Second Year History and Theory Week 3: Le Corbusier: ʻExact Breathingʼ

ʻYou are under the shade of trees, vast lawns spread all around you. The air is clear and pure; there is
hardly any noise. What, you cannot see where the buildings are? Look through the charmingly diapered
arabesques of branches out into the sky towards those widely spaced crystal towers which soar higher
than any pinnacle on earth. These translucent prisms seem to float in the air without anchorage to the
ground, flashing in summer sunshine, softly gleaming under grey winter skies, magically glittering at
nightfall ...ʼ In considering contemporary political unrest in his book Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier,
asked the question ʻArchitecture, or Revolution?ʼ His answer, that ʻrevolution can be avoidedʼ, betrays his faith in the
power of architecture to provide solutions for social problems at all scales. Indeed, while suggesting that ʻthe
problem of the house is the problem of the epochʼ, Le Corbusier spent a great of energy in the 1920s, 30s and 40s
extending his radical critique of the nature of the individual house to the scale of the city. A relatively small example
of this critique can be seen in Pessac, Borbeaux (1924-5), but this type of housing is but a small component of his
Contemporary City for three million people (1922). With this he posits a new, highly ordered orthogonal urban
plan, where, according to a predetermined social hierarchy, the higher echelons of the population work in
skyscrapers and dwell in immeuble villas which sit within a landscape of parkland. A similar theme is developed in
the Plan Voisin of 1925, a new vision of Paris (sponsored by a French car manufacturer) which replaces the tightly
wrought, medieval fabric of the Marais area with a series of high-rise cruciform towers and lower rise à redent
housing. Meanwhile, in projects such the Cité de Refuge (Salvation Army Building) (1929-33) and the Swiss
Pavilion (1930-2), Le Corbusier began to extent his built architectural repertoire from the scale of the villa to that of
the public building or urban block, producing actual prototypes for his city plans. Two very influential models played
on Le Corbusierʼs thinking during this period and indeed, the rest of his life: the ship and the monastery. He found
the charterhouse type of monastery (at Ema, for example, or the Certosa at Galluzo, both in Italy) an exemplar of
how autonomous units can become part of an overall system and how organizational clarity can be matched by a
clarity of architectural form. Indeed, the L-shape form and relationship between the cell and the garden of his
Pavillion de LʼEsprit Nouveau (repeated in the immeuble villas) was borrowed from the charterhouse. Le Corbusier
considered the ship, or to be more precise, the ocean-going liner as an industrial product or type, one which
suggested new opportunities for a organizing society and habitation. Like the other types identified in Vers Une
Architecture – the motor-car or the aeroplane – Corb finds in the liner a closely attuned relationship between form
and function. Moreover, the shipʼs detachment from place also begins to echo some of the qualities of his five
points – an architectural prototype of universal, virtually siteless application. In fact, in the late 1920s, the five points
began to find their way into his communal buildings, perhaps noticeably in the beefed up pilotis of the Swiss
pavilion. His most ship-like building, however, is probably the Cité de Refuge which is entered across a type of
gangplank and seems to sit like a gleaming mechanism in a congested area of Paris. Its setback roofscape is
deeply reminiscent of a shipʼs funnels and superstructure. Meanwhile, its sheer, air-tight glass curtain wall, while not
explicitly derived from the liner, extends his idea of architecture as mechanism. Behind the sealed façade he
envisaged mechanical ventilation and heating which he called ʻexact breathingʼ (respiration exacte). The emphasis
on a completely controlled environment found in the Salvation Army buildingʼs mechanical ventilation as well as its
physical and formal detachment seem to exemplify a deliberate withdrawal from the complexities of the city found in
much of Le Corbusierʼs projects during this period, described here by the Soviet critic S. Gournyi, in 1933, ʻIt is
obvious that the panaceas proposed by Le Corbusier ... are only a reaction against the state in which our
large cities find themselves today. Only such a Leviathan, grinding away with continuous movement night
and day, could give birth to the idea of an asylum made of steel, hard and tightly sealed. Only the
overcrowding which characterises this octopus and the poisonous air it exhales could have provoked the
notion of ʻartificial respirationʼ. Only the abnormally excited nervous system of an inhabitant of a large
capitalist city could stimulate the terrible need to lock oneself up, to isolate one self in an airtight, sacred
asylum.ʼ

Liner section Sketch section of the monastery at Ema Plan Voisin (1925)

References (key texts in bold) (as per ʻThe Problem of the Dwelling I): Brian Brace Taylor, The City of Refuge, Paris, 1929/33,
Gen 720.92; William Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, pp 60-106, Res GEN 720.92/LEC; Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of
the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, pp 1-27, GEN 720/ROW; Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century
architecture, pp 99-101, GEN 724.9/CON; Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture (Towards a New Architecture), pp 225-265, GEN
724/LEC; Stanislaus van Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis, pp 69-143, GEN 720.92/LEC. Other key sources on Le
Corbusier include the 8 volumes of the Ouevre Complète, the 4 volumes of sketchbooks, and his theoretical and polemical works
particularly Towards a New Architecture and The City of Tomorrow. Also worth a read is Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the
Continual Revolution in Architecture GEN 720.92/LEC, which is a biographical account of his life and works.