Offers Le Corbusier example essay topic

Review A gifted storyteller is one who makes his subject come alive. Charles Jencks is unequivocally architecture's greatest living storyteller, He has probably produced nearly as many books and articles during his prolific career as did Le Corbusier, the subject of his latest work. In Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, Jencks has woven together readings of Corb's writings, paintings, architecture, and city planning with pertinent (and sometimes impertinent) biographical details. It is an epic poem in the tradition of Chaucer, and can be read as such. Jencks's style is jocular, freewheeling, anecdotal, and provocative -- as he is in person. In this book there is much on Le Corbusier that has been said before, by Jencks himself as well as others.

Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution is, in large measure, a revision and vastly expanded version of his Le Corbusier and the Tragic View of Architecture (Harvard University Press, 1973), drawing upon research and testimony that continue to emerge about a man whom Jencks believes to be not only a tragic persona, but a genius as well. He rewrites, splices, condenses, expands, speculates, and even offers his own chart of history so that we may easily visualize developments. Jencks is true to his signature method of interpretation, which proceeds by analogy and metaphor, with limitless imagination. However, he also follows, or leads, a trend in architectural theorizing that has become widespread in the late 20th century, namely to look to other realms of intellectual inquiry for insight and guidance.

The absence of a single, comprehensive, overarching theory that might serve practitioners has led would-be theorists, writers, and teachers of architecture to seek parallels within other disciplines, such as literature, linguistics, and sociology. Jencks's references range from Noam Chomsky and semiology in the 1970's to the sociology of David Harvey and David Here in the 1990's, illustrating that he has kept abreast of cutting-edge theory. Most recently he has forayed into cognitive science, finding in it another means for classifying (something the author claims he dislikes) the crucial facts of Le Corbusier's biography to fit a type, namely of the "typical genius", or "basically protean type" of creative individual. Fortunately for readers who have not yet read Howard Gardner's Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi (Basic Books, 1993), Jencks includes an appendix summarizing his theory. Gardner explores seven figures whom he calls "Exemplary Creators", individuals who radically altered their fields, yet also shared common features in their development.

To Gardner's "Big Seven", Jencks wants to include an eighth: Le Corbusier. His previous comparisons between Corb and Don Quixote, Nietzche's Zarathustra, Jesus Christ, etc., are also present in the new book. What remains unclear is the purpose of introducing a new paradigm in which to slip Corb. Is it fundamental to our understanding of Le Corbusier that he fit the pattern of a "genius" of the caliber of Einstein or Stravinsky? "He loved the idea of standardization and the type", says Jencks, who then concludes, "so he would have liked to be considered a normal genius, warts and all, with all the nasty and cruel truths revealed in the end".

It is sufficient to say, as Jencks ultimately does, that Corb was "a man driven by a vision" and leave it at that, rather than apply a label that has become a cliche. Richly coded as a result of Le Corbusier's obsession with symbolism, Ronchamp is proto-postmodern, according to Jencks. In this collage, he highlights the multiple readings of its forms and imagery (above). Drawings by Hillel Schock en (facing page) also depict some of the metaphors that Ronchamp evokes. The tone Jencks adopts throughout the book is one of revelation, as he ostensibly divulges important facts we never knew about the great architect. He is consciously rewriting 20th-century architectural history to reveal Le Corbusier as its most revolutionary and inventive designer.

(Jencks claims elsewhere that Antonio Gaudi, too, deserves that honor.) Some years ago Jencks invented the elaborate "Evolutionary Tree" for architecture, various versions of which have appeared in his books over the years, including The Language of Postmodern Architecture (Rizzoli, 1977). He is continually updating the tree, which appears now in this book, spanning the period 1900 to 2000 and depicting 40-odd movements and 400 persons producing six types of architecture. The author points out that his "revolutionary" Le Corbusier-no longer "evolutionary" -- appears four times (more than any other figure), and that he invented four or five different languages in architecture. Jencks has built a career on the "game of signification" as he calls it, which is based upon finding hidden coding and new metaphors, each more astounding than the previous ones. But one begins to suspect that the exercise of rewriting, or revising, previous books is self-serving in more ways than one. Having a vested interest in postmodernism as a concept, Jencks now offers Le Corbusier as the "grandfather" of the movement because his work, Ronchamp in particular, is imbedded with the "multivalence [s] of meaning" so cherished by the postmodernists.

This makes the building, in Jencks's words, a "harbinger" of postmodern architecture. He likens the chapel's distinctive form to "a nun's cowl, a monk's hood, a ship's prow, praying hands". Setting off on a game of "Hunt the Symbol", as he calls it, Jencks identifies with "a certain surety" the "formal similarities behind different symbols". Le Corbusier's Ubu sculptures, fractal geometry, and anthropomorphism (ear-like forms) generated the plan and shape of Ronchamp, Jencks asserts, among other metaphorical readings. As we know, with raconteurs much of the story is in the telling. A recurrent theme favored by Jencks in his repeat performances on Corb is the supposed relationship between the architect's sex life and his architecture.

The chapters "Jeanne ret Discovers Sex in a Pot,"The Primitive and the Sexual", and "Josephine [Baker]-Goddess of Dance", as well as long discussions of Le Corbusier's purported affairs with Marguerite Trader -- Harris and Minette De Silva take us into armchair psychology and moral speculation that can only increase the popularity of this book. Jencks has always supported the notion that female shapes in Corb's paintings could be correlated with aspects of his urban-planning projects for Rio and Algiers. The reader is offered further "evidence" of Corb's sexual obsessions (big hips), voyeurism (sketching women cavorting in brothels), in addition to extra -- marital affairs, but these will have little impact on our overall long-term assessment of Corb's architecture. On the subject of Chandigarh, however, (the city in India designed by Le Corbusier) Jencks makes insightful remarks. Invited to Chandigarh in 1999 to participate in a symposium commemorating the city's 50th anniversary, he had the opportunity to learn a great deal-especially from the Indians, but also from other foreigners. In opening his remarks to the assembly of "survivors of modernism", and "speaking as a postmodernist", Jencks asked, "What would Le Corbusier do today for Chandigarh as a city?" Almost lost in ethereal discussions about solar rituals and transcendentalism was a proposal that polarized opinion: to re-urbanize and densify Chandigarh, beginning with the esplanade of the capitol.

While it is pure speculation whether or not Corb would accept this kind of growth, Jencks does well to raise the issue of this city and other planned modern cities within what he calls an ecology of succession: layers of growth that permit conservation, but also accept change. What is disturbing in Jencks's approach is his ignorance, or purposeful omission, of some of the very best Corb scholarship of the last 25 years, including work by Manfred o Taf uri, Bruno Reuchlin, Jacques Lucan, Giuliano Gresleri, as well as Alan Colquhoun and Kenneth Frampton. This seems to point at the deep gulf that separates Jencks's particular genre of interpretation from that of many of his colleagues. Nonetheless he modestly admits, "One is bound to be wrong, or at least too limited, in any attempt to fix his essential contribution. The interpretations that are usually made are either contradicted by Le Corbusier's supremely dialectical development, or they pale beside the creative wealth of his output". As biography, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture provides highly readable, entertaining speculation about the life and nature of a "normal genius".

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Diccionario de la Lengua Espa~nola. 4. Weeks R. Jeffrey. "The Shape of Space". 2 da.

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