Eye Camera Window: Takashi Homma on Le Corbusier at the CCA

Description of project by CCA
 

“I was always curious about how architects conceived the views of landscapes from within their buildings. Ever since I had begun photographing, I concentrated on the idea of the frame, of the window—which is simultaneously an architectural and a photographic issue.”

Takashi Homma

The CCA presents Eye Camera Window: Takashi Homma on Le Corbusier, an exhibition that examines the window as a spatial and perceptual motif in both Le Corbusier and Homma’s work while calling into question the act of seeing. Between 2002 and 2018, Homma continually photographed the window as a fundamental element of Le Corbusier’s architecture across Europe and Asia while advancing his own investigations of the photographic medium.

The exhibition, anticipated by the recent publication Looking Through Le Corbusier Windows (Window Research Institute/CCA/Koenig Books, 2019), is curated by Louise Désy (CCA Curator, Photography) and presents photographic sequences and clusters including a selection of Le Corbusier’s original drawings from the CCA Collection. A filmed interview with Takashi Homma, in which he expands on his practice and research, has been made available online, as well as an audio introduction to the exhibition in the Octagonal gallery.

Eye Camera Window: Takashi Homma on Le Corbusier

Between 2002 and 2018, Takashi Homma revisited the window as a fundamental architectural element of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Europe and Asia while delving deeper into his own investigation of the photographic medium.

In 2013 he received a commission from the CCA to photograph the work of Jeanneret and Le Corbusier in Chandigarh as part of the exhibition How architects, experts, politicians, international agencies and citizens negotiate modern planning: Casablanca Chandigarh, curated by Tom Avermaete and Maristella Casciato and presented at the CCA in 2013.

Homma’s research also became part of the Windowology program initiated by the Window Research Institute in Tokyo, which aims to define the position of windows in the history of architecture across cultures—in this particular case, their role as spaces, rather than surfaces, that connect the interior of a building and the surrounding landscape, or the private and the public.

Our sense of space comes in part, from windows and other openings that shape the way we see. Like photographs, windows are devices for framing the view. By carefully imposing cuts, selecting points of views, and revealing details captured by light and shadow, Homma plays himself with the limits of the photographic frame. In so doing, he goes beyond the act of simply witnessing the building. His photographs generate a new reality wherein Le Corbusier’s architectural achievements and thoughts maybe experienced, rather than seen.

The exhibition addresses, in photographic terms, the complexity of the relationships between interior and exterior, architecture and landscape as imagined by Le Corbusier. Takashi Homma's photographs reflect and transcribe embodied experiences mediated by the eye and the space of the window. By transposing them into two-dimensional images, Homma offers a new mode of seeing that allows one to perceive Le Corbusier’s projects in relation to the architect’s own thinking and theories of space.

Le Corbusier was himself a photographer, a compulsive image collector and strategist of visual communication. Likewise, he integrated the principles of photography into his architecture, thinking primarily in terms of framing and construction of the view. Le Corbusier envisioned walls as floating elements, acting as “walls of light”, and used various optical strategies to make his buildings “machines” to see, connected to the landscape. A selection of his original drawings from the CCA Collection emphasizes his creative ideas and the importance of his work of the treatment of windows, openings, and views.