Towards a New Architecture

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Don't forget that this is a manifesto aimed towards an audience of architects, engineers and other artists living in the 1920s.

For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles- douard Jeanneret, 1887?1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials." Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: "American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." "Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary." "A cathedral is not very beautiful . . ." and "Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life." A plan proceeds from within to without. (what about urban planning - city spaces as rooms maybe this is why Lecorb is so good at buildings and so bad at cities?) Architecture is not about styles. Architecture is capable of the sublime, objectivity, heights of abstraction. Mass and surface are key elements. This is a key idea. The best architectural principles are infact unchanged from the beginning. Great Architecture is timeless.It's common knowledge that it hasn't really worked out as he expected it to but so much of what he has written has contributed to architecture. This book is full of innovative designs which unfortunately inspired poor implementations (high-rise poor areas all over the place). however, that says more against society's treatment of the lower classes than against the value of lecorbusier's ideas entering the public domain. i14484018 |b1080000519103 |dculmb |g- |m |h5 |x0 |t0 |i0 |j18 |k010628 |n04-28-2007 15:57 |o- |aNA2520 |r.J4 1946 But when this general phenomenon met the Internet, it also adopted some of the particular advantages of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 permitted for an Internet where users could interact and collaborate with each other, changing the way digital content was produced, and enabling users to generate their own content. This took the form of blog posts, comments and updates on social networks. This new way of using the web allowed for individual voices to arise, offering architects a channel to express their inner critic.

Technological innovation took a giant leap forward during WWI and Architects in the twenties start to try to incorporate this into their Architectural programs. Save this picture! Corbusier sketch of 1925, “We must kill the street” author collection. Image Courtesy of Common Edge The airplane is the product of close selection. The lesson of the airplane lies in the basic logic which governed the statement of the problem and its realization. The problem of the house has not yet been stated. Nevertheless there do exist standards for the dwelling-house. Machinery contains in itself the factor of economy, which makes for selection. The house is a machine for living in.

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Save this picture! Cover of recent reprint of Vers One Architecture (1995; from second edition of 1928). Image Courtesy of Common Edge Only in 1922 had the young Swiss painter and entrepreneur opened an architectural office with his cousin Pierre and begun to refer to himself as a heroic “dark crow” among the avant-garde. He had already published extensively and knew his way around the printers in the city. He was a talented graphic designer with a gift for apocalyptic prose in the style of an American evangelist. Hanno-Walter Kruft saw through the cult-like rhetoric when he argued that Le Corbusier “convinced himself with almost willful determination that he was destined for the role of tragic revolutionary, a martyr come to redeem the world—by architecture.” Whatever architecture was standing after the conflagration of 1914-1919 was like an old religion: worthless and out of date. The Steamship is the first stage in the realization of a world organized according to the new spirt. The Engineer’s aesthetic, and Architecture, are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression. I swapped the word “architecture” for “military design” in one of the sections and here’s how it read: