Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes

A show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June–October, 2013, organized by Guest Curator Jean- Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with Barry Bergdoll, the Phillip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. A catalog of the same name is published by MoMA (New York, 2013). Other venues: Fundació “la Caixa” in Barcelona (February–March 2014) and Fundació “la Caixa” in Madrid (June–October 2014).

In June 2013 the Museum of Modern Art mounted its first retrospective of the work of Le Corbusier: Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. The very existence of the exhibition, its announced theme of Le Corbusier’s life-long association with modern landscapes, and the catalog’s unusual atlas format had the interested public not a little perplexed—had it, in fact, abuzz.

The fact that this was Le Corbusier’s first extensive, research-based MoMA retrospective promised a backstory that would explain why the MoMA had never awarded him the accolade of a major one-man show, something that it had previously bestowed upon several of his peers. Moreover, landscape is entirely absent from the lengthy list of his achievements recognized by scholarly consensus. As Jean-Louis Cohen, world-renowned Le Corbusier scholar and guest curator for this show, concedes, his public image is in fact that of an “urbiclast,”¹ a destroyer of urban landscapes, specifically one who proposed to save only selected iconic historic monuments on their isolated parcels and to sweep away the rest of the centers of cities such as Moscow, Barcelona, Rio, and, best known of all, Paris. If the atlas format is clearly commensurate with the geographic extent of his built works—to be found in a dozen countries on five continents—the title phrase “modern landscapes” implies, more controversially, that these works were to be considered the creations of someone who wanted to preserve and enhance people’s relations with places even while remaining the ideologue of the machine age. Since the idea of a contextualizing Le Corbusier is the antithesis of the one introduced by the MoMA’s International Style show, namely the inventor of an aesthetic that was good for all places and all programs of the modern age, excitement among the cognoscenti was palpable.

1.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) (French, born Switzerland. 1887–1965). Plan for Paris. 1937. Aerial perspective with photomontage of buildings to be preserved. Gouache and silver gelatin print mounted on heliographic print on paper, 23 × 33-7/8" (61 × 86 cm). Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris.

Copyright 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC.

Students of preservation were, to the contrary, understandably skeptical. For a total interpretive overturning, the exhibition organizers would have to find the landscape thesis at work in his plans for historic city centers. A contextualizing Le Corbusier might, in short, have to have been some kind of preservationist. To be perfectly clear, Cohen explicitly excludes this possibility, saying that Le Corbusier only rarely engaged preservation “in the strictest sense,” citing the case of his praise of a newly built villa in Capri constructed following tradition.² And yet the organizers described the photomontage from the presentation of the Plan Voisin of 1936 (Figure 1 here and appearing in the accompanying catalog) as one “of the buildings to be preserved.”³ This review is the result of a conversation between the reviewer and the exhibition and the catalog (but not the organizers) about the impact of the “modern landscape” thesis on the place of preservation in the work of Le Corbusier, with the majority of her attention on the Plan Voisin.

First a few words are in order about the exhibition and the pre-opening puzzle of story and format. The backstory revealed misunderstandings on both sides, but essentially put the onus on the New York–hating architect intent on revenge for the city’s perceived rejection of him in 1935.⁴ The format of a historical atlas of places...