Notebook

Notebook, 1993-

APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .

From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.

Le Corbusier


Where Does Architecture Stand?
1943 - Writings and Theories

How reconstruct France? The war was not yet over when Le Corbusier shared his inner thoughts with architecture students, at their request, on October 18, 1942, on the occasion of an epoch-making lecture. Below are passages from his lecture, published just now by Denoël under the title 'Conversations with Students of the School of Architecture.' In it, the great architect goes over some of the ideas he holds dear on the art of building. We should note that as someone who was strongly opposed by the people of his generation, he sends his message to young people, who, in his eyes, are alone capable of taking up the architectural and urban revolution toward which he has long worked.

In no other age has a society been as helpless as ours, for it has lost and broken off the contact between its physical lifestyle and the natural elements of its spiritual conduct. Severance of contact between ends and means, absence of a line of conduct. In building, lack of restraint is at its peak, for a Byzantine spirit deprives reasonable ends of the most prodigious means of achievement civilization has ever known. At the hour of his greatest material power, man is deprived of views . . .

The tasks that beckon our mechanized society are immense here in France, as they are in the whole world.

We must reconstruct departments ravaged by war, but that is nothing. Hasn't the country for a long time had to construct itself, reconstruct itself, reconstitute itself as cells are reconstituted in tissue or families in households, through new generations, thus acting out the eternal play of life?

Alas! We were sound asleep and our country was covered over with dust . . .

Outside--in the universe, taking place at the same time, were the conquests and ravages of a technical revolution whose philosophical conclusion would assuredly come to pass at the fateful hour. This revolution of consciousness that awaits us.

We see values that are centuries old, millennia old, cracking, even crumbling. The speed of automation was spreading new information to every part of the territory. Natural relationships were violated and man, in some sense, made unnatural, abandoning his traditional ways, losing his footing, accumulating horrors all around him, the result of his lowered social status: his dwelling, his street, his city, his suburb, his countryside. A new and encroaching, filthy, funny, boorish, cruel, and ugly built-up area, sullying countryside, cities, and hearts.

Everything has been accomplished, taken to the worst extremes--a consummated catastrophe. The man of these past hundred years, by turns sublime and base, has strewn the ground with the detritus of his acts. Architecture is dying out, another is being born! . . .

A page is turning; this page that is turning is you, the young people of this unprecedented era, who will cover the blank flyleaf with a flowering of grandeur and intimacy.

Le Corbusier, Conversations with Students of the School of Architecture

[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 416]




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