Jayden Ali and Rowan Moore discuss LeCorbusier's 'Towards an Architecture' in the Guardian
Vers Une Architecture – Towards an Architecture – is the most influential book on the design of buildings since Vitruvius wrote his De Architectura in the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus. It is a manifesto for modernism, arguing that the beauty and logic of machines and engineering – of viaducts, ocean liners and grain silos – be applied to the design of buildings. It also promotes its author, the Swiss-born French architect and painter Le Corbusier, as a man uniquely able to bring this new world into being.
Le Corbusier was to architecture what Picasso was to painting, a towering and egomaniacal creative force who transformed his discipline for ever. His buildings have inspired admiration, sometimes devotion. He is an icon, granted the nickname “Corb” or “Corbu” by architects. He has also been vigorously attacked, as a mechanistic fanatic whose ideas inspired inhumane tower blocks and concrete jungles.
Published as a book in 1923, based partly on previous articles, Vers Une Architecture is now 100 years old. Using arresting combinations of photographs, measured drawings and rough sketches, the book shows images of cars and aeroplanes alongside the Parthenon and the cathedral of Notre Dame. It sets out design principles named “the five points of architecture”, for example that buildings should be raised on slender pillars called “pilotis”, so that the ground could flow uninterrupted beneath them. Vers Une Architecture rings with resonant statements, most famously that “a house is a machine for living in”. It proposes new ways of building cities, with 60-storey towers set among vast gardens and sports fields, served by multi-lane highways, also multi-storey blocks of “villa-apartments” where each home has its own garden.
Jayden Ali: ‘Sometimes we like things that are not good for us’
I made a film with my partner, the artist Lotty Sanna, called A Machine for Living In. It compared the idealised modernist aesthetic of the Unité d’Habitation, and the unattainable home life projected by Kim Kardashian, with the realities of childbirth and the diversity of people on the beach in Marseille. It was about the power of idols and images.
What Corb does with Towards an Architecture is to say “I do this” and to be definitive about that self-expression, that searching for a set of rules so you can break them later on in life. I love the power of the image and of mass media that allowed his ideas to be presented to the world. Just as we know that Kim Kardashian as an entity is probably not the thing that’s going to get you through life but we’re all seduced by it. Sometimes we like things that are not good for us, that’s the joy of life.
Read the full article by Rowan Moore in the Guardian.
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Image: Still from the film, A Machine for Living In, produced in collaboration with artist Lotty Sanna
Cover: Unite d'habitation in Marseille France Photograph by-Chris Hellier Allamy