MODERNIST PERSUASION: LE CORBUSIER’S TOWARD AN ARCHITECTURE
IN JUST A FEW YEARS, the first works of modern architecture will be one hundred years old. The modern will officially become antique. Hardly a surprise: The new has long been old. Indeed, for more than fifty years there have been attempts to preserve key works of modern architecture against the effects of time. Permanent physical and legal defenses have been erected against decay, renovation, addition, and demolition. More and more of the surviving buildings are being meticulously restored to their original condition and cleaned for viewing by ever-increasing waves of architectural tourists. The modernist icons have become museums containing themselves, proud exhibitionists flaunting their historical value, strangely pristine jewels extracted from the relentless entropy of their original use as houses, schools, or offices, to be treated as precious art objects exchanged in an endlessly inflating international market. Everything has conspired to position the modern in the past, and an industry has been developed to accomplish this, armed with scholars, preservationists, technicians, archives, galleries, publishing houses, journals, collectors, local governments, and auction houses. The modern is being retooled as seductively exotic history.
Yet modern architecture remains uncannily modern, even as it rapidly approaches the status of antique. The clothes, cars, and popular music of the early twentieth century seem profoundly dated to us, even comic, but the architecture that tried to keep up with them is oddly fresh. When today’s clients ask an architect for something “modern,” a space exuding a contemporary feel, they unwittingly ask for an antique aesthetic. A space with smooth white walls, large expanses of glass, and a flat roof is still experienced as a contemporary space and described with the very same adjectives used by those who originally launched modern architecture: clear, calm, clean, rational, pure, open, light, free, and so on. The normative copy for real estate advertisements is lifted right out of the radical manifestos of the 1920s. It is as if the arguments used to incubate and promote modern architecture were so powerful that they have remained in force to this day. In the very moment that the original works are being embalmed to preserve and celebrate their historical specificity, their polemical characteristics remain the default setting of everyday perception.
Much of this remarkable effect can be attributed to Le Corbusier, the single most influential architect of the last century, and to his Vers une architecture of 1923, the single most influential architectural manifesto of that century. It is all the more surprising, then, that John Goodman’s new English translation—Toward an Architecture (Getty Research Institute, 2007)—is the first since Frederick Etchells’s heavy-handed and misleading 1927 version (Towards a New Architecture). The restoration of missing passages, of Le Corbusier’s idiosyncratic use of language, of key terms, of typography, and even of the original title is refreshing and timely. After all, we now face the first generation of architectural students for whom Le Corbusier is a profoundly historical figure—a stranger, even. Despite his relentless assault on schools and his own lack of formal architectural education, the schooling of architects worldwide was until recently centered around Le Corbusier and his canonical designs, with copies of his monumental eight-volume Oeuvre complète being close at hand in every architect’s studio, if not on the drawing board itself. Its 1,708 pages detailing all of his remarkable projects amounted to a seemingly unlimited catalogue of essential ideas. But young architects no longer devotedly study each of Le Corbusier’s villas of the ’20s, closely scrutinizing every detail for vital clues that can propel them into the field. The father figure that loomed over the twentieth century like no other is not even a convenient prop for Oedipal fantasies. This is a time of polymorphous, overlapping streams of information—a time when, it is thought, a single figure, a single design, or a single book can no longer command the field. To students today, modern architecture and the techniques for promoting it seem tame. But the radical innovation of both is obscured only because so much of their logic has been internalized into the everyday operations of the field. Students are, as it were, unimpressed by their own inherited biology.
Yet it is precisely for this reason that Toward an Architecture will, perhaps, finally be read. A book becomes visible as such only when its spell is broken. Just because a text is influential, even the most influential of all, does not mean that it is actually read. On the contrary, it assumes canonical status because the way it operates transcends the mere identification of some particular program of action. Oddly enough, truly transformative books are the ones that cannot be read at the moment of their greatest impact.
Le Corbusier’s text is an impassioned sermon, an impatient call for faith—a faith in reason and in an architecture whose rationality can be clearly articulated (or, preferably, is self-articulate) but a faith nonetheless, because both the book and the kind of architecture it promotes exceed reason. The book is powerful precisely because it cannot simply be comprehended. Le Corbusier invented a way of interrupting the architect’s normal way of reading. The text brilliantly deploys a series of overlapping rhetorical and graphic strategies that create an atmosphere of reason, a relentless sense of momentum toward a particular outcome, but in fact work to pound the reader into early submission. To submit to the logic of the book is supposedly to submit to the new conditions of modern life that already “demand” an architecture. Architects simply have to accept what has already happened in order to move toward the necessary design. To innovate, they have only to open their eyes. Architects, to invoke the mantra of the central chapters, have “eyes that do not see.” Any straightforward description of the changed conditions of contemporary life would already be a prescription for a new architecture. Documentary becomes manifesto. What is outside of architecture is what should be inside and what is inside is what should be thrown out. Toward an Architecture tries to open up the field to its outside in order to open up the walls of traditional buildings. Indeed, opening the eyes of the architect and opening the eyes of the building constitute a single gesture that liberates an architecture, polemically dissolving the line between inside and outside.
The crucial point is that this modern architecture will be something that is found rather than made. The book famously uses pictures of the simple undecorated forms of industrial grain silos and factories to set up a series of images of the latest ships, planes, and cars as the models for the architect, as if building should aspire to the status of an efficient vehicle. If only the architect would first follow the example of the engineer by perfecting the mechanical operations of a building before transcending the engineer by rising up from the empirical world of calculation to the spiritual heights of art. Any tool can reach the status of art when perfected through relentless experimentation, Le Corbusier proclaimed, but architecture has yet to frame the first question, yet even to recognize that it is a tool. A building has to be treated as an instrument—a question of logic, science, calculation, and statistics—before it can be elevated to the status of architecture. Likewise, the book insists on its own logical status. It presents itself as an efficient tool. But its effect of logic is just that, an effect, a work of art precisely, and Le Corbusier’s artistry in the techniques of persuasion is as brilliant as that of his best buildings. Indeed, it is the former that makes possible the latter.
It was not by chance that Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, the first critical study to start carefully unpacking the rhetorical strategies of Le Corbusier’s canonical text, should have appeared in 1960, the very year in which the first efforts to preserve his most canonical building—the Villa Savoye (1928–31)—were being launched. As Le Corbusier’s key buildings have steadily moved ever further into the protective custody of history, the appreciative scrutiny of his writings has steadily zoomed inward, with Jean-Louis Cohen’s extensive and insightful introduction to the new translation continuing a strong line of recent scholarship in giving a richly detailed account of the prehistory, production, and reception of this “machine for persuading.” Banham was probably the first to be sensitive to all the conditions of the medium of theory, paying attention to the role of the physical size, length, price, typography, images, structure, sources, and rhetorical strategy of the string of key texts that defined the most radical ambitions of the field between 1899 and 1929. But he was burdened by the desire to find an architectural practice that actually carried out the mandate of those theses. His position on the cusp between the “masters” of the modern and the following generation was that of a disappointed son. He worked to disconnect Le Corbusier’s theories and designs, discarding the practice as no more than a simulation of modernity in favor of the more radical aspirations of the theory, and writing poignantly in Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture (1975) of the embarrassing relief he felt after the death of Le Corbusier in 1965, along with that of other giants of modern architecture: “Now that they are all dead it is difficult not to feel liberation as well as loss.” The first truly post-Oedipal generation of architects may well liberate very different uses for Le Corbusier’s text, treating every detail as if it were a building harboring crucial secrets, deploying the same intensity that used to be devoted to the villas but without the pressure and guilt of quasi-religious conviction.
Toward an Architecture is a singular manifesto that in retrospect seems to capture the unique aspirations of a particular period. Yet the volume was used to legitimize an extremely heterogeneous array of practices over a very long time. Of all Le Corbusier’s writings, it is the one that remained current even for the second and third generations of modern architects who so pointedly challenged their elders. Indeed, part of the secret of its extraordinary success is its surprising lack of specificity, the wide gap between the words and the designs they legitimated. Its brilliance was to combine a highly visible and relentless sense of constraint, the feeling that there is a singular path that all intelligent architects must inevitably follow as if in an endless column of dedicated soldiers, with a remarkable vagueness when crossing the threshold from theory to design, a looseness that allows the text to remain active today. While this latest scholarly translation, part of the Getty Research Institute’s invaluable Texts & Documents series, could be understood as a final act of preservation—a perfectly restored artwork removed from the entropic effects of its original use, like any of the recently preserved buildings—it may also be the launchpad for another round of innovations. At the very least, it provides an object lesson in the techniques of persuasion, the lessons of a masterwork.
The central mission of the book is to create a sense of momentum. The reader is to be carried forward by the inevitable and powerful force of modernity. For all its innovative features, modern architecture will not be an innovation as such but simply the effect of architects no longer resisting the forces around them. The main work of the book is already efficiently under way in the title, Toward an Architecture, which captures the sense of momentum. The original cover image directs our gaze along the promenade of an ocean liner, making the singular, narrow forward trajectory literal, reinforced by the fact that the ship itself is presumably on the move. Movement within movement, then. But this is also an image of the goal of the movement, since the same image of the ocean liner’s undecorated white walls and horizontal windows will act as the paradigm within the book for a new kind of building. The sense of momentum and the goal are the same thing: The goal is momentum. Modern architecture is simply that architecture which allows itself to be carried forward. More precisely, architecture is the movement forward. It is not a matter of replacing an older architecture with a newer one. Any building that is not moving forward is not architecture at all. What’s missing from architecture is architecture itself. Only by moving forward can architecture be seen or produced.
When we move forward by turning the first page of the manifesto, the sense of momentum is immediately credited to the book itself, as the text opens with a five-page section (“Argument”) that summarizes the main points of each chapter in a linear sequence of assertions leading up to the book’s concluding formula: “Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided.” The reader is promised a singular logical argument steadily progressing through the book and gathering momentum toward the goal of architecture itself. But the argument alone gives no clue as to the character of the architecture being promoted, let alone any specific feature. It legitimizes rather than defines the desired architecture. No particular design could be produced on the basis of the central argument. This remains the case even when the subsequent chapters fill in the detail linking the chain of assertions. It is much clearer what architecture should not be—decorated, or one of the eclectic historical styles—than what it should be. Indeed, the desired architecture only becomes clear when examples of Le Corbusier’s own work quietly appear forty pages into the book and more loudly fifty pages before the end. Even then, a major gap between the theory and the designs remains. The designs are associated with a theory that could not have produced them.
The real force behind the writing throughout is not logic but association. The emphatic placement of the clearly structured “Argument” at the beginning can even be understood as the first illustration of the book—an image of logic, but so insistent an image that it is also paradoxically a symptom of the fact that the book itself is not as clearly structured as advertised. The basic mode of the text is the fast-tempo repetition of pointed mantras to establish a particular aura, rather than the systematic unfolding of a rigorous logic.
Since key sentences are extracted from each chapter to form the summaries that are placed at the beginning of the chapter and gathered together to form the opening “Argument,” the reader encounters these sentences at least three times. They become familiar long before there is any sense of their meaning. The very first words of the book, for example, form the abrupt heading “AESTHETIC OF THE ENGINEER, ARCHITECTURE,” a seductively incomplete fragment that is then expanded into the statement: “Aesthetic of the Engineer, Architecture: two things firmly allied, sequential, the one in full flower, the other in painful regression,” which is in turn expanded on by two longer statements, twenty-two words celebrating the engineer and seventy-eight words insisting that the architect can exceed the physical world of the engineer by activating the complex mental and emotional synergy experienced as beauty. In this way, fragmentary slogans are seen to expand steadily into aphorisms, which are seen to expand into a manifesto, which is seen to expand into a complete treatise. This is a carefully crafted hierarchical image of knowledge that is well organized, unequivocal, even classical in its apparent integration of each part to the whole. As with any classical building, all the gaps and contradictions are veiled by insistent repetition. In moving on from the manifesto-like opening of the “Argument” to the first chapter, the reader actually absorbs the first phrase five times, the statement expanded from that phrase three times, and the summary expanded from that statement two times—all before the main text even begins. The same layering of repetitions continues within each chapter in a rhythmic chant that erodes sentences down to abrupt formulas. Slogans, paragraphs, and even groups of paragraphs are repeated to form a kind of drumbeat. The resulting textual syncopation provides a pulsating and often eccentric sound track to the brilliantly choreographed sequence of images that drives steadily on from the open spans of the most delicately engineered bridge by Eiffel to the smoothest of pipes by a cooperative in Jura. The images are stitched into the narrative by captions pulled from the text such that Le Corbusier’s own designs appear to be naturalized within the continuous chain of image-text associations. The details of the projects become the inevitable effect of simply moving forward rather than the effect of design itself.
In the end, the main strategy is simply the repetition of short declarative formulas that try to define what architecture is. Countless sentences take the form of “Architecture is x” or “X is architecture,” and many key paragraphs end with the confident announcement: “This is architecture.” One of these declarations would become the most cited sentence of Le Corbusier’s career: “Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.” Symptomatically, this romantic line, repeated in the book and endlessly repeated by others through the years, has very little meaning outside the surrounding argument that overall volumetric form rather than surface elaboration is the key to architecture’s force. It is the aura of “masterful, correct, and magnificent” that produces disciples. The two other slogans that were to gain wide currency—“A house is a machine for living in” and “The plan is the generator”—are more precise in their meaning, but again their mantric repetition by others is invariably atmospheric and misses the more radical claims being made. It is as if merely quoting them brings the full force of the rest of the argument to bear to legitimate whatever piece of writing invokes them. The rhetoric of machine-age precision is actually the source of an imprecise and diffuse rhetorical effect.
To extract any of the crisp formulas from the text, as has been done continually in architectural discourse over the decades, is to miss the point; it is precisely not to read. The formulas take their meaning from the sequence of similar claims around them in the book, the system of assertions that spin around the architectural designs. Their force comes from the spinning rather than from the content of any specific claim. And the book itself is part of a bigger spinning system of books that is part of an even bigger system of books that is part of a still bigger system of multiple forms of publication. Toward an Architecture is just the tip of the biggest propaganda iceberg ever assembled by an architect. And this vast system of interlocking and interdependent texts is planned like any city. By 1918, Le Corbusier had already published an advertisement for a forthcoming book titled Vers une architecture, and between October 1920 and May 1922 he published all but the last of its chapters as a set of twelve essays in L’Esprit nouveau, the journal he edited with Amédée Ozenfant and Paul Dermée between 1920 and 1925. The release of the second edition of the book at the end of 1924—which added more recent architectural projects by the author, including commissions resulting from the book itself—was meant to coincide with the publication early the next year of L’Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui (The Decorative Art of Today) and Urbanisme (published in English as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning), two more books composed of essays from the journal. In the preface to the 1924 edition of Vers une architecture, Le Corbusier says the book is now “flanked” by these “two far-flung supports.” The three volumes constitute a system covering the full range of scales from object to building to city. Le Corbusier would add five more books to the series before going on to complete more than fifty other books and a vast array of special issues, essays, and interviews, continually reinforced by an international program of theatrical lectures. “Le Corbusier,” originally just a shortened version of the pen name the architect used for the first essays, is, finally, the name of the most efficient and effective writing machine the field of architecture has ever known. It is not by chance that “man of letters” is the profession listed on the passport of the most influential designer of the past century.
At the heart of this monumental system is the ongoing relationship between Vers une architecture and the Oeuvre complète, between the original manifesto leading toward an architecture and the final manifest of that architecture, the last volume of which appeared four years after the author’s death. Le Corbusier presided over the reissue of the original manifesto in 1958, rejecting the idea of any change and defending the original argument by simply wrapping the unaltered text in a prophylactic transparent cover carrying a drawing and the handwritten note: “Written in 1920 . . . reprinted in 1958.” No matter how much Le Corbusier’s designs evolved over the course of his career, no matter how many challenging innovations they presented his colleagues, his buildings have to be seen as one continuous project, and the first book remains the key source of legitimation for the vast array of work that followed. Its central mechanism—blurring a description of what is happening in modern life into a prescription of what should happen in architecture, and then into a description of what did already happen in the author’s own designs—never stops turning. The cycle from “is” to “should” to “did” acts as a relentless dynamo, energizing Le Corbusier’s own work but also the wider field of modern architecture he dominated. In the eighty-four years since his manifesto’s publication, the authors of hundreds of texts in architecture have literally imitated the titular form of Toward an . . . without fully understanding that the remarkable momentum established by the book is circular rather than linear, hence able to sweep up historical exemplars like the Parthenon as evidence of modernity itself. Portrayed alongside the latest automobiles, the ancient classical temple becomes a tool like any other, a product of reason, of calculation, and of its time, but a tool perfected through experimentation to transcend reason, calculation, and time to become a “machine for stirring emotion.” The machine is just the necessary vehicle for leaving the world of mechanism behind.
Toward an Architecture repeatedly celebrates emotion as the desired outcome of embracing but ultimately transcending reason. In so doing, it goes out of its way to simulate linear reason in its own structure, yet its force derives from the way it keeps transcending its own simulation. After constructing the image of a single line of argument, it is the diversity of heterogeneous fragments, small clumps of paragraphs held apart by short horizontal lines or sets of asterisks, that ultimately rules. The fragments can be as short as one or two aphoristic lines. Each is a mini manifesto, able to be consumed in any order or in any quantity. Even the captions to the images operate as independent compacted arguments or polemical taunts. A complete list of the sources and narrative techniques in these hundreds of smart weapons would be overwhelming. This is a book that can, is meant to, and does overwhelm its reader. Far from chaotic, its heterogeneity is strategic and precise. There are, for example, different sizes of capitalization used within paragraphs to finely adjust the level of emphasis. The mechanism of the book’s 224 pages is very precisely tuned. It is such a radical design that Banham was once again the first to recognize Toward an Architecture’s explosive strength, calling it, in Age of the Masters, “almost the only piece of architectural writing that can be classed among the ‘essential literature of the twentieth century.’”
Meanwhile, generations of readers have clung to the remaining traces of order in the book, unable to absorb the radicality of its displacements. In the end, it deploys a stunning collage of techniques of persuasion, barely held together by the drumbeat of mantric chants and the regular rhythm offered by the smooth succession of brilliantly edited images. In polemically defying the very linearity its structure insists on, the book could never simply be read by those it addresses. There is no evidence that the author’s most central but subtlest arguments about the status of volume and emotion were ever understood. But, as in the military tradition of the manifesto, the readers have no choice. This book takes no prisoners. To agree with it is to join the “wise,” “brave,” “vigorous,” “strong,” “civilized,” “healthy,” “virile,” and “active.” To disagree is to join the “afraid,” “vain,” “timid,” “dishonest,” and “cowardly.” Press-ganged into allegiance, we have long been able only to nod approval and intone some of the slogans. Now we are, one hopes, at a different threshold. The biology of the architect is on the line. Toward an Architecture is about to be read.
Mark Wigley is dean of the graduate school of architecture, planning and preservation at Columbia University in New York.
