The Algerian Sphinx: Le Corbusier’s other colonialism in the M’Zab

Abstract

The post-colonial project of historical revision has recently precipitated — not without polemic — in the defacement of statues during the Black Lives Matter protests. Yet, despite the monumentality of the iconoclastic event, the discipline of architecture has only started to weigh up its own historical figures against the colonial background. This article proposes a revisit of Le Corbusier’s journeys in French Algeria to critically unravel different forms of embedded colonialism. While acknowledging the claims by other authors of Le Corbusier’s colonialist mindset as revealed in his journeys, the article uses the archival material and the texts published after the journeys to propose a different form of colonialism that has escaped post-colonial critiques. Le Corbusier was not predominantly projecting an orientalist view over the African country; rather, he was paradoxically learning from desert architecture in order to trace a project for the aggrandisement of France. Disillusioned by the colonial government that spurned his projects, Le Corbusier operated a shift in colonialism away from politics into poetics, and condensed it in Poésie sur Alger (1950). This form of colonialism does not operate through power-struggle and imposition, but rather through a subtler appropriation of a lyrical other.