Abstract
Abstract: In the year between April 1910 and March 1911 Le Corbusier – then Charles-Edouard Jeanneret – composed maybe the most comprehensive piece of writing of his career: a manuscript entitled “La construction des villes” which took on to systematically investigate the architectural elements that the city is made from. Taking Camillo Sitte’s Der Städte-Bau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen of 1889 as his intellectual starting point, Jeanneret developed a complex and convincing thesis within several months, however never published it himself. One of the topics that appear throughout Jeanneret’s manuscript is the quality of space as enclosure. This paper takes this observation as a starting point to ask how the manuscript that was put aside after March 1911 (and only shortly picked up again by Jeanneret in 1915) may have influenced Le Corbusier’s architectural thinking. In order to achieve this, the chapter “The Illusion of the Plan” from Vers une architecture is investigated as a link between La construction des villes and Le Corbusier’s houses. Finally, the Maison La Roche-Jeanneret and the Villa Savoye are read as buildings that very strongly incorporate aspects of thinking urban space in a way that way that closely relates to his studies back in 1910. Keywords: La construction des villes; Städtebau; urban space; architectural space; Maison La Roche-Jeanneret; Villa Savoye. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/LC2015.2015.1547
Highlights
IntroductionThe well-known opening lines of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme contain a strong rebuttal of his earlier investigations of urban design
The space of Le Corbusier’s house designs and La construction des villesThe well-known opening lines of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme contain a strong rebuttal of his earlier investigations of urban design
The Maison La Roche-Jeanneret and the Villa Savoye are read as buildings that very strongly incorporate aspects of thinking urban space in a way that way that closely relates to his studies back in 1910
Summary
The well-known opening lines of Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme contain a strong rebuttal of his earlier investigations of urban design. For the informed reader it is clear that Le Corbusier criticizes himself for being the pack-donkey, for following the winding path – and that he prompts himself to walk in a straight line He evokes the impression that his studies of Sitte and other urban design authors had been a waste of time, Le Corbusier knew better. This paper undertakes to take the knowledge gained from our study of Le Corbusier’s urban design education a step further and to ask how it might have not been put to the side, despite his strong argument to the contrary, but how much and in which way his own knowledge, gained from the intense study of German language urban design literature and the direct experience of towns and cities at first hand was able to shape his formation as an architect This can only be done in sketch format here but it might act as a useful starting point for further investigations. This paper follows Stanislaus von Moos’ question in his foreword to the German/French edition of La construction des villes: “What happened to the text, after it had been shelved for the time being, respectively had been recast into the form of Urbanisme, which, in terms of its content, was mostly distorted into its contrary?”3
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