Richard Etlin, “A Paradoxical Avant-Garde: Le Corbusier’s Villas of the

1920s,” Architectural Review 181 (January, 1987): 21-32.

Building on the writings of Colin Rowe, Kurt Forster, Alan Colquhoun, this
essay explores Le Corbusier’s paradoxical use of history to inform meaning
and to provide form in his avant-garde Cubist villas of the 1920s.

Section titles:
The Romantic Legacy
1. The Architectural System
2. Philosophical Eclecticism
3. The Architectural Promenade
La Roche-Jeanneret Houses and the Sittesque Tradition
The Lessons of Egypt and Greece
Maison Cook, the French Hôtel, and Synthetic Cubism
Villa Stein, the Pylon Temple, and the Ocean Liner
Villa Savoye, the Acropolis, and the Second Machine Age

Errata:
p. 24 left column: not “en échelon” but rather “en enfilade”
p. 24 right column: not “Henri Martin” but rather “Camille Martin”
p. 25 caption 16 should read: analytical drawing from Choisy’s Histoire of
the Hôtel du Maine, Paris, 1728-30.

This article is one of two sequential essays developed out of a talk presented
at the University of Virginia in December, 1981, and later at the 1985
Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. The first essay
was published as “Le Corbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism,” Art
Bulletin 69 (June, 1987): 264-278. The ideas presented in both articles were
further developed in my book Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: The
Romantic Legacy (Manchester University Press, 1994, paperback 1997).