The great thing about multidisciplinary research is that it lets you dig into things that interest you without having to worry too much about what you don't know. The worst of it is that you can dig into things that interest you without worrying enough about what you don't know -- sometimes to great detriment. And so to Le Corbusier.
There's a chapter in my book -- and I think it's a pretty good one -- where I talk about how cities work, how their spatial organization and appearance can influence our behaviour and what all of that means. There's no way to write about those ideas in a North American context without discussing the wisdom of people like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler. And I do. But what also happens in that chapter is that I talk a bit about the revolutionary ideas of early modernist architect Le Corbusier. Le Corb had some deeply concerning ideas about how cities should be put together, and to my eye there is a fair consensus that he got some important things wrong -- that if the city of Paris had really allowed him to tear down a big swath of architecture and to replace it with Radiant City, the results would have been disastrous. Some modern buildings that resonate with some of the Le Corbusian ideals (the infamous Pruitt-Igoe building, for example) have also suggested that Le Corbusier's notions about how cities should be put together were mistaken -- perhaps because of a wrong-headed view of what people actually were and how interactions between individuals could be promoted (or not) by the organization of spaces. Mostly, modern planners suggest that Le Corb didn't fully understand the impact of the automobile in the evolution of cities -- but given the times -- early 20th century -- one can hardly blame him for this.
So this morning, and over much of the weekend, I've been very much back in the presence of a dear friend and collaborator who passed away last summer. Thomas Seebohm read my chapter on cities. The review was mostly good -- he told me that he thought every architecture student should read my book, which I took as lofty praise indeed coming from someone who took such pleasure in educating architects. But he also warned me to re-think what I said about Le Corb. Thomas was far too gentle and kind a man to have laid it out for me, but I now understand that he wanted me to avoid making a knee jerk condemnation of Corbusian ideals without fully understanding what the man was trying to do. He suggested I think about colour. He urged me to go take another look.
My memory is a bit fuzzy now about what happened next. I know I toned things down a little bit, but I didn't really take the time to re-write my review of Le Corbusier. It was time I didn't have, and I instead fell into the little trap of assuming that since others, whose opinions I valued very highly, had condemned Le Corb in much more damning language than I would ever use, I must not be completely on the wrong track. Anyone who knows anything about Jane Jacobs will see much irony in this kind of blind trust in authority.
More irony: I spent this weekend with a little book called "Experiencing Architecture" by Steen Rasmussen. Thomas put this book in my hands. When he and I were designing experiments together, we needed to come up with some recommended reading for our participants -- so that if the people who explored our virtual reality models were really fired up by what they were asked to think about we could send them off to learn more. Thomas recommended the Rasmussen. I bought it, but confess I didn't open it until very recently. In the pages of this little gem of a book I found the clearest explication of Le Corbusier's ideas that I've ever encountered. I still know very little, but now I understand a bit more of the program. It may still be true that Le Corb's proposals for city plans would have been disastrous if enacted (and I suppose some might argue that in some ways they have been in certain quarters), but the core of his life's work was not so much to fill cities with anonymous and insular beehives of dwellings devoid of public space and choked with cars. His motivation was to find a way to parlay what he saw as certain basic truths about how human beings engage with built structures -- having to do with the mathematics and scaling of the human body -- into a philosophy of architecture with human embodiment at its centre. When I try to build a virtual model of a room or a building and then measure how people behave in that space, I'm really doing exactly the same kind of thing. Le Corbusier's theoretical underpinnings might not have been the same as mine -- where he had golden ratios, mathematical measuring sticks of the proper heights and widths of things based on the form of the human body, I might substitute certain facts of the anatomy and physiology of the body and the operation of the human senses. But there's definitely a connection.
So on this chilly Monday morning I'm feeling a bit chastised by my own ignorance but also heartened because it isn't too late for me to learn more about this fascinating figure, correct my errors in thinking, refine my arguments and now, with the help of one or two new friends in architecture, perhaps to embark on some new studies.
Incredibly interesting post, one of the few that have stopped me in my tracks in a very long time. Thanks for that.
Felt compelled to share this on Twitter.
Posted by: John Schneider | March 02, 2009 at 06:45 PM
intriguing story!
Posted by: Emil | September 20, 2011 at 05:58 AM