Corb in the Corner • Living with Le Corbusier...
Le Corbusier’s ideas are usually viewed separately; but they are all the same thing
Marc Perelman 2005
Introduction
My father knew, and I grew up with, the Swiss-French architect, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and identified in familiar form as, Corb. I don’t mean that Dad knew Le Corbusier personally, of course he didn’t. But he had learnt about his work as providing the foundations of modern 20C architecture. For architects of his generation, and involved with the great rebuild g after WW2, Corb was recognised as the patriarch and guiding genius of the profession.
Corb was a familiar presence at home, and amongst my father’s colleagues and friends, and also from the pages of various architectural and design journals that came home. We had books about Le Corbusier on our shelves at home.
My parents were artistic without being completely bohemian. My father was a very practical kind of architect. As a young designer, and in the context of post-WW2 austerity, he had made his own furniture in the style of Robin Day and Ernest Race. Dad also built a kit-car and a radiogram. The radiogram comprised a valve ampifier with VHF tuner, and with a deck for playing records arranged in a cabinet with a hinged lid. The amp and radio took a few moments to warm up before working…
The various strands of Dad’s practicality were evidenced in his choice to repurpose a cast-concrete white-painted drainpipe, from Coventry, as the speaker cabinet for the radiogram. The drainpipe stood vertically with the loudspeaker resting, and fitting exactly, into the top opening. The pipe stood on a disc of polished wood (teak maybe) that was cut so as to allow the speaker cable to emerge neatly from within the pipe. This whole thing stood, about four-foot high, in the corner of the living room until, as a teenager, the radiogram and speaker were moved to my bedroom. The radiogram was about twenty-five years old when I took it over.
The drainpipe-speaker did several things for me. It gave me an early taste of concrete as a material that combined economy and heft, and that could also be enjoyed in the context of domestic comfort. The drainpipe also introduced me to ideas about the sculptural potential of ordinary objects, and the appeal of material integrity. It took many years for me to unpack the connections, implicit within this object, to design-reform, Le Corbusier, and to Duchamp’s Fountain, and to the found-object artworks of Picasso, and to all the rest of art and philosophy, and to my own engagement with and experience of things.
Nowadays, I recognise our drainpipe-speaker as a totem object in our household…exemplifying and celebrating a world in which cultural sophistication and material economy combined…as an art-brut style expression of the exquisite everyday. Most importantly, the drainpipe showed me that every object, however prosaic, could be enjoyed through a combination of imagination, feeling and creativity, and understood in terms of ideas, emotions and personalities; so as to provide a world of art, experience and wonder…on the doorstep and in plain sight. As I got older, I began to discover the same possibilities in the shops, galleries, museums and houses that we visited.
Machines for Living (and being)
Quite a few off the houses we visited were lived-in by architect colleagues of my father, and with their families. These houses, mostly in the south-east of England, were identifiable by their open-plan living, white-painted walls, maxed-out gazing, asymmetric lighting and outsize Japanese paper-lantern shades. Later these houses were further modernised and extended so that the kitchens became larger multi-purpose spaces with fold-away glass walls that blurred the interface between indoor and outdoor space. Now, I recognise these houses as iterations of Le Corbusier’s concept of the house as a machine for living, In the UK context, few of these houses were new-builds; mostly, the machines were enclosed within historical structures of English domestic building; whether Georgian, Victorian or suburban.
The machines-for-living concept is often misrepresented by reference to FW Taylor's Scientific Management, and the claim to labour saving efficiency, rationality and convenience. The Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) is the exemplar for this. Le Corbusier's machines incorporate some elements of this convenient practicality, but the spatial machine is very much more expansive in what is potentialises.
I work at Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London. The school moved to Kings Cross/St Pancras in 2012. The new building, designed by Stanton Williams, sits within 19C railway buildings that formed an historic freight terminal for the supply of grain to London. The original station platforms have been removed and their site now defines a three-storey block of studios and workshops, arranged around a floor-to-roof height and full-length-of-the-building atrium space. This modern structure is all interior space and large glazed openings expressed through the combination of glass, steel and concrete. In contrast, the original front-facing Granary building, designed by Lewis Cubitt, is built of stone, brick, cast-iron and timber.
The old building is lovely example of the functional 19C warehouse type. The structure and shape of the building is entirely derived from the specification of its materials. By modern standards, the whole appears relatively small-scale. Inside, its five storeys appear low-ceilinged and with floor-spans interrupted, at regular intervals, by cast-iron columns that provide internal support. Notwithstanding these limitations, the building is comfortably Vitruvian in scale and popular with students.
There’s a really exciting spatial transition associated with the experience of moving from one scale of building and materials, circa 1840, and into another, bigger open structure (2012). The effect is literally mind-blowing; which is just right for creative thinking. That TARDIS effect of spatial expansion, expressed through structure and materials is entirely derived from Corb, and described as shifting from Vetruvian to Modular scales. There's also an implied accelerating effect. The Granary building is the smallest of new-builds across the KX campus development.
My own interest in communication design developed as a consequence of my own experience of the open-plan associations facilitated in the department store and museum developments of the 1960s and 1970s.
The scale and scope of open-plan living proposed by these structures, whatever their external form, provided for a reaction against the tyranny of small-spaces evident in the separate-rooms-for-separate activities evident in the organisation of the traditional home. This spatial organisation implied a separation of functions and concepts that tended toward compartmentalisation, hierarchy and isolation. The dynamic and connected space of Corbusier suggested a wider range of positive interactions, and established modern architecture as a form of social practice in expanding space.
In the 1960′s and the 1970′s, modern engineering combined with ideas of a different kind of cultural experience and produced the fun-palace concept. In Britain, the architect and theorist, Cedric Price, used the potential of the mega-scaled space-frame to conceptualise a multi-function structure. The legacy of this idea may be seen in the present-day scale and design of airport terminals, shopping malls and so on.
Part of what Cedric Price had imagined was an architecture that was structural and systemic; but also social and cultural. Co-incidentally, the social potential of civic space had been described and promoted by Ernesto Rogers (Richard's uncle) in Italy.
The big idea of the Pompidou Centre, entirely derived from Le Corbusier and Price, and designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, and with engineering by Peter Rice, was that this big building should have a completely open floor plates. This would allow for maximum versatility and visibility. Accordingly, the supporting structure of the building had to be externalised.
The external structure of the Pompidou Centre is all about lightening-the-load and keeping everything stable. The building is pretty big and there’s are some substantial compression loads from within the main structure. All those traditional internal columns, that would have kept the roof on, had to be pushed onto the outside and dissipated through a triangulated lattice of ties.
The crucial part of the structure is a pivoted lever element called a gerberette.This is a cantilever that balances the internal compression of the structure and transfers it to the external lattice of tensioned metal ties. The gerberette parts are cast steel and weigh 11 tons each…but they have lovely sculptural quality. That’s Corb and Mies combined, and with Brancusi etc.
I love the way that the Beaubourg building combines a number of ideas from the history of architecture
Gothic flying buttresses…
Sail boat rigging (Frei Otto)
The architecture of infinite-extension (Joseph Paxton)
The space frame and the geodesic lattice (Buckminster-Fuller)
The open-plan (Le Corbusier)
So, although the form of the building is expressed using 20C materials, the ideas that those forms express are much older. Crucially, the spaces opened up by Beaubourg were beyond the existing budgets and resources attaching to institutional colleagues. This provided a break-out space from the siloed thinking of longer established museums and galleries.
The new spaces of Beaubourg encouraged curators to develop new ways of showing things and created an environment in which the connections between things became more clearly evident.In curatorial terms the spaces undermined the usual ownership of culture by effectively by-passing the gate-keepers of compartmentalised objects and culture. Thus high and low were brought together, and everything became more visibly connected.This was the beginning of an inter-textual hyper-reality. The galleries provide a space in which objects, images and texts seem to float in space…I love that. In the UK, this model was perhaps most clearly realised in the retail environment of the Biba store.
Looking back, I now understand that I internalised these structures and, as far as I was able, these systems of thinking. I did that thanks to family and friends who took me around palaces, and shops, and showed me how life could be lived and how things could be arranged.
When I began to build my own mind-palace it was quite architecturally specific. It was a high-tech structure derived from the Eames House (kit of parts) and at the scale of Piano and Rogers, and with the open-plan space of Le Corbusier. There's also a bit of Jean Prouvé, and Cedric Price, and Malevich. I want my big buildings to have big spaces that connect people and things.
There are no corridors in my mind-palace, and the rooms are configured by the artful arrangement of objects, people and moving images…The whole thing is a cross between how I imagine Biba (I never went there) and what I got from Beaubourg and Versailles.
From the 1980s and onwards, I worked in the art world. This helped me develop my visual memory so that I have really good recall of the spatial arrangements of objects in room-settings - furniture, pictures, objects, people and books etc.
As I’ve got older, the whole thing has become a bit more 18C looking. That’s slightly weird; but I’ve definitely developed a taste for parquet floors. I also like the patina you get on old-fashioned linoleum after about twenty years.
Dom-ino (1914)
Le Corbusier had previously worked in the studio of Auguste Perret where he had been introduced to the structural potential and economy of reinforced concrete. The advent of WW1 unexpectedly provided Le Corbusier with the opportunity to conceptualise an inexpensive and simple domestic-scaled concrete frame, or platform, that could be mass-produced and combined, like dominos. Le Corbusier hoped to address, through this concept, the unfolding humanitarian crisis of housing shortage and displacements attaching to conflict, disaster and progress.
Le Corbusier’s schematic proposed three slabs, raised on six concrete posts and with a cast-concrete staircase elements connecting ground to first-floor, and roof. The practical economy of the concept belies the exciting potential of separating the structural function of walls from their space and activity-defining roles. The open-plan floor system was understood as multi-function and flexible, and the exterior walls transformed so as to afford larger apertures to provide transparency and greater in-and-out movement. The Dom-ino prototype suggests a set of guiding, abstract and idealised principles to direct modern architecture.
Corbusier’s concept combined a number of important ideas in relation to modern building: economy, mass-production, pre-fabrication, modularity, system assembly, functionality, co-design and scalability. Nevertheless, this potential remained largely ignored within the context of house-building until after WW2.
Le Corbusier explored the potential of the dom-in concept through a series of iterations in various forms, and optimisations of space and function. The most famous of this variants are
The Citrohan Concept House (1920)
The Pavillion de L’esprit Nouveau (1924)
The Villa Savoye (1927)
These experiments allowed Le Corbusier to more clearly define the basic architectural principles that had shaped the development of the original concept. These were
Free design of the ground plan – commonly considered the focal point of the Five Points, with its construction dictating new architectural frameworks. The absence of load-bearing partition walls affords greater flexibility in design and use of living spaces; the house is unrestrained in its internal use
Pilotis – a grid of slim reinforced concrete pylons that assume the structural weight of a building. They are the foundations for aesthetic agility, allowing for free ground floor circulation to prevent surface dampness, as well as enabling the garden to extend beneath the residence
Free design of the façade – separated exterior of the building is free from conventional structural restriction, allowing the façade to be unrestrained, lighter, more open
Horizontal window – ribboned windows run alongside the façade’s length, lighting rooms equally, while increasing sense of space and seclusion. As well as providing interior spaces with better light and view of the surroundings
Roof garden – flat roofs with garden terraces serve both harmonic and domestic utility, providing natural layers of insulation to the concrete roof and creating space
Economy + Scale Flexibility + Possibility
The machine for living, as evidenced by these examples and characteristics, is not a thing of mere convenience; it is a space of dynamic and transcendent possibility, that can expand and shape-shift as required. The Corbusian machine is conceptualised as a mechanism of association and aggregation as much as one of functional productivity. The model is less straightforwardly instrumental or deterministic than the Fordist models to which the concept is usually attached.
Accordingly, the spatial characteristics of architecture became the primary focus of Le Corbusier’s thinking, with materials, scale, structure and specification each serving the spatial priority of experience and practicality. These principles and logic have continued to inform the development of 20C architecture in terms of scale, materials, economy and possibility.
The consideration of architecture as a cultural form is nearly always concerned, with the outward appearance of buildings. Le Corbusier shows us that this is misguided. The outward appearance of buildings is very nearly their least interesting characteristic. The consideration of space, structure, scale and specification in relation to buildings is helpful to understanding how form, function and experience are related. This arrangements of ideas is also suggestive of an architecture without buildings and a focus of interactions and outcomes as an expression of architectural practice.
By a happy co-incidence, the three master architects of the modern movement each focussed their efforts on one of these characteristics; Le Corbusier on space, Water Gropius of structure, and Mies on the elegant details and alignment of specification.
Each of these masters, and the architectural profession generally, have often been identified as megalomaniacal egomaniacs. The dom-ino concept provides a significant and alternative example to this narrative. Le Corbusier idea has become the template for grand-designs, but also for non-architect designed housing across the suburbs and the global south. The dom-ino has become the default structure across Africa, Asia and Latin-America.
Architecture without Buildings...
The eccentric and non-planned combination of simple structural dom-ino elements provides the frame for a wider social ecology that reminds us of John Conway’s Game of Life and of the combinational potential in Deleuzian desiring-machines as exemplars of co-design.
The modern world shapes identity through perception and cognition in relation to the systems and structures of machine philosophy. This is experienced through social relations and by the objects that surround us and in which we invest meaning and memory...
My own interests are in the the expression of the modern world as floating (dynamic) signs in space. I'm mostly interested in the historical and material iteration of these signs in relation to the acceleration of modern life. I love the idea of digital, but I'm skeptical of the emotional potential of the digital realm; at least compared with the memory and feeling that we attach to print culture.
Actual buildings are almost the least of it.
