Le Corbusier: crap / not crap

Not The Tabard Inn, surely? That's Norman Shaw.

Despite the noise and banding, I love this.

Completely turned off him during the very short time I spent studying architecture. Good 10 years at least I think before I can begin to give a reasoned opinion of his work as a whole.

Why? Forced down your throat too much?

Thanks for that Teuchter, very interesting. There are some hints in the pics that the building needs a bit of tlc. Is that right? Or are the metal fences evidence of tlc being currently applied?

Not crap

No, they are doing restoration work on it at the moment as suggested by the bits of fencing and stuff you have spotted. There is scaffolding to a large part of the internal courtyard. I could see that some work had been done on other parts because it was noticeably less scruffy than what I'd seen in photos before.

Actually you have reminded me that I was going to check up on what exactly they are doing / have done. I noticed for example that there are some areas of white render which aren't in older photos. I was wondering whether this was something that was intended in the original plans but never carried out, or whether it all fell off or something, or whether it has been adopted as a way of dealing with deteriorating concrete.

Eg if you look at the white panel here in my photo (top right):




You can see it isn't there in this one I've nicked from the internet:

I serously doubt that a corbusier building of that scale/period would be rendered.

In fact, my first thoughts on seeing your pics were "they have harled the place!"

This must be to protect deteriorating/leaking/spalling concrete IMO.

There's frustratiungly little to be found online giving any detail on the scope of the "restoration" works.

Possibly someone with better French than mine would have more success.

As far as I know the white render at Ronchamp has been there since the beginning. That was just a few years earlier, and wasn't one of his purist international modern type schemes either.

Yes - but that is a project on a very different scale and with a number of significant departures from his other work of the period.

It was also commissioned earlier than La Tourette and is maybe the most site-sensitive/inspired of all his later work.

Most if not all of the large Corbusier projects from that era were finished/patterned by the concrete shuttering - he had a lot to say about why in one of his books IIRC but it has been a long time since I read any.

Except maybe the Berlin Unite, which was finished in some pus-coloured smooth render but again, that project was largely dominated by other architects in its latter stages.

Corbusier and the Bauhaus are two sides of the same coin really but I certainly would not be linking them directly. There was a fair difference between their basic methodologies.

Although it is true that Corbusier knew the Bauhaus founders early in his career and that his ideas were a significant influence on its students, his relationship with the active Bauhaus was strained and often ambivalent. Also, when the Bauhaus was at its zenith, Corbusier's main interest was urban planning rather than individual building/component design.

In fact CIAM's (Corbusier's platform) response to the Nazi's closure of the Bauhaus was a bit lacklustre. More of a "we oppose this for the sake of modernism as a whole" rather than an outright condemnation of the act itself.

Then there is the matter of history drawing a veil over his his active support of Petain and his participation with the Vichy government. Although he was forced to retreat/retire from that when he came to be considered too "Bolshevik" for them.

Definitely. At the time, couldn't see anything in him. Now, I can see he had some good ideas, but all to often woefully misapplied.