Le Corbusier's Practical Aesthetic of the City

The treatise 'La Construction des villes' of 1910/11

Christoph Schnoor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317107132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Set within an insightful analysis, this book describes the genesis, ideas and ideologies which influenced La Construction des Villes by Le Corbusier. This volume makes the important theoretical work available for the first time in English, offering an interpretation as to how much and in what way his 'essai' may have influenced his later work.

Dealing with questions of aesthetic urbanism, La Construction des Villes shows Le Corbusier's intellectual influences in the field of urbanism. Discontent that the script was not sufficiently avant-garde, he abandoned it soon after it was written in the early 20th century. It was only in the late 1970s that American historian H. Allen Brooks discovered 250 pages of the forgotten manuscript in Switzerland. The author of this book, Christoph Schnoor, later discovered another 350 handwritten pages of the original manuscript, consisting of extracts, chapters, and bibliographic notes. This splendid find enabled the re-establishment of the manuscript as Le Corbusier had abandoned it, unfinished, in the spring of 1911.

This volume offers an unbiased extension of our knowledge of Le Corbusier and his work. In addition, it reminds us of the urban design innovations of the very early 20th century which can still serve as valuable lessons for a new understanding of contemporary urban design.

Part I, Chap. I

General Considerations

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PART I.//FIRST PART

Chap I. General Considerations

" II Study of the element[s] of the city

" III On possible (useful) modern strategies

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FIRST CHAP.//GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

§ 1. – The purpose of this study

§ 2. – Guiding principles

§ 3. – The present state of the debate

§ 4. – A fundamental present-day error

(Drawing on paper.)

Art is excluded

no responsibilities.

§1 Purpose of this study

[LCdv 24] 1//I^ST PART//FIRST CHAPTER

General considerations.//§. 1.

Purpose of this study.//1

This study, written with no other claim than as a reminder of the procedures which make our existence in cities agreeable, is addressed in particular to the authorities.

Perhaps it will evoke in architects a concern for harmonious ensembles, a concern which, more than any other, will bring them to set out the rules for a style. The view of modern cities would then lose the inconsistency which affects our eyes and spirits. Seeking harmony in entire streets would lead inevitably to a restful unity, and from there inevitably to character.

These principles developed here outside of all technical form, can be understood by all; they offer each of us a foundation sufficient to follow with interest the development of cities where we are obliged to live.

This development is not always dictated by sufficient logic. The area of city planning,⁴ overly monopolised by specialists who remain beyond the reach of popular criticism, needs to be more widely known. A matter which meets with such peremptory public interest deserves assistance from each of us, or at least requires informed assent, and not as is the case

4 Jeanneret uses “la construction des villes” here (literally ‘building towns/cities’), in an apparent calque on the standard German term ‘Städtebau’.

[LCdv 25] 2

today, blind assent, unreasoning trust.

Every man needs intellectual contributions from his contemporaries – and a man who exercises a public function even more so. Otherwise he risks confining himself to a small circle of personal ideas, often mediocre and short-lived. The history of the sciences and the arts involves nothing if not constant collaboration.

The authorities hold enormous strength; either they are unaware of the generous efforts born of the masses, and their government will be sterile and sad as a barren land; or they instigate in the people noble flights of fancy; upholding that which is beneficial, they provoke a flowering of great works.

Of past eras, there remain only those works in which our spirit is immortalised in beautiful shapes and, in tacit recognition, History has passed down the names – which are like torches – of those who crowned their warrior triumphs with a garland of the arts: Ramses, Ashurbanipal, Pericles, {Titus, Augustus, Trajan,} Charlemagne, the Caliphs, Tamerlane,* the Ming Dynasties, The Dukes of Berry, Louis XIV … Our mentality fashioned by the advanced state of socialisation

*{good} … But the most magnificent of master builders was Timur Beg (or Tamerlane). His warrior successes in Russia, in the Caucasus, in Persia, in Asia Minor and the Indies, provided him with abundant material with which to decorate his capital Samarkand. Many caravans brought rich spoils there. When a city was taken by force, the order was given to spare the [Continues on page LCdv 26]

[LCdv 26] 1.//3

in which we find ourselves, brings us to sometimes accuse these men of being cruel and despotic; their egotism which we condemn was at the time no worse than that which reigns today, more hidden, incapable of such frank violence, but just as active: an essentially human feeling, which differs only in its outward expression. {These men whom we often understand poorly have shown themselves as geniuses; their genius was to prompt the greatest flowerings of art.}

§2 General principles

Feeling beautiful emotions is the joy of life. The power, the task of art is to awaken feelings which, according to the level of nobility in individuals, will be more or less profound. The city is the field of action in which society lives and dies. The problem of beautifying it will therefore be a search for designs which evoke feelings.

Forms and colours arouse sensations, and from there, provoke emotions. The artist, drawing the plan for a city, will employ in rhythms the shapes and colours which bring feelings, as does the musician with his notes, the painter with the treasures of his palette. The more or less perfect beauty of a city will depend on the level of imagination

[Continued from LCdv 25]* architects, painters, skilled workers, who Tamerlane then used to carry out his projects. Constantly playing a very active part in his constructions, Tamerlane was very hard to satisfy; he often ordered that an already finished monument be altered and personally oversaw the rebuilding he had indicated. (Meciti, the Mosques of Samarkand⁵).

[LCdv 27] 1//4.

which had presided over the grouping of the various elements. This question is a plastic one, and altogether as delicate as questions of statuary. Equally, a funerary marble is made of similar material to the usual commercial marble – a glorious city is built of stone, mortar and iron just like an ugly city.*

{[In the margin:] *(as a note)

The ideal and the real have one same, single essence. Raw diamond and polished diamond are both diamond; but raw diamond is the real; polished diamond is the ideal.}

The layout of a city is primarily a work of art; in order to realise it, the artist must draw inspiration from the same rules which govern the other arts: the rules of convenance, balance and variety.

Thus he will recall that what adds to the heart’s emotion, the spirit’s rapture, is to do much with little. The opposite would be madness, – the madness of our era, which confuses beauty with surfeit, which measures emotion according to the level of budget.

As he considers that a richly dressed man will appear as such only when surrounded by colleagues dressed soberly, he will know the value of contrasts.

He will know that everything is relative, that the absolute of a dimension or an impression does not exist in the play of emotions; only by a correct scene setting, and a perfect adaptation to the surroundings, will the thoughts which he wishes to inscribe in concrete forms be brought forth.

His aesthete’s taste will force him to choose, when two equally practical solutions present themselves, the solution capable of more beauty.

Architect, engineer, painter, sculptor and poet, the city planner is faced with one of the noblest tasks: that of bringing his fellow citizens the joy of living in a city where the living is good.

[LCdv 28] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS//Text.//I

§3 The present state of the debate

[LCdv 29] The present state of the debate. §3

[LCdv 30] 2)

Today we are in the midst of an artistic rebirth and the city, in its shape, is caught up in this. The development is also truly curious, which led to the reappearance of Architecture. From 1800 to 1900 – the problem had much more distant roots –, architecture had fallen into irretrievable decadence; it became excessively formulaic, to the point of being deadly, it had begun to lose sight of its own existence, its reality, its raison d’être: the material. Being cultivated in shady offices where theory was king, it was gradually reduced to a harmonious and flattering graphical representation, non-viable lines traced on the drawing board. Yet this display ignored the material, often contradicting it. Besides which, science was developing, and the demands of everyday life required something other than linear fantasies: bridges were needed,

5 Izdamie imperatorskoj archeologiceskoj Kommissii: Meceti Samarkanda. (Les Mosquées de Samarcande, published by la commission impériale archéologique), Volume: Le Gour Emir, St. Petersburg: Éxpédition pour la confection des papiers d’état 1905. Text in Russian and French.

[LCdv 31] 4)

vast halls, etc. Industry supplied the iron, and this not being easily reconciled with the formulary for sculpture, architects discounted it. They could not however do without it, and being cowards they left the ignoble task to the engineers; they contented themselves with making masks. In front of the metal frame which they left unaesthetic, they erected stone walls, disfigured with useless mouldings and columns, vaults and arches; these immoral trompe-l’œil masks which constituted inadmissible trickery, a veritable blasphemy which […] by this dressing against their own ideals engineers were modest, and undertook the ignoble task for a long time. Yet little by little, going back to study the material which the architects had abandoned, they learned its capacity for plasticity. And this ascetic school,

[LCdv 32] 6)

considering the ungratefulness of iron, one day, made it express beauty. That beauty was still lacking in generosity, and many did not understand it. There were some imposing bridges, and the immense Machine Hall at the 1889 Exhibition. Iron was decidedly lacking in corporalité⁶, but in this persistent struggle, characters had formed and ideas changed. The impressionist painters, literary figures, symbolists had already shaken the routine structure. Leaving the morbidly Elysian fields given over to art, the end of the 19th century got back in touch with the earth, the plain material. In architecture, a writer specialising in these questions said, quite correctly: “It is today something publicly acknowledged, but not yet admitted, that in the field of architecture, engineers are the true architects of our time.”*

{[On facing page:] * Der Städtebau. Jos. Aug. Lux. Dresden⁷}

[LCdv 33] 8)

Moreover, a new material has arrived since then, prodigiously rich in promise: reinforced concrete. It will, when combined with the boldest d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Le Corbusier’s Practical Aesthetic of the City: Introduction
• Essay
• La Construction des villes: The Manuscript
• Proposition:
• Part I, Chap. I General Considerations
• Part I, Chap. II The Elements of the City
• Part I, Chap. III On Possible Strategies
• Part II Critical Application La Chaux-de-Fonds
• Appendix: Material for Critical Application, II
• Materials: Notebooks
• Inventory
• Bibliography
• Illustrations
• Index