Word: corbu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Captivated Audience. As Corbu built, he also wrote. In the U.S., Frank Lloyd Wright thundered his contempt for the French "painter and pamphleteer," but one by one, young architects were captivated by him. "There were no teachers to teach us the new architecture," says the Chinese-American architect. I. M. Pei, "so we turned to Corbu's books and these were responsible for half our education." In Greece, a young student named Constantinas Doxiadis, who was to become famous in his own land, got a Corbu book as a gift on Christmas Eve in 1932. "I glanced through...
...Moscow, Corbu built a ten-story glass-walled office building that survived two decaded of Stalinist criticism as anti-esthetic to become, now, much admired. Then Le Corbusier flew to Brazil (in the old Graf Zeppelin), to advise a team that included Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa on the designing of Rio's 1936 Ministry of Education, a slab on pilotis with a new feature: a honeycomb of sun-shading breeze-admitting vanes at the windows, called brises-soleīl. That single example spread to give all the major cities of Latin America, notably Brasilia, their present look...
...even greater disaster than the first. In 1947 he was invited to serve on an international committee of architects who were to design the U.N. headquarters. Setting up shop on the 21st floor of the RKO building, he threw himself into the job with his accustomed vigor; but Corbu was never a man to work with a team. From the beginning the direction of the project had been given to the more diplomatic Wallace Harrison, designer of Rockefeller Center. When the U.N. Building was finished, Corbu wrote: "A new skyscraper, which everyone calls the 'Le Corbusier Building...
...Corbu was to suffer a further disappointment in 1952, when the UNESCO headquarters in Paris was placed in the hands of Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer of the U.S., Bernard Zehrfuss of France, and Pier Luigi Nervi of Italy. Despite all this, Corbu was in fact entering the richest phase of his career. Plans that had been locked in his mind for years began tumbling out like coins from a treasure chest. Now came the Marseille apartment block of raw concrete (béton brut), on which the marks of the form boards were left visible. The Society for the Preservation...
...apartments could be placed like drawers. Part of the way up was an "internal street" of shops, and on the roof was a garden made up, not of plants and trees, but of sculptured shapes surrounded by a parapet that shut out all but the sky and the mountaintops. Corbu called the building a "Radiant City," its garden "a landscape worthy of Homer...