Le Corbusier’s Secret Architectural Language

Abstract

This essay analyzes Le Corbusier’s most important architecture and uncovers in them a previously untranslated private and personal language with extended narratives. It offers a fresh look at a number of specific compositions by finding deep resonances in his sketches, writings, private correspondence, and others’ recorded memories. The main representational devices used in these compositions are faces and phalluses; however, geometric objects and other representative elements comprise their own lexicon and are interwoven throughout. These compositions follow themes of wit, virility, revenge, self-memorialization, and grief. It appears that LC intentionally paired the profound and the puerile in certain works of architecture, which may have made them complete for him. This may have been directly modeled on the writing of François Rabelais, whom he deeply admired. One central and oft-repeated self-portrait construct advanced here is the “two-eye diagram”, which LC created to explain how the matter-spirit dialectic played a fundamental role in portraying himself and expressing his world view and creative process.