Le Corbusier - The Creative Search. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, April, 1996 by Peter Davey

Le Corbusier spent quite a lot of effort in later life selectively editing his own history to suggest that he was self-taught. But as Geoffrey Baker points out, he was in the 'early years a receptive pupil, owing an incalculable debt to his own teacher L'Eplattenier, and basing much of his thinking and his actual techniques on the writings of Ruskin and Owen Jones'.

L'Eplattenier was the head of the art school at La Chaux-de-Fonds, the watchmaking town in the Swiss Jura where Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was born and grew up. Without doubt, the master was a disciple of Ruskin, though Baker has some trouble in showing that Corb read Ruskin, apart from the copy of Les Matins a Florence he took on his first Italian journey in 1907. Baker is often reduced to having to say that 'Ruskin may have been the source' of this or that. But he does show that Corbusier's early sketchbook work has many parallels with Ruskin's romantic approach to nature, from which the Victorian sage derived 'scientific' rules that had little basis in objectivity but which were immensely important in his own analysis of the relationship of humanity to the cosmos and of man to man. Corb's 'scientific' understanding of the world was equally fundamentally based on formal analysis.

Baker's analysis of the sketchbooks and the early architectural work is exemplary. Using his own analytical drawings, he shows how the La Chaux houses could have been derived from Ruskin's teachings and how they began to draw on motifs from nature and travel studies that were to be reinterpreted again and again in the later work. Baker is far from uncritical of the results. Corbusier's approach was, he emphasises, 'predominantly visual', which led him 'to give undue emphasis to formal arrangements ... the conclusions he reached oversimplified the issues involved' - particularly in human terms.

Between the wars, he became obsessed with order and harmony (and with military discipline) - 'Democrative assemblies', he wrote in 1931, 'will not necessarily promote [the harmonious world]: everywhere conflicts arise ... We no longer need debates, but force, rapidity, all the qualities of a military man, of a general in wartime'. Corbusier's dislike of democracy is in some ways similar to that of Ruskin (though Ruskin was no worshipper of force). Baker should explore the parallels in a future edition.

Baker emphasises the break in Corbusier's work after the Second World War, when rather like Heidegger, he was forced to abandon many of his semi-fascist ideas and began to explore deeper (and more cuddly) perceptions of humanity and God in buildings like the Maisons Jaoul and Ronchamp. Here too, the earliest lessons and impressions were continually re-evaluated and re-used in ways that Baker suggests still have great power - indeed, for him, Corbusier was 'an obdurate genius in whose work even the heroic failures resonate with the magical exuberance of a great creative force'.

Baker has made a provocative and revelatory book, and he has been excellently served by his publishers who have laid on copious quantifies of illustrations closely related to the text.