Le Corbusier (born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in 1887) is often referred to as the most important architect in history. His influence on building design and urban planning worldwide can hardly be overestimated. Despite his legacy, a Le Corbusier exhibition of this magnitude is long overdue in Northern Europe. Le Corbusier: The Secret Laboratory presents a unique opportunity to discover the many dimensions of his oeuvre — including rarely shown sculptures and paintings — and provides new perspectives from which to appreciate his work.

A central theme of this exhibition is Le Corbusier’s oscillation between two seemingly disparate pursuits: his celebration of mechanical objects and his search for poetic forms. The exhibition will highlight the way in which this complex relationship developed from his youthful study trips around Europe to his late work, investigating the resonances between artistic work and architectural design. At the centre of attention for this migration of themes is Le Corbusier’s painting studio – his “secret laboratory”.

The exhibition is organised in five thematic sections dealing with the major stages of his work: his purist paintings and the villas of the 1920s; his rediscovery of vernacular values in the 1930s; his preoccupation with the synthesis of the arts after 1945; and the complex reminiscences of his late work. Moreover, special attention will be dedicated to Le Corbusier’s relationship to Sweden. His plan for the urbanisation of Stockholm (1933) and the museum he designed for the Ahrenberg collection (1962) will be juxtaposed with comparable plans and projects.

The exhibition assembles a diverse body of material, in terms of both medium and scale. The 200 works selected include paintings, landscape drawings, still-lifes, portraits, sculpture, tapestries, furniture, architectural drawings, models of buildings and of entire city plans, books, and photographs.

Le Corbusier: The Secret Laboratory is curated by Jean-Louis Cohen, professor at New York University, and a prolific author of books on Le Corbusier. Cohen conceived the centennial Le Corbusier exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, and is preparing Le Corbusier, Landscapes for the Machine Age, scheduled to open in June 2013 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The associate curator is Pascal Mory, author of several important architectural exhibitions, including Towers and Skyscrapers, from Babel to Dubai, currently on show at the CaixaForum in Madrid.

Le Corbusier: The Secret Laboratory is organised in association with the Le Corbusier Foundation, with important contributions from the AVC Charity Foundation.

Curators are Jean-Louis Cohen och Pascal Mory.
Venue.- Moderna Museet. Skeppsholmen, an island in central Stockholm. Sweden.
Dates.- January 19-April 18, 2013.

Read more
Read less

More information

Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland on October 6th, 1887. He is best known as Le Corbusier, one of the most important architects of the XX Century that together with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright rise up as the fathers of Modern Architecture. In his long career, he worked in France, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Argentina, India and Japan.

Jeanneret was admitted to the Art School of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1902. He knew Charles l’Éplattenier, his first teacher, and he became interested in architecture. He built his first house, Villa Fallet, in 1906, and one year later he set out on his first great journey to Italy. From 1908-1909 he worked in Perret Bother’s Studio, where he focussed on the employment of the concrete, and from 1910-1911 he coincided with Mies van der Rohe in this studio in Berlin.

In 1917, Charles Édouard Jeanneret set up finally in Paris. The next year he met the painter Amedée Ozenfant and he displayed his first paintings and wrote his first book, Après le Cubismo. In 1919 he founded the magazine l´Esprit nouveau, where he published unnumbered articles, signing with the pseudonym Le Corbusier for the first time.

He opened his own Studio in 1922, in the number 35 of the rue de Sèvres. In this decade when his laboratory epoch started he carried out a great number of activities as a painter, essayist, and writer. But also as an architect, he planned some of the most recognizable icons of modern architecture and developed the principles of the free plan. Some of these works are the Villa Roche-Jeanneret, the Villa Savoye in Poissy, and the Siedlungweissenhof’s houses built in Stuttgart in 1927. It should be pointed out that at the same time; he set out the “five points” of the architecture.

Le Corbusier projected “The contemporary three million population city” in 1922 and in 1925 put forward the Voisin plan of Paris, which is one of his most important urban proposals. Three years later, in 1928, through his initiative, the CIAM was created and in 1929 he published his first edition of the Oeuvre Complète.

In the 30s, he collaborated with the magazine Plans and Prélude, where he became enthusiastic about urbanism and he started, in 1930, to elaborate the drawings of the “Radiant City” as a result of the “Green City” planned for Moscu, his project would be summarized in the “Radiant Villa”, which was enclosed with the projects for Amberes, Stockholm, and Paris. By 1931 he presented Argel, a proposal that composed the Obus Plan. And in 1933 the 4th CIAM passed and there he edited the Athens Document.

Le Corbusier, in 1943, developed the “Three Human Establishments Doctrine” and founded the Constructors Assembly for Architectural Renovation (ASCORAL). He made the project the Unite d´habitation of Marsella in 1952, which was the first one of a series of similar buildings. At the same time, the works of Chandigarh in India began, where he planned the main governmental buildings. Nevertheless, in the same decade, he worked in France too, in the Notre-Dame-du-Haut chapel in Ronchamp, in the convent of La Tourette in Éveux, Jaoul’s houses in Neuilly and the Unites d´habitation of Rézé-lès-Nantes, Briey-en-Forêt and Firminy.

He wrote and published his worldwide known study of the Modulor in 1948 followed by a second part in 1953. Meanwhile the next Le Corbusier’s books had a more autobiographic nature, among them the Le poème de l'angle droit (1955), l'Atelier de la recherche patiente (1960) and Mise aupoint (1966) stand out.

Le Corbusier, at the end of his life, created many projects that would not be built, for example, a calculus center for Olivetti in Rho, Milan; a congress in Strasbourg, the France embassy in Brasilia and a new hospital in Venice.

He died drowned on the 27th of August of 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin.

Read more
Published on: February 10, 2013
Cite: ""Moment. Le Corbusier: The Secret Laboratory"" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/moment-le-corbusier-secret-laboratory> ISSN 1139-6415
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...
Loading content ...