Review: Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in Liverpool

Ellis Woodman on Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in The Crypt, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

There is a moment early on in Liverpool’s new Le Corbusier retrospective which perfectly encapsulates its subject’s public persona.

It is a short film, from 1925, showing the man known to his mother as Charles Édouard-Jeanneret peering out from behind those fearsome thick-rimmed, circular spectacles that he invariably wore.

He is explaining his proposal for the construction of the Plan Voisin, a modest scheme to bulldoze much of central Paris and replace it with a series of 60-storey cruciform towers laid out on a grid.

As he turns to the map behind him, draws a large rectangle around the proposed site and calmly proceeds to black out the medieval street pattern, you can’t help thinking what a magnificent Bond villain he would have made.

Such moments of provocation proved wildly effective in promoting Le Corbusier to international fame. They also, however, served to caricature him as a deranged technocrat, an image that the work of his lesser post-war followers did much to reinforce.

And yet the exhibition powerfully conveys that this is only a fraction of the story. Yes, the urban plans still look absolutely barmy – thankfully, very few of his large-scale projects were realised – but Le Corbusier was also a painter, sculptor, furniture designer and, of course, an architect of some of the greatest buildings of the 20th century.

At Liverpool, all these aspects of his output are brought together, giving an indication of how developments in art – notably Cubism and Surrealism – played as large a role in shaping his architectural imagination as did developments in reinforced concrete technology and the growth of motor car use.

The show also describes a figure who was Picasso-like in his quest for reinvention. His early work draws on both classical architecture and the vernacular buildings of his native Switzerland.

It is only when he arrives in Paris in the 1920s that he adopts his pseudonym — which can be translated as “the crow-like one” — and begins to produce the series of highly abstract, spatially complex houses that bring him to the world’s attention.

The post-war work is as different again: muscularly sculptural, where the earlier work had been composed of thin planes; and in rough, exposed concrete and brick where it had previously been painted a pristine white.

One wall of the exhibition is devoted to Le Corbusier’s very substantial influence on the British architecture of the Fifties and Sixties. However, he never built here, and visiting much of his greatest work — the church at Ronchamp, the La Tourette monastery, the string of major buildings that he realised in India in the 1950s — demands a considerable trek.

The Liverpool show represents the next best thing, offering an Aladdin’s Cave of original models and drawings. As a bonus, it offers a rare opportunity to see inside the crypt of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, the only part of Lutyens’s original design for the building to be built.

However, quite what Lutyens would have made of the show being staged here, I dread to think. On admission to his office, new staff members were notified that ownership of Le Corbusier’s books was considered a sacking offence.

The Oval Tower, Another Landmark For Dubai

The Oval Tower is the latest piece of architectural whimsy to come out of Dubai. As you might guess, it is shaped like an oval. The tower in the Business Bay area will be home to 19 floors of office space and a leisure deck with a gymnasium with a sauna, shower and lockers.



The building as two distinct parts, the tower and the podium. The podium of the tower will hold a dining area with a panoramic lift and staircase. There will be parking in both the podium and the basement for 651 cars.

6th Le Corbusier Research Center to be Built in India

The world is soon to have a new Le Corbusier research center/museum. It's been announced that the sixth such building will be constructed in Chandigarh, India, a city for which Corbusier laid out the master plan for in the 1950s. It's the second building in India, and it will feature a museum, like in all the other locations, but also plans to be a destination for architects and designers to work in their respective fields (though much more like a research library and most of it will have to do with the famous designer/architect himself). What's more, it will also be built to resemble and function in the way Le Corbusier would have likely wanted it designed, the planers hoping that it will resemble how things operated when the man was there working lo those many years ago.

Here's a bit:

The centre will be divided into six sections portraying the archival records, original plans, elevations, sketches and studies, maps and models, documents, photographs and furniture. Three rooms will serve as reception, reference and digital library with internet facility.

"We will establish a 'Chandigarh heritage conservation cell' for monitoring the conservation activity within the city. The materials that will be displayed in the centre will be collected on a permanent loan basis from various public, private and international institutions," he said.

The open courtyard would be used for the temporary exhibitions to promote ancient, medieval and Contemporary art and architecture in the region.

Architectural Quotes:

Here are some Architectural Quotes; Enjoy:

Light, God's eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.

Thomas Fuller (1608-1661) British clergyman and author
Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) U.S.
No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) English art critic.
An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) English art critic.
When we build, let us think that we build for ever.

John Ruskin (1819-1900) English art critic.
Believe me, that was a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65) Roman philosopher and playwright.
Form ever follows function.

Louis Henry Sullivan (1856-1924) U.S. architect.
All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) American architect.
I don't think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) American painter who was a founder and foremost pr
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) French poet, writer and art critic.