Le Corbusier: A Sketch

THE Visual Arts Center, financed by a $1.5 million gift to the Program for Harvard College by Alfred St. Vrain Carpenter '05 and the late Mrs. Carpenter, of Medford, Ore., is the first Le Corbusier building in North America.

It follows a series of buildings to house educational and religious activities which the French architect, now 76, has designed elsewhere in the world during the last few years.

These include dormitories for Brazilian and Swiss students in University City outside Paris, a new museum of modern French art in Tokyo, the pilgrimage church of Notre Dame de Ronchamp, and a convent for the Dominican Order at La Tourette, near Lyon.

During the last ten years Le Corbusier has also designed Chandigarh, the new capital city of India's Punjab province, and large superblock apartment houses in Marseilles and Nantes; these three projects embody the radical concepts of city planning which Le Corbusier first developed in the 1920s.

In brief, Le Corbusier advocated "cities of tomorrow" composed of immense, largely self-contained apartment blocks, widely spaced in open parks. Bands of superhighways would weave about these superblocks, while a network of smaller roads and pedestrian walks would connect individual units.

This outline took form in Chandigarh in the early 1950s, which the Indian government commissioned Le Corbusier to design as a state capital replacing Lahore which India lost to Pakistan in the division of the Punjab in 1947. The new city already has 150,000 residents, and will expand later to a half million.

Its central units are residential sectors of approximately 240 acres, designed to house 15,000 people. Each is an inward-looking, self-contained neighborhood, with its own business center. The city can be expanded almost indefinitely by adding new sectors; yet, growth will not lead to depersonalization, Le Corbusier believes, for each sector forms a coherent community.

The same concept of a self-contained community is displayed in Unite d'Habitation, the Marseilles apartment block completed in 1952. At the opening ceremony in October of that year Le Corbusier described the superblock as "the first manifestation of an environment suited to modern life."

Marseilles's Unite d'Habitation is a massive structure of reinforced concrete, 450 feet long, 70 feet deep, and 180 feet high, containing 337 apartments for a population of 1,600. Designed as a piece of gigantic sculpture, it stands apart in an 11 1/2-acre park. Its seventh and eighth floors form an interior street flanked by small shops. On the roof is a garden with a playground for children and a wandering track for running.

Despite Le Corbusier's grand conception, the Unite d'Habitation has been only a partial success. The apartments, arranged as duplexes, have 15-foot-high living rooms opening on four-foot-deep balconies. But, the bedrooms are very narrow--only 13-feet for the master bedroom and a scant six-feet for children's rooms and both kitchens and bathrooms are windowless. The arrangment has brought criticism on the grounds that it is cramped and lacks privacy.

The fulfillment of Le Corbusier's plans at Chandigarh, Marseilles, and Nantes, followed two decades in which investors and public authorities spurned his plans although his ideas had a wide impact on architects and professional planners. His vast plans for the reconstruction of Paris as a city of widely spaced, 60-story skyscrapers never neared adoption. And a similar fate met schemes for Stockholm, Antwerp, and Algiers.

Yet, the impact of these imaginings was widespread. In Rio de Janeiro, a group of architects, including Oscar Niemeyer, designed the Brazilian ministry of Education and Health (1939-1943), incorporating Le Corbusier's ideas -- stilts, sun-breakers, roof-garden, cubist design of windows and balconies. Niemeyer's plans for Brasilia also show the impact of Le Corbusier.

In the late 1940's Le Corbusier as a member of an international group of architects, developed the master plan for the United Nations Secretariat and Assembly. Yet, until the completion of Unite d'Habitation and the stream of commissions which followed it, Le Corbusier was primarily important as an architectural theorist rather than a producing architect.

Some of his later work, including the Carpenter Center, seems to be at some odds with his early theorizing. In his very influential Towards a New Architecture of 1923, Le Corbusier wrote: "We must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses." Earlier, he had said: "The house is a machine to live in."

The Carpenter Center at Harvard, as well as the principle government buildings in Chandigarh and the chapel of Ronchamp, show an attention to sculpturesque form, which clashes with strictly utilitarian considerations. This view of buildings as sculpture, though, is a development of another consistent strain in Le Corbusier's thought: architecture as the "masterly, correct and magnificent play" of primary forms -- spheres, cylinders, cones, cubes, and pyramids. This attention to form is evident even in his very first work, a house designed for his art teacher at age 17.

Then Le Corbusier, using his given name, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, was still studying in his home town in the French-speaking area of Switzerland. Soon he went to Paris as an apprentice architect. After several years travel, he settled permanently in Paris in 1917. Five years later he set up his headquarters on the Left Bank in a former Jesuit monastery at 35 Rue de Sevres which he still occupies.

During those five years he had done Cubist paintings (under the name Jeanneret which he still uses for his painting and sculpture), and developed his fundamental ideas. He had written Towards a New Architecture with its conclusion that "the old architectural code, with its mass of rules and regulations evolved during 4,000 years, is no longer of any interest . . . all its values have been revised."

"Architecture or Revolution," he declared in the book's closing paragraph. "Revolution can be avoided." But by then Le Corbusier was well along on his own revolution