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Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances of

comparisons for architectural history

Roy Kozlovsky

To cite this article: Roy Kozlovsky (2019) Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances of
comparisons for architectural history, The Journal of Architecture, 24:4, 549-570, DOI:
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 549 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 4

Pairing Le Corbusier and the

affordances of comparisons for
architectural history

Pairing is a technique for historicising and theorising architecture by Roy Kozlovsky

explicitly comparing two entities, be they architects, buildings or
periods. As this mechanism constitutes the object of knowledge by School of Architecture, Tel Aviv
establishing a relationship between two discrete objects, it raises a University, Israel,
host of methodological, theoretical and historiographical concerns, rkozlov@tauex.tau.ac.il
among them the criteria for selecting the cases, the concepts by ORCID 0000-0003-4079-4637
which their differences and similarities are assessed and made mean-
ingful, the interrelation between linguistic and visual media, and
finally, the agency of aesthetics in works of architectural scholarship.
Le Corbusier serves as the case study for exploring pairing formally,
as a rhetorical trope, and contextually, as a discursive intervention
within a given field of knowledge. This paper analyses successive com-
parative ‘events’ performed in the history of architecture by Colin
Rowe, Reyner Banham, Stanislaus von Moos, and Beatriz Colomina,
to argue for the portability of this form and its discursive function as
an alternative, counter-narrative mode of historical inquiry. As a
series, the pairings reaffirm Le Corbusier’s position as the central refer-
ence point around which the history of modernism revolves. The paper
concludes with a discussion of pairing as a medium for incorporating
historiographical methods of research into architectural theory and
pedagogy.

‘Mies is great but Corb communicates.’ (Peter Smithson, 1959)1

Introduction

The process by which facts are transformed into evidence in support of a histori-
cal account of objects or events inadvertently involves a mediating textual arti-
fice. One such mechanism is pairing, the act of placing two objects side by side
for the purpose of comparison. It is one of the most frequently used tools of
architectural scholarship, but the practice has drawn little attention in itself,
as its authority appears to be self-evident. As Hayden White argued, the literary
aspects of writing bear upon the epistemological status of works of history as
objective accounts of reality. His critique focused on narrative forms of
history, in which the plurality of facts and events are plotted into a story that dis-
plays ‘coherence, integrity, fullness and closure of an image of life’ to endow

# 2019 RIBA Enterprises 1360-2365 https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2019.1645724

550 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky

history with a moral meaning.2 To reveal the constructed, moralistic nature of

narrative, he contrasted it with two other modes of historical writing, the
annals and the anatomy; his example of the latter was Alexis de Tocqueville’s
comparative study Democracy in America.3 Tocqueville is singled out by
White as one of the few historians who ‘refused narrative in certain of their his-
toriographical works, presumably on the assumption that the meaning of the
events with which they wished to deal with did not lend itself to represen-
tation.’4 Beyond using it as a foil to narrative, White did not examine the ideo-
logical content of comparative history. A first step towards this task can be
initiated by drawing upon Dominique LaCapra’s notion of historiography as a
space in which objectivist, documentary models of historical knowledge interact
with the rhetorical aspects of history as a form of writing that reconstructs the
past into a living memory.5 Comparative history is one such place where method
and rhetoric interact in a productive and ambiguous manner. Comparison is an
abstracting mental operation that extracts a discrete, unique case from its lived
context and places it on a levelled conceptual plane where it becomes compar-
able with other similarly transformed objects. When patterned according to the
rules of inductive logic, it can be used to establish or refute relations of cause
and effect, as when assessing the effect of a variable by comparing it to a
control group where it is absent.6 As Emile Durkheim explained, ‘since social
phenomena clearly rule out any control by the experimenter, the comparative
method is the sole one suitable for sociology.’7 Yet comparative philosophers
note that the operation is to some degree arbitrary and creative, as ‘everything
more or less resembles or differs from everything else in accordance with the dis-
position or ingenuity of the observer; and that the most capricious similitudes
and unexpected differentiations present themselves to our gaze, provided we
know how to vary appropriately the angle of vision from which the fact is per-
ceived.’8 Comparativists are bestowed with the freedom to combine objects and
produce relationships where none existed before.9 It is therefore a synthetic,
‘fashioning’ mode of writing that generates a new thought out of the exchange
between two otherwise independent objects: Ed Ahrean and Arnold Weinstein
explain that ‘this undertaking draws every bit as much on the fashioning powers
of synthesis as the critical procedures of analysis.’10 As one of the main uses of
comparison is to define an object by differentiating it from another, a compara-
tive identity is inherently relative and unstable, since a different selection would
generate an alternate characterisation.11 Thus in addition to its definition as a
rational, objective method intended to produce truthful knowledge irrespective
of the person performing the operation, comparison doubles as a form of argu-
mentation, a rhetorical performance designed to persuade. An instructive
example is Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which pioneered the genre of comparative
history. The work, which pairs the biographies of twenty-two Greek and
Roman statesmen, commences with a quote from Aeschylus that discloses
the subjective, dramatising criteria for selecting the cases for historical compari-
sons: ‘Whom shall I set so great a man to face? Or whom oppose? Who’s equal
to the place?’12
 551 The Journal
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Number 4

To highlight the rhetorical and creative dimensions of comparison, this paper

focuses on pairing, which employs the minimal number of cases for comparing,
and is therefore especially susceptible to selection bias and artful conclusions.
Pairing constitutes the boundary condition for comparative thinking, where its
potential to pattern a ‘double’, dialogical mode of attention contravenes with
its status as an analytical method for determining relations of causes and
effects.13 As comparisons in architectural texts mobilise different kinds of
media as evidence, they also bring to attention the media techniques that
support this mode of argumentation.
Consider the case of Heinrich Wölfflin, whose conceptual model for identify-
ing and explaining stylistic transformations influenced the definition of modern-
ism as a style.14 To neutralise other forces traversing a work of art and make it
comparable according to what is visible, he paired photographs of works that
have a similar subject matter: a standing Venus for a standing Venus, a
palace façade for a palace façade (Fig. 1), a colonnade for a colonnade, and
so on. Wölfflin defined the Baroque style by comparing it with the period
that preceded it, the Renaissance, and classified their inner variations according
to paired national traits, as when defining Dutch art by contrasting it with
Flemish Art.15 His unifying comparative framework for discussing painting,
sculpture, and architecture as manifestations of an epochal manner of seeing
and feeling was likewise composed of dual concepts such as the linear and
the painterly, which he linked to the emotional poles of calmness and
intoxication. As media historians pointed out, his bipolar art history relied on
the technology of slide projectors for placing images of works of art side by
side in his lectures, and Wölfflin was well aware of the ‘one-sidedness’ of this
magically engaging technique.16 Modernist architectural historians wielded
the instrument of visual pairing to generate provocative associations: Sigfried
Giedion, who was Wölfflin’s student, constructed dialectical montages of
works of art and architecture across space and time in support of his evolution-
ary thesis in Space, Time and Architecture: Borromini was matched with Tatlin,
and Gropius’s Bauhaus building with a Cubist painting by Picasso;17 likewise,
modernist architects mobilised the mechanism as an estranging rhetorical
device rather than as an analytical tool, as when Le Corbusier paired
photographs of two Greek temples with two automobiles in Toward an
Architecture.18
As to Le Corbusier himself, he is by far the most com-paired architect of the
twentieth century. His villas were paired on different occasions and for different
reasons with houses by Palladio, Antoine Le Pautre, Eileen Gray, Buckminster
Fuller, Hans Scharoun, Gerrit Rietveld, and Adolf Loos.19 The Unité d’habitation
was matched with Vasari’s Uffizi, or contrasted with Portman’s Bonaventure
Hotel;20 the Palace of the League of Nations was compared with Gropius’s
Bauhaus building; his conception of space was defined in relation to Mies van
der Rohe, and his ‘acrobatic’ attitude to practice was associated with that of
Louis Kahn’s ‘yogi’ approach.21 Indeed, pairing is so ingrained into
writing about Le Corbusier that almost all architectural histories reiterate the
Perret-Corbusier comparison to establish the modernity of his five points of a
 552
Figure 1.
Comparative photographs of the
façades of Palazzo Rucellai and
Palazzo della Cancelleria brought to
illustrate the polar formal concepts
of multiplicity and unity, in Heinrich
Wölfflin, Principles of Art History
(1950). The photograph of the
Cancelleria’s horizontal façade was
cropped to match the proportions
of Alberti’s.
Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky
new architecture.22 One can infer that the professional persona of Le Corbusier,
as a historiographical construct, is in part the product of comparative thinking,
in which two singular objects and subjects are brought together in the abstract
space of inquiry through words, drawings, and photographs that render them
comparable.
Yet the case of Le Corbusier poses a specific difficulty for architectural histor-
iography, as these pairing events took place at a time when the comparative
method was no longer the dominant episteme for interpreting architectural
culture. While late nineteenth-century historians such as Wölfflin, Frankl, and
Fletcher employed it systematically as a classifying mechanism to establish a
natural history of architectural form, twentieth-century historians relied on the
narrative form and the monographic format to situate the production and
reception of works of architecture within a dense network of social forces
and cultural formations. Therefore, the repeated application of this residual,
 553 The Journal
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Volume 24
Number 4

untimely mechanism presents an opportunity to rethink the position of Le Cor-

busier within modern architectural discourse.
The primary aim of this essay, then, is to explore the constraints and affor-
dances of pairing in architectural analysis in general and historicise its agency
in contributing to the constitution of Le Corbusier as the proper name around
which modern architectural history revolves.

The rhetoric and affordances of pairing

The Le Corbusier scholar Tim Benton was the first to utilise Chaim Perelman’s
The New Rhetoric to study Le Corbusier’s mode of persuasion in his public lec-
tures.23 Perelman’s insight into ‘arguments by comparison’ also applies to com-
parative texts whose subject is Le Corbusier. Perelman observes that
comparisons bring together ‘two terms which were considered, with good
reason, to be incommensurable.’24 Since a comparison evaluates objects by
relating them with each other, it has been suggested by Catherine Brown
that it liberates them from the insularity of being discussed by themselves in a
monologue, and ‘permits competing voices to be heard.’25 The implication,
according to Perelman, is that comparisons gain their power of persuasion
from their resemblance to self-evident mathematical modes of proving while
treating objects metaphorically, as if they were engaged in an interpersonal
relationship.
Rhetorical analysis constitutes the linguistic construction of a statement as
subservient to the intention of the comparing agent. The concept of ‘affor-
dance’ in turn allows examining comparison as a cognitive instrument for discri-
minating patterns within a given environment (such as the professional ecology
of architectural history) by a situated actor (the author or reader) and, at the
same time, exploring comparison as a quasi-autonomous literary form. This
interpretation of affordance builds on the ambiguity of the term as it is currently
used in design theory and literary criticism. The word was introduced by James
Gibson to explain visual perception within an ecological framework: an environ-
ment is perceived in terms of those properties that are relevant to the action
capabilities of an organism.26 Donald Norman borrowed the concept to
describe the design aspects of an object that communicate how it can possibly
be used.27 Literary studies follow this dual trajectory: Terrence Cave extends
Gibson’s ecological formulation of ‘affordance’ to the study of literature as an
instrument of cognition that ‘offers itself for improvised use in particular con-
texts.’28 Following Cave, one may inquire how comparison as a mode of
writing interacts with and is shaped by the constraints and possibilities
offered by the field of architectural history. Caroline Levine reworks Norman’s
object-centred understanding of affordance to remake formalism into a politi-
cally engaged mode of criticism. Forms, whose definition Levine expands to
include the ordering of socio-political institutions, are understood as carrying
with them certain latent capacities and constraints that shape experience. She
insists that while ‘each form lays claim to different affordances, all forms do
share one affordance. Precisely because they are abstract organising principles,
554 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky

shapes and patterns are iterable — portable. They can be picked up and moved
to new contexts.’29 In accordance with Levine’s approach, comparison is hereby
treated as a form that patterns thinking within a bounded set of capacities and
constraints. It is my contention that the key affordance of pairing that dis-
tinguishes it from other modes of historical writing is bilateral symmetry. It struc-
tures the choice of the objects to be paired, the concepts by which their
differences and similarities are observed and assessed, and finally the ordering
of the text.
In order that the selection of two cases out of the infinite set of possible
objects would not appear arbitrary or biased, the author must demonstrate
their equivalence, since an asymmetrical pair would appear contrived. For a
comparison to be rhetorically effective, it is advantageous to counter the audi-
ence’s expectations by suggesting parity where none had been observed before,
as when Diane Ghirardo pairs the New Deal with Fascist Italy in Building New
Communities,30 or by differentiating between objects that appear to belong
to the same class, a procedure often employed by Rosalind Krauss.31 Not all
pairing selection is rhetorically motivated. A rather rare example that is
guided by the logical rules for establishing causal relations between antecedent
conditions and outcomes is Carol Willis’s Form Follows Finance. It compares
Chicago and New York skyscrapers ‘to describe the broad principles that
affect all skyscrapers and to explain how these universal factors, adapted to
the historical land patterns and codes of a particular city, generated typical
formal solutions, widely applied for similar sites.’32 The minimal set of cases is
justified on the grounds that during the early modern period, most
skyscrapers were built in these cities. Still, the argumentative function of this
pair is to counter the evolutionary narratives pioneered by Giedion and
Pevsner, which constructed the ‘Chicago School’ style as a precursor of the
modern movement.
Objects cannot be meaningfully compared without a common measure that
makes them comparable in a way that makes a difference. The terms depend on
the number of cases: a comparison of three suggests itself to a ternary interpre-
tive structure, as when Goldhagen and Legault position Le Corbusier within the
triadic structure of consensual, reformist, and critical modes of modernism.33 A
quaternary comparison would tend to organise the cases along the possibilities
offered by a quadrilateral matrix, as can be seen in Sanford Anderson’s compari-
son of Loos, Mies, Tessenow, and Behrens.34 As Wölfflin’s system demon-
strates, two cases afford the organisation of concepts into polar opposites.
The comparative legal scholar Günter Frankenberg contended that binary cat-
egories function as controlling devices that make the object conceivable ‘in
terms of inclusion in the category of one or the other extreme of two
opposed terms.’35 To sustain the symmetric structure of the polar categories,
the author of comparison is compelled to exaggerate or suppress differences.
This also shapes the presentation of visual evidence to support the comparison.
To render them comparable, buildings are represented with schematic plans
and sections that have been purged of any information that does not fit the
terms of comparison.
 555 The Journal
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The correspondence between the case and the concept appears to be self-
evident, but it involves establishing a hierarchy. Perelman offered the analytical
distinction between illustrations and examples to assess the asymmetric relation
between the cases and the concepts: ‘an example is designed to establish a
rule’, while ‘the role of illustration is to strengthen adherence to a known and
accepted rule […] and increase its presence to the consciousness.’36 Robert Ven-
turi’s visual pairing of his Guild House with Paul Rudolph’s Crawford Manor in
Learning from Las Vegas illustrates his semiotic interpretive model of the ‘duck’
and the ‘decorated shed’. Tellingly, the shared social dimension of housing for
the elderly was left out of the analysis and the concluding comparative table
made of opposite terms (meaning/expression, symbolism/abstraction, boring/
interesting), because it does not serve the rhetorical aim of the comparison
‘to show what we are for and what we are against and ultimately to justify
our own architecture.’37
Binary concepts do not inevitably lead to comparisons that simplify the cases
into illustrations or suppress heterogeneity in order to attain symmetry. The art
of pairing could be defined as working around the territorialising mechanism of
dualism by inducing thought to oscillate between the objects and the concepts
by modulating attention aesthetically, a quality that characterises the third level
of symmetry, that of the ordering of the text.
Comparing operations are based on addition, permitting authors to discuss
different scales of a work of architecture, from window detailing to its spatial
schema, as long as they are active in the two cases. The open-endedness of
comparative texts offers itself to aesthetic play. As Francis Goyet explains, a
comparison is not only an analytical tool but also an aesthetic means, since it
modulates repetition: ‘The essential fact is that this repetition is accompanied
by a general schema in which everything tends toward symmetry; to comparatio
[…] the will to symmetry: with the pure fact of counterpoint, of setting two
elements beside one another, of comparing.’38 Thus not unlike a poem or a
building, a comparative text can be analysed in terms of its rhythmic structure.
Symmetry poses an epistemological challenge to the objectivity of compari-
son. The historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison caution that
objectivity is a recent modern epistemic virtue. Before objectivity, the propensity
of observers to identify symmetrical structures in natural phenomena was con-
sidered the essence of the ‘truth to nature’ paradigm. They use the example of
Arthur Worthington’s research into fluid dynamics to demonstrate this shift. His
early work represented the complex process of deformation of liquid drops with
schematic, perfectly symmetrical drawings. Two decades later, in 1893,
Worthington came to consider this as a result of the mind’s tendency to
smooth variations into regularity and published the original suppressed photo-
graphs to neutralise the interference of subjectivity in observing the ‘real, as
opposed to imaginary’ phenomena (Fig. 2).39
Symmetry is thus both an affordance that is latent in pairing comparisons, and
a historically specific principle for producing knowledge. Awareness of its
shaping agency gives rise to the counter-measure of the ‘individualizing com-
parison’, which denies symmetry.40 The aim of pairing analysis is to isolate
 556
Figure 2.
Arthur Worthington’s graphic
depiction of drops of liquid as
published in 1877 (left) and in 1893
(right). The figures were
reproduced in Objectivity (2007) as
illustrations of the epistemic shift
from ‘truth to nature’ to
‘mechanical objectivity’.
Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky
the agency of symmetry, examine its interaction with other forces shaping the
text, and identify those moments when it is breached.
The focus on the formal attributes of comparing raises the problem of its acti-
vation within a given historical context. According to Levine, ‘we can under-
stand forms as abstract and portable organizing principles, then, but we also
need to attend to the specificity of particular historical situations to understand
the range of ways in which forms overlap and collide.’41 Discussing together
texts that compare Le Corbusier with another architect foregrounds the rhetoric
agency of pairing, as authors work with or around its limitations and affor-
dances; and at the same time, their chronological arrangement enables the
study of their specific meaning as performative interventions within a given
field of modern architectural scholarship.
Pairing Le Corbusier
The three case studies considered here are Colin Rowe’s pairing of Le Corbusier
with Palladio, Reyner Banham’s contrasting of Le Corbusier with Buckminster
Fuller in the concluding chapter of Theory and Design in the First Machine
Age (1960), and the coupling of Le Corbusier with Loos by several historians.
These texts were selected because they offer themselves to close reading of
the art of comparison, and because they influenced the perception of the archi-
tect at key historical moments. This analysis will not compare them, as this
would entail a tautological use of the method to examine itself. Instead, it exam-
ines them as a series of distinct, irreducible interventions within the field of Le
Corbusier scholarship.
 557 The Journal
of Architecture
Volume 24
Number 4

Rowe and the trope of inverted symmetry

No scholar has paired Le Corbusier more effusively than Colin Rowe, both in
texts and in his lectures.42 His most memorable comparison, ‘The Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa’ (1947), is still assigned as required reading in architectural
schools and is routinely cited in scholarly studies of Le Corbusier. Moreover, it
is one of the few works of historical scholarship that directly impacted architec-
tural praxis, from The New Brutalism to the Neo-avant-garde of the 1970s.
Given the numerous commentaries it received, it is striking that only a few
examined it as a work of comparison. Anthony Vidler associated Rowe’s
method of comparison with Wölfflin, Frankl, and Wittkower’s ‘scientific’
approach to architecture as ‘a series of typical and formal-spatial combinations,
tied to specific epochal “wills” or “drives”, and each comparable to the next in a
natural history of morphological transformation’, to claim that Rowe conceived
modernism as analogous to mannerism.43 Mollie Claypool argued that Rowe’s
diagrammatic comparison, designed to undermine the modernist myth of self-
invention by uncovering its correspondence with the design principles of
Humanism, is a dialogical construct that brings buildings and architects separ-
ated by centuries into a ‘subjective dialogue’ with little factual evidence.44 Its
rhetoric effect was to alter the perception of Le Corbusier from a revolutionary
architect into a nostalgic one.
The analysis of the text’s negotiation of the affordances of pairing enforces
Claypool’s critique by demonstrating how its argument, to paraphrase
Kenneth Burke, may be no more than the spinning out of possibilities implicit
in symmetric pairing operations.45 The first dimension of symmetry is related
to the choice of objects. Rowe’s essay commences with a comparison of
Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. After establish-
ing their equivalence by pointing to such formal and contextual similarities as
their ideal, centralised geometry, suburban location, and references made by
both architects to the Virgilian ideal of the good life, the text dramatically
turns to pairing Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta with Le Corbusier’s Villa Garches,
‘two buildings which, in their forms and evocations, are superficially so entirely
unlike that to bring them together would seem to be facetious.’46 Rowe
explains that the first pair was ‘more obviously Platonic and easy to take […]
because they are both in the round’, hence too self-contained to produce the
difference that fuels the comparative operation.47 The second pair offers itself
to comparison since in both, the ideal geometry of the cube collides with the
formal demands of directionality. This reading transposes Wittkower’s
method of interpreting basic Renaissance architectural types as the outcome
of a synthesis between formal and programmatic aspects (as when the centra-
lised, mathematically regulated symbolic plan and the classical façade of a
revived pagan antiquity are projected upon the longitudinal basilica typology
of the church), to the work of a modernist: the Garches plan is narrated,
without any supporting evidence, as a series of formal operations aimed at
reconciling the contradictions between Le Corbusier’s five-point system and
the transhistorical ideal of platonic solids and mathematical proportions. This
reading is enforced by the graphic layout of Rowe’s essay as it originally
 558
Figure 3.
Original layout of ‘The Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa’ in The
Architectural Review, 1947.
Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky
appeared in the Architectural Review (Fig. 3). Set to mirror each other across the
page spread, the three pairs of drawings include a basic rhythmic schema at the
top, the main floor plan — the only one to be analysed — in the middle, and the
rear façades at the bottom. The schematic documentation makes the two build-
ings comparable in a controlled manner, forcing the analysis of the modern to
be subjected to the under-arching constituent system of the Renaissance.48
There are no perspectival views, references to decoration, furnishing or materi-
ality; nor is there indication of the distribution of domestic functions, thus
excluding from analysis the dimension of lived experience.
By extracting the architectural object from its social context the graphic layout
establishes a relationship between the two architects’ treatment of the villa type,
one that is structured according to the trope of inverted symmetry: for Le
Corbusier, the freedom of the open plan cannot be extended to the façade
due to the horizontal slab system, and therefore the elevation is regulated by
mathematical relations. For Palladio, the mathematical order is manifested in
the plan, while the elevation allows for incidental irregularity. Rowe sums
these relations in a symmetrical formula: ‘Free plan is exchanged for free
section; but the limitations of the new system are quite as exacting as those
of the old.’
 559 The Journal
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Number 4

The rhetorical effect of pairing is to transform Le Corbusier from being one

modernist architect among many into a representative of architectural moder-
nity, and at the same time, establish him as a unique master who, like Palladio,
recognises the structural contradictions and limitations of architectural reason.
This is the point where the equivalence between the two architects is strategi-
cally overturned by introducing the finitude of history since, unlike his predeces-
sor, Le Corbusier only managed to achieve ‘a reasonable order’. Rowe argues
that while for Palladio it was ideologically possible to draw upon the Platonic
belief in proportions as representing a divine order, for a modern architect
such an engagement with antiquity has the ironic status of a ‘quotation
within a quotation’.
This closed argument that denies modernism’s agency and condemns it to be
a failed repetition is enforced by the symmetrical ordering of the text. Unlike
most other comparative texts which discuss each object separately (known as
the ‘block method’), Rowe uses the ‘point by point’ form. The text alternates
between the two cases for as many as twenty times in a seesaw movement,
bringing to mind Condillac’s observation that ‘comparison is thus only a
double attention.’49 The overall layout of the text is structured like a musical
fugue with three concentric thematic rings that correspond with the basic
ABABA alternation of the bays that Rowe identified in the plans of the two
villas. The text commences with a comparison of Rotonda with Savoye; it
then pairs Malcontenta with Garches; in the middle is a historiographical discus-
sion of the symbolism of mathematics; then the essay retracts its steps and
revisits the Malcontenta and Garches pair, then to the outer ring of the
Rotonda and Savoye, and finally concludes with a theoretical statement on
the nature of architecture that ties it back to the introductory quote from Chris-
topher Wren. The symmetrical, self-referential structure endows the text with a
sense of unity and direction, a pattern that makes Rowe’s conception of archi-
tectural history as a form of repetition appear self-evident.
Therefore, it is of major significance that Rowe unsettled the essay’s circular
structure when it was republished in 1976 by attaching an addendum. It intro-
duced a new pair, Corbusier’s Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh and Schin-
kel’s Altes Museum in Berlin,50 to compensate for the original’s limited sample of
the villa type, and added a commentary on the method of pairing as such, which
can be read as an ‘affirmation and denial’ of the original text: ‘Its limitations
should be obvious. It cannot seriously deal with questions of iconography and
content; it is perhaps over symmetrical; […] [but it] might still possess the merit
of appealing primarily to what is visible.’51 This ambivalent comment establishes
a symmetry between the critic and the modernist architect. Just as Le Corbusier
cannot re-inhabit Palladio’s nostalgic worldview, Rowe of the 1970s cannot
reiterate his symmetrical comparison of the late 1940s. At that moment in
time, Rowe was reconfiguring the significance of Le Corbusier in relation to
urbanism using the binary terms of figure (building as autonomous object) and
ground (building subordinate to urban system). This formalist operation had a
political subtext, in which the purist-utopianism of the modern (the figure) is
contrasted with the pluralist liberalism of the post-modern (the ground).
 560
Figure 4.
Comparative illustrations of Villa
Savoye and the Dymaxion House in
the concluding chapter of Reyner
Banham’s Theory and Design of the
Machine Age (1960). Photographs:
ADAGP, Paris 2015; Estate of
R. Buckminster Fuller.
Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky
The Addendum is thus analogous to the asymmetric porch that Le Corbusier pro-
jected from the rectangular block of Villa Garches, a form of compensation for the
impious playfulness of the original.
Banham and asymmetrical comparisons
Alan Colquhoun historicised Le Corbusier scholarship as passing from an initial
stage of reinforcing the myth of the architect as a heroic figure of the modern
movement to that of its destruction.52 A key moment in this revisionary shift is
Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), which
concludes with the paring of Villa Savoye with Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion
House (Fig. 4). This pair presents itself as a case study of asymmetry, contrasting
comparisons and their overlap with non-comparative modes of historical
inquiry. A comparison is said to be asymmetrical when one case is used as a
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foil to accentuate the particularities of the case one is really interested in.53 The
sociologist Tim May defined it at as a ‘mirror import’ comparison, to highlight its
reflective, distancing function.54 Banham’s comparison is asymmetrical given
that up to that point, the text makes no reference to Fuller, while Le Corbusier
is discussed in as many as four chapters. Moreover, it concludes a genealogical
work of history. As Levine argued, forms rarely appear in their ideal shape or in
isolation. Rather, they overlap and intersect with other forms and forces operat-
ing in a given entity, be it a text, a building, or a social institution. In Theory and
Design, the contradiction between the two modalities of writing, the genealogi-
cal study of modernism according to its own terms of reference, and its criticism
from the external discourse of science and technology, is displayed in the con-
trast between the two pairing acts that conclude the book. Banham first
matches the Villa Savoye and the Barcelona Pavilion as two ‘mature’ exemplars
of modernism. Both are celebrated in their experiential, material and symbolic
richness, as works of intellectual and emotional complexity equal to Palladio’s
achievement (contra to Rowe, Banham argues that it is Mies who maintains a
strict adherence to the horizontality of the slab), and for their Dadaist juxtaposi-
tion of mechanical and ready-made objects with academic architectural
elements.
After applauding the two works, Banham violently contrasts Savoye with the
Dymaxion to expose the technological fallacy of modernism. Le Corbusier’s
concept of the house as a machine for living in is discredited on the grounds
that the architect deduced its design principles from the visual appearance of
aircrafts, cars, and ocean liners. The Dymaxion is brought as a counter
example in which the logic of technological thinking is correctly applied to
the problem of the house to revolutionise the concept of dwelling.55
The comparison raises two related issues regarding the affordance of pairing
in setting objects both in confrontation and dialogue with each other. The
pairing with Fuller was intended to reduce Savoye into one parameter of com-
parison, that of technology. Since symmetry establishes an exchange between
the two objects compared, it is possible to reverse the direction of comparison,
and interpret the Dymaxion through its mirroring by the Savoye. By foreground-
ing its formal and iconographic content, this operation undermines Banham’s
idealisation of Fuller as a noble engineer unburdened by the ‘baggage’ of
history. The Dymaxion has a centralised hexagon plan and is topped with a
church-like spire; the non-functional geometric forms of the triangle and the
square are inscribed within a circle at its base. Rather than being derived from
the functional, culturally levelling logic of technology, as Banham would have
had it, the metallic object echoes the crystalline, mystic imagery associated
with Expressionism. The artificially illuminated photograph of the model stresses
the dialectics of concealment and transparency, a major theme of modern archi-
tectural theory as described by Banham. And the readymade reclining nude on
the bed functions as an afterimage of Savoye’s curved boudoir. Once the paired
objects exchange properties, the Dymaxion no longer appears as the mechan-
ical, anti-aesthetic ‘other’ of Savoye. This leads to the second point related to
Banham’s rhetorical construction of comparative images.
562 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
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Roy Kozlovsky

As Anthony Vidler observed, the contrast between the Dymaxion and Savoye
is a reprise of Corbusier’s montage of temples and cars.56 Theory and Design is
credited with initiating a critique of the evidentiary status of photographs in
architectural history. Banham argued that Pevsner’s interpretation of Gropius’s
1914 Werkbund model factory as the first modernist building was based on a
misleading photograph of its spiralling, dematerialised staircase; a frontal
point of view would have showed its adherence to academic principles of com-
position. Banham’s sceptical attitude towards photography therefore contra-
dicts his own practice. If the intended effect was to parody Le Corbusier by
comparing him with an engineer, the outcome is sincere flattery. Far from
being reduced into an illustration of a dichotomous analysis of modernism’s
machine aesthetics, Villa Savoye is made other to itself, as an after-effect of
the dialogising mechanism of pairing.

Le Corbusier–Loos and the plurality of pairing

The pairing of Le Corbusier with Adolf Loos has been iterated several times by
scholars with diverging historiographical intentions. It exemplifies the indetermi-
nacy of comparison: repetition produces a different result depending on how
the affordances of comparison are activated. Max Risselada, who curated the
exhibition ‘Raumplan versus Plan Libre’ in commemoration of Le Corbusier’s
1987 centennial, expressed puzzlement that such an undertaking had not
been performed earlier: ‘Although a confrontation between the work of Loos
and Le Corbusier is an obvious one in retrospect, it is remarkable how little,
until now, has been published on the subject.’57
It is not that previous historians failed to see the parallels between the two,
but that only within a specific historiographical context would this pairing
become meaningful. Until the 1960s Loos held a marginal position in historical
accounts of modernism. Pevsner identified him as a precursor of the abstract
modernist style associated with Gropius, while Banham assigned to him an
auxiliary role as the literary source of modernism’s hostile attitude to ornament.
Thus, the equivalence suggested by the title ‘Raumplan versus Plan Libre’
defines modern architecture as a contest between two equally significant con-
cepts of space, and by extension confers to Loos the prestige already associated
with Le Corbusier. Yet the Loos-Corbusier pair does not afford itself to absolute
symmetry, as historians tend to assign them to different ‘generations’. This
allows the pairing to produce an argument on the diachronic development of
modern architecture, even when the buildings compared were built at the
same time.
This pattern has been set by their first pairing by Henry-Russell Hitchcock who
compared Villa Garches and the Tristan Tzara House as examples of the contem-
porary architectural style in his 1929 ‘Houses by Two Moderns’. For Hitchcock,
Garches establishes Corbusier’s modernity in having ‘no relation to traditional
architecture, even in the widest sense.’58 Loos, whom Hitchcock characterises
as ‘a generation older than Le Corbusier’, is brought up as his antithesis, stand-
ing for a modern architecture in which ‘the ties with the past are not severed.’59
Le Corbusier’s position within the modern is presented as analogous to Bernini’s
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relative to the Baroque — his individual manner is deemed too virtuosic to be Figure 5.
imitated, while the ‘less exciting’ Loos is offered as a safer guide for the Visual comparison of Loos’s Villa
Moller (1928) and Le Corbusier’s
future development of modern architecture. Still, Hitchcock excluded the ‘half
Planeix House (1927) in Stanislaus
modern’ Loos from the International Style exhibition three years later, to con- von Moos’s Le Corbusier. Element
struct modernism as a new style that breaks with the cycle of historical revivals. of a Synthesis (1979) and ‘Le
The comparison was reiterated half a century later by Stanislaus von Moos in Corbusier and Loos’ (1987).
his 1979 English edition of Le Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis, which Colqu- Photographs: # Albertina, Vienna;
ADAGP, Paris 2015; # G. Thiriet.
houn considers to be one of the first scholarly attempts to employ an objective,
dispassionate approach to Le Corbusier.60 Von Moos paired photographs of the
front facade of the Moller House (1928) with Le Corbusier’s rarely discussed
Planeix House (1927) to establish their uncanny likeness (Fig. 5). The visual com-
parison is used to substantiate his claim that Planeix was influenced by Loos’s
Tzara House, while the Moller House was Loos’s answer to Planeix, ‘this time,
however, in cold, funereal marble.’61 The parallel images support von Moos’s
broader claim that in the late 1920s the two architects were engaged in a con-
scious dialogue, as they faced the similar problem of establishing a synthesis
between the ‘severe classical order’ of symmetry and the ‘intricate and pictur-
esque requirements of the “functional” plan.’62 The Loos–Corbusier compari-
son is nestled between two additional pairing acts. It is preceded by a
reiteration of Colin Rowe’s comparison of Garches and Malcontenta, including
its original set of parallel drawings, and is succeeded by the pairing of Le Corbu-
sier’s two houses at the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart (1927) with van Does-
burg and van Esteren’s study of a villa (1920–1922). Both projects are
564 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky

rendered in axonometric drawings that make them appear similar, to argue for
the direct influence of De Stijl on Le Corbusier, while observing that ‘any com-
parison with the free and dynamic unfolding of volumes in space, which is
typical of the efforts of the Dutch neoplasticists, makes Corbusier’s formal voca-
bulary look closed.’63 As a series, these three pairs triangulate Le Corbusier’s
design approach to the typology of the house while tracing the influence of
other architects on his development. Von Moos mobilises the mechanism of
pairing to account for the interaction between historically situated actors —
thus overcoming the inadequacy of comparative reason to account for the inter-
dependences of the compared units.64
A decade later the same visual comparison reappears in von Moos’s contri-
bution to the Raumplan versus Plan Libre catalogue. The diptych is used to
establish the ‘remarkable convergence of their ideas’ in order to differentiate
their treatment of window detailing.65 When confronted with Loos’s craft-
based practice, Le Corbusier is deemed more receptive to the transfer of indus-
trial manufacturing techniques into the domestic realm. This observation illus-
trates the historian’s broader comparative argument that in contrast with
Loos, Corbusier had a Utopian faith in industry and considered architecture as
belonging to the realm of art.
This specific pairing raises several difficulties. First, the resemblance between
the two buildings is accidental rather than fundamental, as the original design
of the Planeix house was elevated on pilotis. Due to the client’s financial difficul-
ties, the ground level was filled with commercial functions, which made it visu-
ally similar to the Moller house.66 More importantly, the comparison only works
for the street façade. Von Moos did not summon their garden façade nor their
plans, since they render the two buildings incomparable. Therefore, the
matching of two photographs taken from a similar position is highly controlling
in suppressing differences that do not advance his argument. The comparison is
reduced into an illustration of two opposing theoretical conceptions of
architectural modernity, which are attached to the proper names of Le Corbusier
and Loos.
Raumplan versus Plan Libre included an additional comparative study by
Beatriz Colomina, which matched Loos and Hoffman. It was substituted in
the 2008 republication of the catalogue with her 1992 essay ‘The Split Wall:
Domestic Voyeurism’, which paired Loos with Le Corbusier. Both were incorpor-
ated into her book-length comparative study of Loos and Corbusier, Privacy and
Publicity (1994). The following analysis will examine how Colomina activates the
affordances of pairing to reposition Le Corbusier within a discourse on mass
media and modernity.67
The comparison of Loos with Hoffman appropriates Pevsner’s pairing in Pio-
neers of Modern Design (1936), where they appear as complementary speci-
mens of a proto-modern style.68 Colomina pairs the two to discuss modern
architecture in relation to the changes brought by technologically mediated
mass culture, as theorised by Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel. Since these
dialectical thinkers constructed their arguments using polar abstractions, their
theory is readily applicable to this contrastive pair. For example, Benjamin’s dis-
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tinction between experience and information is transposed upon the Loos-

Hoffman pair, making the later illustrate the loss of experience, while Loos is
presented as actively resisting, in words and buildings, the commodifying and
disembodying effect of mass media. This requires that Hoffman be portrayed
as a passive, silent contrast to Loos, thus failing to produce a dialogue. Colomi-
na’s declaration that ‘Hoffman’s and Loos’s paths took on a kind of inverse sym-
metry’69 is in itself a by-product of the dual terms of comparison. Hence the
significance of uncoupling Loos from Hoffman and matching him with a stron-
ger and more active protagonist. The new pair allowed Colomina to mobilise
post-structuralist feminist theories of the gaze to reassess the history of
modern architecture.
The essay is split into two symmetrical sections, each devoted to one architect
and one model of subjectivity. The comparison between them establishes an
inverted symmetry between their articulations of the relation between the
polar opposites of the interior and the exterior: Loos’s Villa Muller and the
Moller House are interpreted as theatre boxes where feminine domestic inti-
macy is staged as a panoptic mechanism, split from the masculine-coded
social world of the exterior mask. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye presents ‘the
reverse condition’ of the cinematic apparatus and the decentred subject:
‘unlike the occupant of Loos’s houses, who is both actor and spectator, involved
and detached from the stage, Le Corbusier’s subject is detached from the house
with the distance of a visitor, a viewer, a photographer, a tourist.’70 In the con-
clusion to Privacy and Publicity, this contrast overlaps with the generational
pattern established by Hitchcock in which Loos represents an ‘older’, more con-
servative attitude towards media, while Corbusier heralds the paradigm of the
modern: ‘Le Corbusier is a postwar figure, Loos a prewar one.’71 Since the
houses compared were realised in the same period, the argument yields to
the affordance of pairing to generate inverted symmetrical relations that are
unsustainable outside the controlled environment of comparison.
Yet Colomina’s method cannot be reduced to the trope of symmetrical
inversion, as it exploits two additional affordances of pairing: scaling and dia-
logue. The text instructs the reader to observe and interpret photographs as
evidence, by drawing attention to minor details such as the placement of per-
ishable items such as fish on the kitchen table. Such details are usually
excluded from the discussion of architecture as being accidental but following
Benjamin’s statement commencing the essay that ‘to live is to leave traces,’72
their marginal status is upturned. This strategy is fundamental to what Fran-
kenberg defined as ‘deviant comparisons’, which foreground ‘marginal stuff
that is normally skipped for lack of relevance’ to deconstruct the ‘legocentric’
foundation of comparative legal scholarship.73 Colomina’s comparison is criti-
cal in the sense that it works against ‘archi-centric’ accounts of domestic
environments such as the one developed by Rowe by literally inserting the
subject into the picture.
As suggested by Levine, forms seldom appear in isolation: Colomina’s work is
marked by a productive tension between two overlapping forms: comparison,
which depersonalises and abstracts by uplifting objects from their lived
566 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
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Roy Kozlovsky

context, and storytelling, which endows the protagonists with subjectivity and
depth. That is, one may consider the appearance of architects and their build-
ings in pairing texts as obeying the rules of literary character construction,
rather than as factual, ‘real’ objects or persons. In literary theory, a character
is considered as a textual construct that endows a proper name with an illusion
of individuality.74 The effect of a live person is achieved by adding texture and
contradictions that exceed a character’s signifying function or its role in advan-
cing the plot, as for example when pairing a character with another to produce a
dialogue. Le Corbusier and Loos are made to appear as round characters that
exceed their role in representing two dichotomous types of spaces and subjec-
tivities. They offer themselves to the critical discussion of the interiority of the
modern self precisely because the two figures have constructed themselves, in
their writings and buildings, as passionate, self-motivated personas.

The historiographical function of pairing

Each pairing event is analysed here in terms of the author’s negotiation of the
affordances and limitations of the form. These are identified as related to the
compulsion to establish symmetry, which constrains the objects into binary
structures of reasoning, selective presentation of the material, and formulaic
conclusions. This inherent shortcoming was balanced by the poetic potential
of the form to reconstruct separate objects into a hybrid conceptual entity,
the couple.
The attempt to generate architectural knowledge by colliding Le Corbusier
with another architect comprises a rather minor, provisional practice, a localised
cross-section that disrupts the dominant, plan-like narrative of modernism by
interjecting an alternative set of concepts and frames of reference. As a rhizo-
matic activity, each pair establishes an alternate perspective, one that is in dia-
logue with preceding events, as shown by Banham’s and von Moos’s
reinterpretation of Rowe’s original pair, or Colomina’s successive coupling of
Loos. As a form of repetition, the accumulation of pairs reinforces the canonical
status of buildings and architects that afford memorable comparisons. This is
especially true for pairings intended to discredit Le Corbusier, as they produce
the opposite effect of establishing his proper name as synonymous with
modern architecture.
One might ask if there is some essential quality in Le Corbusier’s work and
persona that offers itself for com-pairing. Many critics have observed his ‘dialo-
gic habit of mind’ and method of ‘reconciliation of opposites’, which makes him
readily analysable with polar categories.75 The ‘labyrinthine scope’ of his pro-
duction and his ‘many guises’ create the effect of a ‘man with a hundred
faces’, and therefore a good partner for pairing.76 Perhaps it is his established
position within architectural discourse that presents him as a useful tool for
writing about modern architecture through the creation of associations. This
leads to the thought that the repeated, serial activation of the pairing artifice
is symptomatic of a broader crisis in architectural historiography and its relation
to theory and practice.
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The method, which helped systematise and popularise the study of art and
architecture, was grounded on the premise that comparison is a secure
method for analysing and classifying large sets of objects into a unified concep-
tual order. This endeavour gave rise to overarching comparative categories of
style, period, and type for deducing the general laws that govern historical
development and morphological change. As the epistemological framework
that supported comparative research in the humanities became unhinged,
pairing became autonomous, a technique that can be wielded as an estranging
device and a tool for theorising architecture through its relationship with history.
The ambivalence of pairing with regards to its scientific legitimacy as a method
was turned into an advantage, since it enabled the instrumentalisation of history
into architectural theory and pedagogy at moments of disciplinary crisis. In the
words of the editor of Raumplan versus Plan Libre,
The comparison is one of the means through which design can be discussed, of
vital importance in a situation in which an educational program can no longer
be built up around one, all-encompassing architectural theory.77
Risselada’s comment on the ideological function of the Loos-Corbusier compari-
son ties pairing with a wider disciplinarian development in which history and his-
toriographical methods such as archival research became appropriated into
architectural theory. Pairing offered itself as an ad-hoc, pragmatic mechanism
for observing and interpreting architectural works without the benefit of an
overreaching interpretive system, but one that is nevertheless inflected by the
affordances of the form.

Notes and references

1. Alison Smithson, Team 10 Primer (London: Studio Vista, 1968), p. 32.

2. Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’. Critical Inquiry, 7,
no. 1 (1980), p. 27.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. by Henry Reeve (New York: Adlard and
Saunders, 1838) cited in ibid., p. 6.
4. White, ‘The Value of Narrativity’, p. 6.
5. Dominick LaCapra, History & Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 41.
6. Richard Rose, ‘Comparing Forms of Comparative Analysis’. Political Studies, 39 (1991),
p. 451.
7. Quoted in Reza Azarian, ‘Potentials and Limitations of Comparative Method in Social
Science’. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 1, no. 4 (2011), p. 114.
8. Paul Masson-Oursel, Comparative Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul, 1926), p. 39.
9. Haun Saussy, ‘Comparative Literature?’ Publications of the Modern Language Association
of America, 118, no. 2 (2003), p. 339.
10. Ed Ahrean and Arnold Weinstein, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in Com-
parative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. by Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 79.
11. As the historian Jurgen Kocka observed in relation to the propensity to compare Germany
with England and France to explain the rise of Nazism as a product of its unique path to
modernity (the Sonderweg thesis), ‘the result of a comparison depends on the selection
of the objects of comparison’. Jurgen Kocka, ‘Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The
Case of the German Sonderweg’. History and Theory, 38, no. 1 (1999), p. 49.
568 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
of comparisons for architectural history
Roy Kozlovsky

12. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives vol. 1, ed. by A.H. Clough (Boston: Little Brown and Company,
1910), p. 1.
13. Francis Goyet, ‘Comparison’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Prin-
ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 162.
14. Sarah Goldhagen, ‘Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style’. Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians, 64, no. 2 (2005), pp. 144–67.
15. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (Mineola: Dover, 1950), p. 6.
16. Horst Bredekamp, ‘A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft’. Critical Inquiry,
29, no. 3 (2003), p. 422. Wölfflin wrote that ‘demonstrating the national differences
though the juxtaposition of contrasting pictures […] may well render good service in a
lecture, where it is possible to correct the one-sidedness of the single comparison by
means of various other comparisons.’ Heinrich Wölfflin, The Sense of Form in Art. A Com-
parative Psychological Study (New York: Chelsea, 1958), p. 4.
17. Sigfried Giedion, Space Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, 3rd edn
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 118–19, 490–91.
18. Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. by John Goodman (Los Angeles, CA: Getty
Research Institute, 2007), pp. 180–81.
19. Comparison with Scharoun in Flora Samuel and Peter Blundell Jones, ‘The Making of Archi-
tectural Promenade: Villa Savoye and Schminke House’. Architectural Research Quarterly,
16, no. 2 (2012); Pairing with Rietveld’s Schröder House in Kenneth Frampton, Genealogy
of Modern Architecture. Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (Zurich: Lars Müller,
2015).
20. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), pp. 68–69; Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1991), pp. 39–42.
21. Balkrishna Doshi, Le Corbusier and Louis I. Kahn: The Acrobat and the Yogi of Architecture
(Ahmedabad: Vastu Shilpa Foundation, 1993).
22. The Perret–Corbusier pair appears in Bruno Reichlin ‘Pros and Cons of the Horizontal
Window: The Perret – Le Corbusier Controversy’. Daidalos, 13 (1984), and Louise Campbell
‘Perret versus Le Corbusier; Building for Art in the 1920s’. Kunst og Kultur, 97, no. 4 (2014).
In historical surveys, see Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 143.
23. Tim Benton, The Rhetoric of Modernism: Le Corbusier as a Lecturer (Basel: Birkhäuser
Verlag, 2009).
24. Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric; A Treatise on Argumentation (London: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 243.
25. Catherine Brown, The Art of Comparison: How Novels and Critics Compare (Oxford:
Legenda, 2011), p. 1.
26. James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1979).
27. Donald Norman, The Psychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
28. Terrence Cave, Thinking with Literature; Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2016), p. 54.
29. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2015), p. 7.
30. Roosevelt’s reaction to the Great Depression is typically contrasted with those of the Hoover
or Coolidge administrations. Hence the ‘unfamiliar perspective’ of a comparison with Italy
establishes the New Deal as ideologically conservative and paternalistic. Diane Ghirardo,
Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1989), p. 22.
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31. See for example her placing side-by-side of two nearly identical photographs of Pyramid
Lake to argue for their radical discursive difference. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Photography’s Discur-
sive Spaces: Landscape/View’. Art Journal, 42, no. 4 (1982), pp. 311–19.
32. Carol Willis, Form Follows Finance. Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), p. 10.
33. Sarah Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar
Architectural Culture (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000), pp. 303–07.
34. Stanford Anderson, ‘The Legacy of German Neoclassicism and Biedermeier: Behrens, Tes-
senow, Loos, and Mies’. Assemblage, 15 (1991), pp. 62–87.
35. Günter Frankenberg, ‘Critical Comparisons: Re-thinking Comparative Law’. Harvard Inter-
national Law Journal, 26, no. 2 (1985), p. 422.
36. Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric. A Treatise on Argumentation (London: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 357.
37. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 87.
38. Goyet, ‘Comparison’, p. 164.
39. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), pp. 11–16.
40. The social historian Charles Tilly advocated individualising comparisons, which consider
each case as unique by minimising its common features with another, to counter the pro-
pensity of modern sociology to generalise heterogeneity into monolithic theoretical struc-
tures. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), p. 82.
41. Levine, Forms, p. 8.
42. Researching Rowe’s archive, Braden Engel discovered that he used parallel slide projectors
to conjure surprising comparisons such as Villa Schwob and St. Peter’s Basilica. Engel
characterises this practice as ‘anachronous’, as it subverted Wölfflin’s method of comparing
successive periods or different works belonging to the same period. Braden Engel, ‘Ambi-
chronous Historiography: Colin Rowe and the Teaching of Architectural History’. Journal of
Art Historiography, 14 (2016), p. 3.
43. Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present. Inventing Architectural Modernism
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p. 8.
44. Mollie Claypool, ‘The Consequences of Dialogue and the Virgilian Nostalgia of Colin Rowe’.
Architecture and Culture, 4, no. 3 (2016), p. 360.
45. Burke states that ‘not only does the nature of our terms effect the nature of our obser-
vations … much of what we presume to be observations about the world may be no
more than the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms’.
Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1984), p. 46.
46. Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1976), p. 3.
47. Ibid., p. 13.
48. Claypool, ‘The Consequences of Dialogue’, p. 360.
49. Quoted in Goyet, ‘Comparison’, p. 162.
50. In his commentary on the addendum, Stan Allen argued that the assembly building contra-
dicts Rowe’s conception of ‘modern’ as a compensatory repetition of a lost humanist past,
as it opened new possibilities and freedoms for architecture. Stan Allen, ‘Addenda and
Errata’. ANY, 7/8 (1994), p. 28.
51. Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, p. 16.
52. Alan Colquhoun, ‘The Le Corbusier Centenary’. Journal of the Society of Architectural His-
torians, 49, no. 1 (1990), p. 96.
 570 Pairing Le Corbusier and the affordances
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Roy Kozlovsky

53. Kocka, ‘Asymmetrical Historical Comparison’, p. 49.

54. Tim May, ‘Comparative research: Potentials and problems’, in Social Research: Issues,
Methods and Process, ed. by Tim May, 4th edn (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill, 2011), p. 249.
55. Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980),
pp. 326–27.
56. Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present, p. 123.
57. Max Risselada, ‘Introduction’, in Raumplan versus Plan Libre: Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier,
1919–1930, ed. by Max Risselada (Delft: Delft University Press, 1988), p. 7.
58. Henry-Russell Hitchcock, ‘Houses by Two Moderns’. The Arts, 16, no. 1 (1929), p. 36.
59. Ibid., p. 38.
60. Colquhoun, ‘The Le Corbusier Centenary’, pp. 96–97
61. Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979),
p. 81. The comparison did not appear in the original 1968 German publication. The refer-
ence to funerary marble slyly alludes to Antonin Planeix’s occupation as an entrepreneur of
funerary monuments. See Tim Benton, The Villas of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret
1920–1930 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007), p. 25.
62. Von Moos, Le Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis, p. 80.
63. Ibid., p. 83.
64. Richard Rose argues that cross-national comparisons often assume that nations are inde-
pendent entities, and hence their attributes are internal to them rather than to their inter-
action within a larger system. Rose, ‘Comparing Forms of Comparative Analysis’, p. 458.
65. Stanislaus von Moos, ‘Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos’, in Raumplan versus Plan Libre, p. 21.
66. Benton, The Villas, pp. 34–35.
67. Graham Livesey and Antony Moulis, ‘From Impact to Legacy: Interpreting Critical Writing on
Le Corbusier from the 1920s to the Present’, in Proceedings of Le Corbusier, 50 Years Later
International Congress, Universitat Politècnica de València (2015), 1169–85 (p. 1178).
68. Pevsner situates the two within the Wölfflinian framework of pairing masters of the same
nationality: ‘Rembrandt and Vermeer are Dutchmen. But Rembrandt as a personality is
completely opposed to Vermeer, when one compares them within the smaller orbit of
their national art. So it may be profitable to contrast Hoffman’s delightful building with
the work of Adolf Loos, so completely opposed in character, although Loos was also an
Austrian.’ Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design, 2nd edn (London: Pelican,
1974), p. 199.
69. Beatriz Colomina, ‘On Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann: Architecture in the Age of Mechan-
ical Reproduction’, in Raumplan versus Plan Libre, p. 68.
70. Beatriz Colomina, ‘The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism’, in Raumplan versus Plan Libre.
Adolf Loos – Le Corbusier, ed. by Max Risselada (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008),
pp. 40, 49.
71. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity. Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), p. 181.
72. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, trans. by Edmund Jephcott
(New York: Schocken Books, 1986), quoted in Colomina, ‘The Split Wall’, p. 32.
73. Frankenberg, ‘Critical Comparisons’, p. 443.
74. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen,
1983), pp. 40–42.
75. Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier (London, Thames & Hudson, 2001), pp. 6–7.
76. ‘The Man with a Hundred Faces’ is the title of Jean Louis Cohen’s introduction to Le Corbusier
Le Grand, ed. by Jean Louis Cohen and Tim Benton (New York: Phaidon, 2008). It alludes to
Joseph Campbell’s 1949 comparative study of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
77. Risselada, ‘Introduction’, p. 6.

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