While Le Corbusier's urban projects are generally considered confrontational in their relationship to the traditional urban fabric, his proposal for the Venice hospital project remained an exercise ...in preserving the medieval fabric of the city of Venice through a systemic replication of its urban tissue. This book offers a detailed study of Le Corbusier's Venice hospital project as a plausible built entity. In addition, it analyses it in the light of its supposed affinity with the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. No formal attempt to date has been made to critically analyse the hospital project's design considerations in comparison to the medieval urban configuration of the city of Venice. Using a range of methodologies including those from architectural theory and history, using archival resources, on-site analysis, and interviews with important resource persons, this book is an interpretation of the conceptual basis for Le Corbusier understanding of the structural formulation of the city of Venice as mentioned in The Radiant City (1935). In doing so, it deciphers the diagrammatic analysis of the city structure found in this work into a set of coherent design modules that were applied in the hospital project and that could become a point of further investigation. Architects and other architecturally interested laypeople with an interest in Venice will find the book a valuable addition to their knowledge. For architectural historians the book makes an important link between modernism and the historically grown Venice.
Dr Mahnaz Shah is a Lecturer in Design Theory at the Cardiff School of Art and Design, Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Contents: Foreword, Robert Maxwell; Foreword, Tim Benton; Introduction; History of the project; The urban context; Analysis of the project; Important findings; Table of important events; Bibliography; Index.
This is not a book for architects, but for all those that have suffered, consciously and unconsciously, from modern architecture and have wondered how it came about. This was largely due to one man, ...an architect called Le Corbusier. For some he was a genius, but the truth is he was a sham, a fake, a charlatan whose only gift was for self-publicity. He was the most influential architect of the second half of the twentieth century; his influence overwhelmed the architectural profession on a global scale, who swallowed his publicity whole, and still hold him in awe. For the rest of the world, the mere mortals, his influence was disastrous, as traditional buildings were destroyed and replaced by featureless boxes of varying sizes, imposing a dreariness hitherto unimagined. As usual, it was the poor who suffered most as they were herded into tower-blocks. These were often grouped into estates that ringed many towns and cities, which then degenerated into high-rise slums with all the well-known attendant social problems.This book exposes the myths that surround Le Corbusier, detailing the endless failures of his proposals and his projects. These were due to his profound dishonesty, both as a person and as an architect. His legacy was an architectural profession that believed, and still believe, they were designing buildings based on logic, functionality and honesty whereas they were doing the opposite.
the construction of the apartment block at number 24, rue Nungesser et Coli in Paris, between 1931 and 1934, was an important milestone for Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. It was the first ...opportunity offered to them in France to put to the test theories on urbanism and architecture, which they had been working on since the 1920s ("cinq points de l architecture moderne"), and marks an important stage on the path to Brutalism. And it is of all the more interest because of the apartment and art studio Le Corbusier designed for the top two floors of the building and in which he lived from 1934 until his death in 1965. Historical documents and drawings make this handy-sized volume an invaluable guide for visitors and a practical introduction for all architectural enthusiasts.
Aerial photographs are most commonly associated with notions of panoptic vision or the environmental sublime. This paper reviews the dystopian and utopian discourses surrounding aerial photography ...and suggests a third approach to understanding aerial vision as dialectically situated between the poles of science and art, rationality and imagination, abstracted and embodied knowledge, visibility and invisibility, the archive and the museum.
From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability - how we imagine better urban environments - remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How ...do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city - Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital - Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic 'algorithm', that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the 'model city' that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other 'Venices' for the future. From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability - how we imagine better urban environments - remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation.The Venice Variationsexplores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city - Italo Calvino'sInvisible Citiesand Le Corbusier's Venice Hospital - Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic 'algorithm'. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the 'model city' enduring a 1000 years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other 'Venices' for the future.
"Poème électronique" was one of the first comprehensive multimedia works, which consistently used the handling of audio material in architectural space. This work was prepared by a trio of artists Le ...Corbusier, Edgard Varèse and Iannis Xenakis for the presentation of the Philips company at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. Poème électronique is used in this book as a comprehensive term for a set of artistic acts associated with the Philips pavilion. A particular emphasis is placed on the personality of the solitaire and pioneer of electroacoustic music, Edgard Varèse. The present publication attempts to trace the lines of the development of the three main protagonists intersecting an interpretive framework designed by the aesthetics of contemporary art groups and movements.
With its uncompromising and clear construction, the Villa Savoye, completed in 1931, established Le Corbusier s reputation as an undisputed master of twentieth-century architecture. André Malraux ...placed it on the historic register in 1964. In this guide, historic documents and new photographs provide an in-depth presentation both to visitors to the site and to interested readers at home.
The pilgrimage church Notre-Dame-du-Haut in Ronchamp (1950-54), an icon of modern architecture, represents one of the central buildings of Le Corbusier's late period. Located on a high plateau in the ...Vosges above Belfort, this building is an unsurpassed work of art which also fits uniquely into its physical surroundings. The shell-shaped roof, the rounded walls, the towers of stone masonry, and the facade with its rhythmic openings of colored glass are the essential elements of this sculptural construction. The scale and proportions of the chapel at Ronchamp are designed on the basis of the Modulor that Le Corbusier developed, which accounts for its distinctive spatial effect. Like all the guides in this series, this book is indispensable both for a specialist audience and for tourists interested in architecture and modern art.
