Architect: Le Corbusier

Just Begin

Just Begin

Stan Allen

‘The first line on paper,’ Louis Kahn once said, ‘is already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully.’ This captures perfectly the anxiety of beginnings: not what is to be expressed, but everything that will be left out, and an inevitable sense of loss over all the unexplored possibilities.… Read More

Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’

Ronchamp: ‘Rough to the Touch’

Robin Evans

– Robin Evans, excerpted from ‘Comic Lines,’ in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (London: MIT Press, 1995), 282.

Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects

Le Corbusier and the Poetry of Objects

Danièle Pauly

The consideration of objects shapes the mind, providing it with resources: sliced butcher’s bones, shells that are whole or broken by the tides. . . . Nature also teaches sharpness, the rigour of functions. — Le Corbusier, Unité [1] Around 1928, Le Corbusier abandoned the universe of manufactured objects, having exhausted all… Read More

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India

Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is useful only to fix the design, to transmit to one’s client and one’s… Read More

Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s

Work on Paper: The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s

Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More