CINEMATIC LECORBUSIER

I believe that LeCorbusier was very dependent upon pictures and photographs to make his architecture. His books are stuffed full of photographs of ships and machines. I pretty sure that when he was designing the roofscape of Villa Savoye, he was not out sitting by the wharf with his sketchbook drawing the superstructure of ships. He was looking at photographs of the superstructure of ships. I can also offer greater substantiation to this hunch.

Example One. At the 2013 LeCorbusier retrospective at MOMA, the focus was on his drawings. There was one drawing that he did of a Roman city. It was more or less an axonometric, and it seemed to be an investigation of the inherent overlapping geometries. The tag on the wall by the drawing stated that he based his drawing on a 15th C print that he saw in the library. So there he was, sitting in the library with his drawing pad, using a two dimensional drawing to make his architectural study.

Example Two. LeCorbusier writes in The Modulor, 1, “Architecture is…a successive (phenomenon), made up of pictures adding themselves one to the other, following each other in time and space, like music.” I find it simply amazing that based on this passage, he basically conceives of the architectural experience of moving thru time and space to be a series of pictures. One gets the sense that he is thinking that our basic visual sensory experience is more like a film at 30 FPS. Whereas we are taught at least to understand the act of seeing in a much more flowing and continuous manner.  This, if anything, is strongly indicative of a cinematic LeCorbusier.

Example Three. “Truly the key to my artistic creation is my pictorial work…” Of course, he is referring to his paintings, which he did each day. And he has also said that he considered himself to be a painter first and an architect second. Nevertheless, is it interesting to see how he uses the word pictorial, or picture.

Whether these three examples prove anything or not remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it is very likely that LeCorbusier used photographs and other 2D imagery much more than is commonly taught or understood.