v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Rue le Corbusier [1924]- Cité Frugès (Pessac)

Architectes: le Corbusier [1887-1965] & Pierre Jeanneret [1896-1967]  by RUAMPS Copyright at flickr

-Les Corbusier: Maison Type Gratte-Ciel [1924]- Cité Frugès (Pessac)

RUAMPS Copyright at flickr

Le Corbusier + Pierre Jeanneret - House at Weissenhof

08 ROTCH Simeneau at flickr

Le Corbusier - Villa Turque

08 ROTCH Simeneau at flickr

Les Corbusier & Architecture

Unité d'habitation

An exhibition in Berlin at the Vitra design Museum:

Le Corbusier (1887–1965) is considered to be one of the most significant architects of the 20th century. His work continues to exert a considerable influence on architecture and town planning to this day. The exhibition will take an explicitly contemporary view of its subject that takes account of the latest research while at the same time attempting to do justice to the perennial discourse on Le Corbusier. On the other hand it should be seen as an introduction to the work of the architect – especially for those more recent generations for whom Le Corbusier is already part of the history of the 20th century.

Divided up into three relatively autonomous areas – Contexts, Privacy and Publicity, Built Art – the show will pick out leading themes in Le Corbusier’s work: his fascination with the modern metropolis, his Mediterranean and oriental interests, his pursuit of organic forms in the 1930s, and also his interest in new technologies and media. It is only by seeing these and other aspects in context that we can gain an overall understanding of his œuvre, which manifested itself in an ever more intensive interplay between architecture, town planning, painting, design, film and other disciplines. Selected exhibits from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris will form the core of the exhibition.

They include original paintings, sculptures, numerous original pieces of furniture, original drawings and plans, first editions of Le Corbusier’s books plus numerous small objects from the architect’s private collection, which he used for purposes of inspiration, orientation and demonstration. As any comprehensive understanding of Le Corbusier must also take account of the mutual influences between himself and many of his contemporaries, the exhibition will also feature for the first time numerous exhibits of contemporaries with whom he had close relations, including original pieces of furniture by Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé as well as paintings by Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and André Bauchant. The exhibition’s use of such a wide spectrum of media is intended to highlight Le Corbusier’s historical models while also illuminating the technical, formal and philosophical backgrounds to his works.

Lego Corbusier

From Brick Architect Matija Grguric a new project of unconventional Architecture: the version 2.0 of Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier

Interview with Mike Davis

From BLDGBLOG:

BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the vocabulary that you use to describe this new “post-urban geography” of global slums: regional corridors, polycentric webs, diffuse urbanism, etc. I’m wondering if you’ve found any consistent forms or structures now arising, as cities turn away from centralized, geographically obvious locations, becoming fractal, slum-like sprawl.

Davis: First of all, the language with which we talk about metropolitan entities and larger-scale urban systems is already eclectic because urban geographers avidly debate these issues. I think there’s little consensus at all about the morphology of what lies beyond the classical city.

The most important debates really arose through discussions of urbanization in southern China, Indonesia, and southeast Asia – and that was about the nature of peri-urbanization on the dynamic periphery of large Third World cities.

BLDGBLOG: And "peri-urbanization" means what?

Davis: It’s where the city and the countryside interpenetrate. The question is: are you, in fact, looking at a snapshot of a very dynamic or perhaps chaotic process? Or will this kind of hybrid quality be preserved over any length of time? These are really open questions.

There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality, where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees. Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries.

This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums, peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.

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