LE CORBUSIER: THE PICASSO OF PLANNING

Le Corbusier was perhaps the greatest architect of the 20th century. He thought he could reshape mankind by creating a new form of city, yet he seldom practised what he preached, writes Jonathan Meades ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2008

Le Corbusier excelled in the visual and the plastic. He was a painter, sculptor, furniture designer and, above all, an architect of the highest order, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, a colossus who in his prodigiously fecund invention and protean versatility was the peer of his friend Pablo Picasso.

And there we might leave it. But Corbusier’s energetic vanity extended beyond the bounds of his gifts. He thought of himself as a visionary who would reshape mankind by creating a new form of city. To this end he wrote and illustrated countless manifestos, blueprints for the future: indeed, in his passport he described himself as a “man of letters”. He was a calculating controversialist who knew that the more outré his proposals were, the more they would attract attention and generate commissions.

His Plan Voisin, to demolish the northern half of Paris and replace it with a city of cruciform towers, belongs more to the history of self-advertisement than to that of urbanism—or would have done had his regiments of witless acolytes not imposed frail copies of it across the globe. He himself appears almost insouciant of his written dicta.

This was a man who seldom practised what he preached—he was the least Corbusian of architects, and his houses are anything but the “habitable machines” he wrote of. They are quirky, ingenious, highly crafted, handmade, cosily homely. They favour high art over sheer function. At Ronchamp near Belfort, this non-believer created a spiritually transcendent chapel. At l’Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, he conjured a roofscape that seemingly encapsulates the mythic history of the Mediterranean: Odysseus might be at your shoulder.

Exhibitions such as the one that has just opened at the Barbican are all well and good, but no photograph, no model, no maquette can properly represent the beatific power of his work; even the most inventive exhibition can only hint at its fluid potency. To understand you need to make the journey to Belfort, to Marseille, or to Firminy. There, on the edge of the Massif Central, he designed a cultural centre that is like a geological formation, and a church whose recent completion was celebrated on a postage stamp. At these sites you’ll be rewarded with a sensation of aesthetic bliss that only works of genius can stimulate.

Le Corbusier—The Art of Architecture Barbican Art Gallery, London, February 19th to May 24th. www.barbican.org.uk

Picture credit: Portrait of Le Corbusier (1960-65), Le Corbusier Notre Dame du Haut chapel, Ronchamp (1950-55), ©FLC/DACS, 2009

(Jonathan Meades writes and broadcasts on culture, architecture and food. In the summer issue of Intelligent Life magazine he dubbed Zaha Hadid "the first great female architect".)