Review: Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes

Abstract

Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes Museum of Modern Art, New York 15 June–23 September 2013 This ambitious exhibition, curated by Jean- Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, was the first major retrospective at MoMA to focus on the creative work of Le Corbusier. Organized biographically according to geographic locale, it drew upon a range of media to probe the integral relationship between Le Corbusier’s travels and his artistic and architectural production in scales that range from furniture designs to buildings and urban proposals. In addition to original sketches, architectural drawings, and models, the installation included objects he collected (glassware, shells, bone fragments), numerous paintings, excerpts from films made by Le Corbusier and others, selected images from his travel notebooks (reproduced digitally and projected in series according to locale), large-scale polemical drawings made during his 1935 lecture tour of the United States, photographs of selected examples of his buildings commissioned from Richard Pare, and full-scale replicas of rooms from diverse periods of Le Corbusier’s practice. The museum is to be congratulated for assembling the extensive drawings, models, and paintings generously loaned by the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, as well as films from a range of sources and examples of his early paintings from La Chaux-de-Fonds, together with those of his art teacher Charles L’Eplattenier, all of which made this retrospective an opportunity for scholars and practitioners alike to reassess the extraordinary range of the architect’s creative output. Bergdoll describes the primary ambition of the exhibition: “to organize a new generation of research, analysis, and interpretation of Le Corbusier’s practice using the metaphor and, in part, the form of an atlas,” a form that serves “to recognize a profound relationship between practice and place in Le Corbusier’s life and work” ( Atlas , 19). Scholars have often misunderstood …