Who's responsible for all the concrete carbuncles?
| BUILDING SITE Architecture re-appraised by the Magazine |
I only have to hear a fellow architect say "Corb" and I curl.
 |  Chandigarh's assembly building is one of Le Corbusier's most famous  |
Enlarge ImageLe Corbusier will do for me. This vain, mercurial megalith of Modernism wouldn't have given the average architect a glance.
Only a fool would attempt to emulate his work. Thousands have - the public calls it "Modern Architecture", a concrete desert where simple souls bend to an architect's arrogant will.
Le Corbusier's pincer-like powers lock us into the "modular" grids he so successfully imposed on our lives. Frigid, perfect, masterful - his works glimmer with the fatal splendour of a sunlit iceberg.
He died five years before I became a student at the Liverpool School of Architecture. The air was thick with his influence. In 1970 architecture and town planning still enjoyed the flux of post-war socio-economic theory.
|  Cumbernauld town centre is hated but its whole concept was controversial |
Le Corbusier had attained the status of a god - his work was not questioned, as the work of famous architects is not questioned today. I avoided his revolutionary manifesto of 1923, Towards a New Architecture. I skipped The Modular of 1948, and Modular II - all sacred architectural creeds. Now I know about Corbusier but approach with caution.
Three examples explain him in the context of how we experience our dwellings, towns and cities today. Each example - like a Hollywood movie star - is scintillatingly photogenic.
The Villa Savoye, built in 1930, is a fatally stupendous design, the second home near Paris of the wealthy Savoye family. Limousines linked the Paris house to the villa - the motor car generated the plan.
The elegant columns, piloti, that raise the principle "deck" of the residence above an immaculate, cemetery-like oblong of lawn (over which the villa "flies" like a plane) inspired thousands of horrible post-war shopping centres, dead average downtown office blocks, and lurid multi-storey car parks. Think lacklustre concrete slimed with pigeon muck. London's Centre Point is a notable example.
|   Our climate cannot be blamed entirely, or the fact that the English are not good at large scale planning and hate piazzas  |
Functionalism demanded that these millionaires and their guests walked on floors surfaced with black quarry tiles (as for commercial kitchens) and linoleum. The villa is of reinforced concrete, finished in ever-to-be-repainted white.
Inside, you stand beautifully dressed round the walls, upstaged by your own living room where perfectly arranged furniture begs not to be used.
In Marseille, Unite d'Habitation was an experiment in communism. Opened in 1952, the leviathan block embodies in concrete the ideals of socialist family life - everything but the freedom to do as you want.
 Le Corbusier is thought of by many in the world of architecture as the leading mind of the 20th Century |
With its shops (half way up), its children's garden on the roof, its modular facades gaily painted in Cubist colours, and location in a park, Unite was the "last word". People hated it.
Modular planning - a grid controls everything - made the flats like railway compartments. The idea of a two-level duplex failed because the bedrooms were set on open balconies overlooking living areas.
Le Corbusier hoped that Unite would promote his 1920 vision of A City of Towers: identical, 60-storey apartment blocks set in a rigid grid within urban parkland.
Unite spawned plans for every awful working-class housing estate in Europe - the most notorious at Park Hill in Sheffield. The Barbican is a splendid attempt but still grim.
 Plymouth Civic Centre is not beloved of all in the Devon city |
The Legislative Assembly Building in Chandigarh in India was completed in 1964. It is an overpowering architectural juggernaut created in sculptural reinforced concrete for a brand new Indian regional capital. Nehru invited Le Corbusier to create the Chandigarh Master Plan and design its civic complex.
The architect relished the megalomaniacal freedom of concept. The Assembly Building is a breathtaking cooling tower projecting from a square "cage" studded with a variety of "Architectonic functional nodes" . Yes, architectural jargon begins with Le Corbusier.
His post-war influence exerted a fatal fascination over a young generation of British architects. They relished a period of urban renewal gilded with socialist optimism. Architecture and town planning were to create the ideal society. London's Royal Festival Hall and Plymouth city centre represent a keynote.
 Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp sticks in the mind |
But what of London's National Westminster Tower, the Institute of Education, the Millbank Tower, the Churchill Gardens Estate, the Economist Building, St Thomas's Hospital, Hemel Hempstead New Town, Harlow New Town, Cumbernauld, and even the BBC's Television Centre? Despite the distinguished names involved, all miss the mark.
Why? Why was it all so disappointing? Why should Le Corbusier's amazing concept of a reinforced concrete, minimal component structural building frame be so difficult to translate? Why should his modular design rationale have stultified thousands of projects?
 Harlow New Town rather less so |
Our climate cannot be blamed entirely, or the fact that the British are not good at large scale planning and hate piazzas.
We must bring to earth a vision of one who saw architecture as cosmic, who made the impossible look easy. Students cannot resist Le Corbusier but his ideals are way too rich for them. He did not conceive form in solid terms - he manipulated an abstract concept of an ideal condition of living. Frigidity is essential to his genius.
Take two examples of Le Corbusier's creed:
• "Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined end, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit." (Towards a New Architecture, introduction to the section, Mass-Production Houses - 1923)
• "All this work on proportioning and measures is the outcome of a passion, disinterested and detached, an exercise, a game... a duty to be straight and loyal, dealing in honest-to-goodness merchandise." (The Modular, Chapter 3, Mathematics - 1948)
For Le Corbusier humanity was the merchandise, piled in pallets in a standardised industrial environment - clean, impersonal, good. But people are warm, loving, dilatory and bad.
Le Corbusier's creed of scrupulous Modernism was doomed to anti-climax - we cannot live up to it. Grasp this fact and we may forgive the brave attempts to emulate Le Corbusier during the three decades from 1950. Two centuries ahead of his time, Corbusier's ideals, years after his death, remain sizzlingly innovatory.
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