Zurich Pavillon Le Corbusier, reopened

On 11 May 2019, the newly renovated Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich opened its doors to the public.

Le Corbusier’s last building is a colorful architectural masterpiece that is run as a public museum. The opening exhibition Mon univers explores the personal passion for collecting demonstrated by the great architect, designer, and artist and provides a glimpse of his creative cosmos.

Originally opened in 1967, the Pavillon Le Corbusier was used as an exhibition venue for presenting Le Corbusier’s work and ideas to a wide audience. In keeping with this spirit, the pavilion reopen as a public museum operated by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich on behalf of the owner, the City of Zurich.

The Pavillon Le Corbusier came about thanks to the initiative and great dedication of the interior designer, gallery owner, and patron Heidi Weber. She won over Le Corbusier for the project, obtained building rights for fifty years for the land on the Blatterwiese meadow from the City of Zurich, and drove forward the construction with patience and perseverance despite many difficulties. Work on the building began in 1964, but came to a stop with Le Corbusier’s death in August 1965. Afterward, a new project team had to be put together to successfully complete the building.

The pavilion was inaugurated in 1967 as the last design by Le Corbusier. When the lease on the land expired, ownership passed to the City of Zurich in 2014. Eva Wagner was hired to manage the museum for four years, after which the pavilion was extensively renovated and repaired from October 2017 to February 2019. For this purpose, the architects Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg meticulously analyzed the landmarked building in order to restore it with consummate expertise and great attention to detail. Today, the Pavillon Le Corbusier shines forth again with the same freshness, elegance, and bright colors as when it was first built.

The Main Exhibit: The Pavilion Itself

Le Corbusier designed the pavilion with the goal of building the ideal exhibition venue. Art, architecture, and the life infusing them were to be merged in a new symbiosis. With this exhibition space in the form of a pavilion, Le Corbusier thus realized his vision of a “synthesis of the arts.”Numerous sketches and plans attest to a prolonged development period that began in the mid-1950s.

The ship-like construction is based on Le Corbusier’s Modulor system of proportions, and the building embodies a number of his other design principles as well—as a kind of architectural legacy. These tenets include prefabrication, elements such as the access ramp and the small roof garden that recur throughout his oeuvre, and the “promenade architecturale,” a carefully conceived route through the building to enable the visitor to optimally view and experience the architecture.

The colorful pavilion across some 600 square meters and four stories, offers various perspectives and vantage points. Le Corbusier’s furniture, some of it permanently installed, is spread throughout the pavilion, demonstrating its second designation as a residence and inviting visitors to linger. Even the small roof terrace is now open to the public, affording unobstructed views of the Zürichhorn river delta and the lake.

The Opening Exhibition: Mon univers.

The exhibition Mon Univers extends over all floors and is dedicated to the Swiss architect’s passion for collecting, giving visitors a glimpse of his versatile creative cosmos. Throughout his life, Le Corbusier pursued the vision of a synthesis of the arts, and for this purpose, he amassed objects and trouvailles from art, industry, folklore, and nature, which he arranged in assemblages. He drew on a wide variety of objects as references and sources of inspiration for his various artistic practices—including conch shells, ceramics from the Balkans, flotsam, and industrial glass. The exhibition brings together originals from Le Corbusier’s private collection with historical photographs, casts, and paintings, as well as finds from nature. Loans from the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, important private collections, and the Antikenmuseum Basel enter into a visual and thematic dialogue with the pavilion.

On the lower level, around fifty personal collectibles from the Fondation Le Corbusier are presented, along with film clips of Le Corbusier (taken with a 16mm camera), and a wall of large-format film stills.

The legendary 1931 installation Les arts dits primitifs dans la maison d’aujourd’hui is recreated in the two-story atrium on the ground floor. In this installation in his studio, Le Corbusier arranged a cast of the Attic calf-bearer known as the Moscophoros alongside a painting by Fernand Léger, a Peruvian Chimu ceramic piece, a chunk of glass, a Benin bronze, a brick, a wicker chair, and his own painting in an exciting ensemble.

While on the lower level originals are shown and on the ground floor copies, the upper floor is devoted to a few originals that Le Corbusier would have gladly collected in the opinion of the curators. These include a Nimba shoulder mask from the Baga people, a marble Aphrodite (Antikenmuseum Basel), frightening Ekoi head masks, and a large-format ceramic vessel known as a tinaja from the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich’s Decorative Arts collection.

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Zurich Pavillon Le Corbusier, reopened. Image courtesy of ZHdK.

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Architects

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Design.-Le Corbusier

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Collaborators

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Steel structure.-Louis Fruitet.
Façade studies.-Jean Prouvé.

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Client

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Heidi Weber

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Construction management 1961–66

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Willy Boesiger

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Execution 1966–67

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Alain Tavès, Robert Rebutato

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Renovation 2017–19

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Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg on behalf of the city of Zurich

Charles Édouard Jeanneret. LE CORBUSIER

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.