself in this way with the Picturesque tradition, he demonstrated his sensibility and escaped the charge of being nothing more than a “dirty engineer.” In answer to a contrary charge, however, that he was an aesthete, all sensibility and no sense (a more likely charge these days), Le Corbusier, a versatile stylist, could have pointed to other drawings-hard, sharp, and clear—cast in the mold of the machine aesthetic and ringing with objectivity: isometric projections with a strong structural emphasis, devoid of any indication of landscape or the experience of the viewer, drawings given a depersonalized air of precision and prefabrication with Zip-A-Tone overlays and stenciled numbers (Figs. 2 and 3).