Le Corbusier and the concept of self: corbusian societies - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2004 by Timothy Britain-Catlin

By Simon Richards. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]27.50

This book is principally about the kind of people Le Corbusier had in mind for the slabs and towers of his urban visions. They were to live in societies run by technocrats, devoid of any kind of public participation in politics, and thus Corb designed for them cities with no public space and no recognizable urban typologies. They were to become isolated to the point that they forged a new selfhood born of solitude, inspired by the type of atavistic visual symbolism that Purist painting provided. And this new selfhood would result in what Richards calls the 'renaissance of the collective', which in Corb's case was allied to his adopted French nationalism. With ideas drawn from Blaise Pascal, and which were to some extent shared with Corb's contemporaries Camus and Bataille, the architect-hero pursued a rocky political path, supporting one promising fascist group after the next in pre-War Paris. Disillusioned time after time, he eventually embraced the Vichy regime only to find that once again his political heroes were merely sloganizing reactionaries.

With long quotations and a great deal of repetition, all the above falls (just) into the 'quite interesting' category for anyone who is not a Corb obsessive. The Arts and Humanities Research Board, the primary UK body funding postgraduate research in the field of architectural history and theory, is funding Richards' current research, and it would be fascinating to know on what basis it distributes its fellowships. I fear it aims to contribute to the flood of scarcely readable pseudo-scholarly jargon-infested claptraps which people have to publish nowadays to build themselves an academic career. As if to add insult to injury, a prominent AHRB board member recently published to great acclaim among literary people a biography of Christopher Wren in a ghastly romantic-novel style, thus further reinforcing the impression that architectural history is only valuable to society when it is dressed up as something else. As the imminent closure of Cambridge University's Diploma School so vividly indicates, the current academic establishment is out of step with the real needs of architects, let alone architectural historians.

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