Corbu made to measure

From the Swiss Jura mountains to the Mediterranean shores of Roquebrune Cap Martin, Charles Edouard Jeanneret, later Le Corbusier, surveyed numerous territories, from his initiatory “Voyage d’Orient” to the distant Indian plains of Punjab.

Of each of these territories and their architecture, Le Corbusier took the measurements, drawing and carefully analysing their compositions. In his vision the architect believed that geometry would simplify their understanding and relied on a study of regulatory plans. By fitting his body into space, Le Corbusier thus revealed the harmonic rules concealed in mathematical proportions.

In this spirit, the Le Corbusier exhibition, Mesures de l’homme, on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, seeks to highlight the human element of his oeuvre. The body in space, perception and sensation, are seen to be essential points in the evolution of the architect’s creations. Imagine Le Corbusier, at the time of his Voyage d’Orient, gazing at the Parthenon while reading Plato: “Man is the measure of all things: of those that are, of the fact that they are; of those that are not, of the fact that they are not”. (Protagora)
A rationalist interpretation of these words suggests a eulogy of human reason: the same reason that urged Le Corbusier to refine his work by proposing a new architectural language. Throughout his life, his architectural development was to lean on his own paintings and sculptures.

In 1918, with the painter Amédée Ozenfant, he wrote the manifesto of the Purist movement, in which paintings are still-lives representing ordinary, but “architectured” objects, preliminarily with the aid of regulatory layouts. “Purism attempts an art made of plastic constants that escape conventions…”.

In establishing L’Esprit Nouveau, a journal of Aesthetics inspired by a lecture delivered by Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant took up “the idea of an art as the synthesis of visual, plastic and acoustic phenomena arising from the new world.”

For the architect, these reflections were to be concretised in the realisation of the Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in 1925. The pavilion was the prototype of a new industrial aesthetic, devoted to the modern habitat and notably to his Villa-building projects. In its new form of experimental expression, the dwelling ‘cell’ reflected a scientific aesthetic, where everything is measured, on a human scale; where furniture flexibly adapts to the movements of the body. Here the architect stuck to the rules of proportion dictated by his own Modulor, a system of proportion based on the golden section and on the silhouette of a man 1.83 m tall. It furthermore took up the mathematical and natural growth process of the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is equal to the sum of the preceding two.

The rhythm and movement perceived by the body are joined in this new aesthetic, where “pictorial” space and that of “habitation” are unite. Wishing to promote new interiors for these houses, and to move away from Art Déco ornamentation, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret brought in Charlotte Perriand as a partner in their developments. This new, spring-mounted tubular metal furniture adapted to bodies that freely appropriated it. Charlotte Perriand carried out ergonomic studies of the body’s varying postures, to the point where even the furniture itself became mobile, as in the now renowned rocking chaise longue. The LC3 armchair, although small, was very comfortable.

The exhibition route stages successive themes with an array of supports that reflect the state of permanent creative research conducted under Le Corbusier’s guidance: an abundance of drawings, models and photographs, sculptures, paintings, objects, texts, films and books. Le Corbusier was a master of exposition, not to say exhibition, whether in the organising of pavilions for trade fairs... or in the staging of an event to celebrate his own works, as witnessed by the numerous works that display his theories.

As a stage-designer and communicator, Le Corbusier perfectly controlled his image, with the help of Lucien Hervé as his personal photographer. In 1952, at Roquebrune Cap-Martin, against an idyllic Mediterranean backdrop and true to his Modulor principles, he built a tiny (15 sqm) ‘log cabin’. There, sitting at a plain wooden table facing the sea, he continued to think about and indefatigably to design his new projects. And it was the Mediterranean Sea, which had so long been his inspiration, that claimed his life, on 27 August 1965.

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until 3 August 2015
Le Corbusier. Mesures de l’homme
Centre Pompidou, Paris