L'homme vert: though environmental awareness is a recent phenomenon, it has deeper and perhaps surprising roots in the Modern Movement, especially in the work of Le Corbusier

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2008 by James Dunnett

The agenda of the Modern Movement is commonly seen as intrinsically unsustainable--it promoted mass production and consumption, the motor car, rapid obsolescence, and the use of high-energy-content materials such as glass, steel and concrete. Especially in some of its wackier late manifestations such as Archigram it arguably did mostly that. But while the desire to embrace industrial methods of production, and the mass markets that that implied, was undoubtedly an important component of Modern Movement ideology, this was married--as Pevsner for one was insistent in pointing out--to an inheritance from the Arts and Crafts movement and its later planning manifestation, the Garden City movement. From this direction came a preference for simplicity and spareness (embodied in William Morris' famous dictum that you should have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful), which implied a restraint of consumption, and an aspiration for the 'green city' (or 'City Verdant'--to use Gropius's term in The New Architecture and the Bauhaus translated by Morton Shand), the city permeated by nature.

The 'green city' ideal is evident in the work of many architects of the Modern Movement, such as the projected apartments by the Wannsee by Gropius of 1932 (and the emphasis he had laid on craftwork at the Bauhaus is also well known, extending to the New Bauhaus in Chicago), or Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park in Detroit of 1955-56, but no one expressed the polarities of industrialism and 'greenery' more forcefully than Le Corbusier. The Arts and Crafts heritage, absorbed from his teacher L'Eplattenier who, from travels in England and friendship with the Englishman Clement Heaton, carried the torch of nature and the hand-made from Ruskin, was strongest in him. It would be fair to say that Le Corbusier saw industrialisation as the means by which man could again make contact with nature, and be freed for the pursuit of the hand-made (the work of art being for him the product of individual sensibility, and therefore hand-made).

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The specific threat that carbon emissions from industrial processes would lead to global warming and a destructive rise in sea levels, which is of such concern now, had not been identified at that time. But the risk to the health of man from the pollution and lack of sunlight common in the dense industrial city were central concerns, and the need to husband the resources of nature, to avoid the waste both of time and materials, was fundamental to his thought. In the Radiant City, his model of green city, 'the link nature-man is re-established'. It is notable also how many of the specific technical components of current 'green' or sustainable construction theory, such as the 'green roof' and rammed earth walling, were being proposed by him from the 1920s onwards. He was himself devoted to the simple open-air life that he practised every summer in his timber cabin--the Petit Cabanon--next to the Mediterranean at Roquebrune.

One of the lessons Le Corbusier sought to draw in Towards a New Architecture (1923) from the comparison between buildings and transport vehicles of various kinds was that of miniaturisation: that the door into a room, for example, could be a much narrower, lighter, less bulky affair than was customary. The development of aeroplanes in particular had forced the reduction in size and weight of every component, and hence in the consumption of materials. Furniture--the 'equipment of the home'--could similarly be reduced from the customary massive pieces to their functional minimum, with potential gain in elegance as well as reduction in consumption. In architecture a reduction in scale in many areas was also possible and could, he felt, allow an expansion elsewhere where it would 'tell'--for example a reduced ceiling height of 2200mm could be doubled in the living area to 4500mm. He frequently drew attention to the very slender walls (and consequent saving in use of materials) made possible by steel or concrete frame construction, compared to the immense thicknesses of load-bearing walls, citing building regulations in Prague which demanded external wall thicknesses of 450mm minimum at the top, increasing by 150mm stages for every storey below. This process of reduction in structure and mass, which was central to the Modern Movement agenda, was thus 'sustainable' in its economy in the use of materials.

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One of the 'Five Points of the New Architecture' proposed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in the first volume of their Oeuvre Complete (1929) was the roof garden. The flat roof, long used as a vital living space in the Arab world, as additional playgrounds for London Board schools in the late nineteenth century, and by Auguste Perret in his Rue Franklin apartment building in Paris of 1903 (where he was perhaps the first to plant them), was for Le Corbusier the prime locale for what might be seen as the defining intellectual activity of the world he sought to create--communion between man and nature. From there, raised above the tumult of the world below, bathed in light, with distance and an uninterrupted view of the sky all around, man could soliloquise and contemplate his situation within nature and the cosmos. Beginning with the Villas La Roche and Jeanneret of 1923 and continuing throughout his career, the roof gardens (including 'green roofs' not intended for regular access) provide some of the most lyrical moments in his oeuvre. Roof-top soil and greenery, presented initially as a technical counter-measure to the high thermal coefficient of expansion of concrete and to limit excess rainwater run-off, was practically to overwhelm the building itself in projects such as his Petit Maison de Weekend of 1935.