Word: corbu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Battlements on the Plain. "Corbu" tackled city planning before anyone dreamed that cities should or could be planned. He designed elevated freeways to make downtowns more accessible when Los Angeles was still getting used to stop lights. He envisaged cities with skyscrapers set in green spaces. He developed the original slab building that inspired the 1952 United Nations Secretariat but gave it character by breaking façades with what he called brise-soleils or deeply set sun-shaded windows...
...Corbu," of course, is remembered as the man who would have started improving Paris by demolishing its most historic part. But that was in 1922; the master is now 78 and mellowed. He has flattered his intended, asking, "Have you observed that Venice is gay and proud, never menaced, never shoved about, never disturbed?" Returning recently, he found Venice "a modern city made for man, without the oppression of machine civilization...
Sacred Silhouette. Such sweet some things, combined with Corbu's world wide reputation (TIME cover, May 5, 1961), inclined Venice's municipal hospital head to invite Corbu to replace the old hospital of Sts. John and Paul...
...lagoon from the cemetery. But since it, like everything else, is a monument, the new $11 million hospital will rise elsewhere: in the slummish San Giobbe sector, where the city slaughterhouse stands, and also the gateway to the city. The available land is nearly 7½ acres, but Corbu plans to extend the hospital for nearly five more acres across the water. Ironically, the man who first put modern buildings on stilts, or pilotis, as he calls them, now can put them to their most logical use. "The silhouette of Venice is sacred," declared Corbu as his model...
...Patience. Instantly critics snapped that the sick need a view. Corbu's partisans reply that the bedridden prefer a supine view of blue sky, birds and stars. All that the hospital must do to grow is go to sea, expanding, said the architect, "like an open hand." There is no façade or front door: ambulance boats can dock conveniently under the hospital at gondola ports. As much an adaptation of the Swiss lake villages, which Swiss-born Corbu knows well, as a ducal palace or a gondola garage, the design should please Venetians. Yet, however harmonious this...