Word: corbu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Vain as he is, Le Corbusier himself would hardly claim to have invented modern architecture singlehanded, but his slim book and his later work to a large degree plotted its course. "Corbu's" personality and buildings have at times angered, shocked, outraged and offended people, but by the overwhelming vote of his colleagues everywhere, he is at 73 the most influential architect alive...
Timeless Image. People already go by the thousands to another Corbu master piece: the Chapel of Ronchamp, which crowns one of the foothills of the Vosges Mountains. It is a place for pilgrimage, a looming form that commands the entire countryside from horizon to horizon. Ronchamp is architecture as pure image, and few images more powerful or more timeless have ever been placed before the eye. It is strange that a man who has shown so few signs of religious feeling should have produced so awesome a place of worship. But this is no odder than the fact that...
...Corbu's career has been equally full of paradox. He has put up about 75 buildings (Frank Lloyd Wright built 500, Christopher Wren nearly 150). The French government has yet to commission him to design so much as a school or a hospital, and the first Le Corbusier building in the U.S.-a $1,500,000 Visual Arts Center at Harvard-is only now getting started. He began as the architectural prophet of the machine age, the poet of the mass-produced. Yet his recent buildings in India are in a sense almost handmade. He was all logic...
...contradictions are only apparent. His career and work are unified by one concern: to make dwellings and cities that are works of both reason and beauty. At times reason seems to give way to wild fantasy, and beauty seems to surrender to a certain harshness. But always in Corbu it is the ever-widening vision of the artist that leads and dominates the architect...
...pyramid-topped oratory, the church and its curvilinear chapel (which Corbusier calls "the rock" and the monks, despite his protests, call "the ear"), there are no statues. "There will be no distraction from images," Corbu told the monks. "If you want to be good fellows and show some friendship for your poor devil of an architect, you can do it by formally refusing every gift of stained glass, or images, or statues, which kill everything...