La recherche patienteLe Corbusier, cincuenta años después = fifty years later

Abstract

In August 1965, a swim in the waters of the Mediterranean led to the death of Le Corbusier, recognized as probably the most important architect of the 20th century. On the occasion of the anniversary of this event, there have been a plethora of acts in his memory. Among them, the Department of Architectural Projects of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, with the support of the Fondation Le Corbusier, promoted the international conference LC2015 Le Corbusier 50 years after in Valencia. Some of the invited speakers have given us the material published in this volume, a result also of the investigations that are still underway about his personality and work. Architect without a degree, publicist, writer, painter, sculptor, engraver, industrialist, essayist, urbanist, graphic artist, furniture designer, editor … as he said on several occasions: “there are no sole sculptors, or sole painters, or sole architects. The plastic happening is realized through a one-form in the service of poetry.” This was clearly evident in 1960 in one of his last publications—which some branded as self-promotion; others, instead, as an introspection, a reflection on his own work—which he himself called “L’atelier de la recherche patiente”, the atelier of the patient search, where he showed the magnitude of this endeavour that he decided to undertake as a young man. The spirit contained in these pages is no different: to continue with that investigation or investigations on the same creative act that, in Le Corbusier, was developed from very different sides. Le Corbusier was undoubtedly one of the most productive architects in creating interrelations between ideas and images, between plastic disciplines and architecture, between history and modernity. The power of his ideas was continually being experienced and corroborated by an unusual and polyhedral work, the result of a deeply inquisitive and critical attitude towards the world and things. In his projects, writings, paintings or sculptures, he disengaged different visions of what had to correspond to modernity, which, as an individual, was nourished by heterogeneous ideological references. If there is something that stands out in his career it is the transversality in his creative work, which permits very different approaches and interpretations of his personality, proposals and achievements. If the work of Le Corbusier is like an immense mountain of which we know its great size and some paths to reach its summit, what this book offers us is a set of new itineraries through which to traverse it. From the places where he lived to his conceptions of modern mobility; from the synthesis between natural and geometric form to his creative processes; from the books he read to his relations with Cercle et Carré; from his political positions to his views on Carthusian architecture; from his forays into the field of cinematography to his artistic creation in the 1950s. Analysis on texts such as Vers une architecture or others not published like Polychromie Architecturale, on concepts such as the promenade architecturale and its relations with the ideas of Goethe; disquisitions on figures such as the swastika or the circle and the square; the musical suggestions of the Modulor; the art of living in the Immeuble Villas, the Maison Jaoul or the Village du Gouverneur in Chandigarh. All these topics, and so many others, invite us to climb towards a summit that, from near and far, always seems intense and protean to us. Here then you have the opportunity to start a new promenade.