Famous Architects » Frank Lloyd Wright

Le Corbusier

Admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:46:09 +0000

Le Corbusier was the most important, influential and famous architect of the 20th century. Swiss by birth and trained as an artist in his home town under a fastidious teacher, L’Eplattenier, Charles Edouard Jeanneret (he adopted the pseudonym Le Corbusier only in the early 1920s) was a remarkably talented pupil.

He travelled widely in the Near and Middle East, and worked his way through a study tour of Germany at a time when the ideas for a new architecture were being formulated. In 1908-9 he went to Paris to attend classes with Auguste Perret. Paris later became his métier: he was absorbed in the cultural and artistic life of the great city as an editor, a writer, architect and artist.

His dedication to the synthesis of the arts – particularly sculpture, painting and drawing and designing – never wavered. His early work, like that of his most important contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, was related to nature but also owed much to the famous French theorists Charles Blanc and Auguste Choisy.

He began his career as an architect in his native town, building Villa Schwoh, an early example of reinforced- concrete construction, in 1916. He had by that time also worked out his basic building diagram, the so-called Maison Domino, a prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid over- sailing floors.

In 1917 he settled in Paris, where, together with his painter and writer colleague Amêdee Ozenfant, he issued his Purist manifesto Apres le Cubisme (1918). With the poet Paul Dermee they edited together a new review, L’Esprit Nouveau, from 1920 to 1925, the year in which Le Corbusier won international recognition for the small pavilion of the same name at the 1925 Paris Expo. Two years earlier his hook Vers lore architecture, mainly culled from articles in L’Esprit Nouveau, had appeared in French: it was to have worldwide repercussions, the most discussed architectural text of the age. It was translated into German in 1926 and English in 1927, and is still in print.

Other influential texts followed, including L’Art decoratif d’aujourd’hui, Urbanisme, Le Peinture moderne 1925), Precisions (1930), La Ville radieuse (1935) and the hooks on harmonious proportions, Le Modulor in 1954 and 1958. From 1922 he worked as an architect in conjunction with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and that year they exhibited the Maison Citrohan at the Paris Salon, together with proposals for a city of three million people.

Among the early executed domestic projects are the Vaucresson Villa (1922), the Maison La Roche (1923), Maison Cook at Boulogne-sur-Seine (1926), Villa Stein at Garches (1927) and the internationally renowned house and apartment block at the 1927 Stuttgart Werkbund Exhibition, the Weissenhofsiedlung (1927), the Villa Savoye, Poissy (1928-9), and the Clam’. Flats in Geneva (1932). These houses, mainly for wealthy clients but not necessarily expensive structures, established the form language of the new rational architecture, which seems to epitomize its definition as a machine a habiter (“a machine for living in”). Public buildings included the Swiss Pavilion in the University of Paris (1930-33) and the masterly Cite de Refuge for the Salvation Army in Paris (1929-33).

In international competition Le Corbusier did not fare well and complained ceaselessly that he was constantly compromised. He did, however, see the Centrosoyus Building in Moscow built, although he failed to realize his schemes for the League of Nations in Geneva (1927), the Palace of Soviets (1931), and United Nations, New York (largely carried out by Harrison & Abramovitz). He produced town-planning schemes for many parts of the world, often as an adjunct to a lecture tour. In these schemes the routes of mankind (vehicular and pedestrian) and the functional zones of the settlements were always emphasized and eventually embodied in the principles underlying “The Athens Charter”, issued as a result of the CIAM Congress IV in 1933. The famous Ville radieuse, more personal, humanistic and megalomanic, was issued in book form in 1935.

During the Second World War he produced little, emerging with his utopian Propos d’urbanisme of 1945 and some years later the fruit of his mathematical meditations in the form of the Modulor. In 1947 lie began work on his monumental Unite d’habitation at Marseille, completed in 1952. A prototype block of over 300 flats, it had internal streets, duplex maisonettes and internal shopping malls. It was followed by further examples in Berlin, Nantes, Meaux etc. Although relieved of their dominant rectangularity by sculptural roof-lines and highly coloured walls, these massive postwar dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism, although they were also plagiarized throughout the world.

As if to contrast with their megalomanic scale, Le Corbusier’s post-war small-scale poetic essays in architecture caught many designers unaware of his potentiality as an inventor of rich, new and varied forms. His Maisons Jaoul (1951-5) were a revelation of vernacular materials, brute concrete (beton brut) and articulated structure. The Monastery of Ste Marie de la Tourerte at Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle (1957¬60) and the splendid free-shaped pilgrimage chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950-55) changed the direction of architectural and liturgical thinking.

Towards the end of his career Le Corbusier was appointed architect for the public buildings at Chandigarh, the new capital city of the Punjab in India (1952-64), and worked closely with Maxwell FRY and Jane Drew, who with others did a number of infrastructure buildings. This episode ran parallel to the more inspired work carried out at Ahmedabad, where his clients included the wealthy Sarabhai family. With the Shodan House (1956) and the Mill Owners Association (1951-9) some of his early design themes were taken up once again, such as the route, the recessed structural column and the expressive staircase and, of course, the flat undecorated plane, most of which formed part of his celebrated five principles of a free architecture which derive from the late 1920s.

With Le Corbusier, every building worked within its time as a testimony to his unremitting genius as the architect of the epoch. Much of it, even though this great architect’s popularity was marred by his tendency to overstate his case, will prove of lasting significance and value.

List of Le Corbusier’s major works

Various villas in and around La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1908-16.
Maison Citrohan (first project), 1920.
Ozenfant Studio, Paris, 1924.
Matson La Roche, Paris-Auteuil, 1925.
Pavillon de [Esprit Nouveau, Paris Exposition, 1925.
Villa Cook, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1927.
Houses, Weissenhof Estate, Stuttgart, 1927.
Villa Stein, Larches, 1927.
Villa Savoye, Poissy, 1928-9.
Cite de Refuge, Paris, 1929-33.
Maison aarte, Geneva, 1930-32.
Swiss Pavilion, Paris, 1933. V
ille Radieuse project, 1935.
Ministry of Health and Education, Rio de Janeiro, 1936.
“Temps Nouveau” Pavilion, Paris, 1937.
Unite d’habitation, Marseille, 1945-8.
Duval Factory, St Die, 1946.
Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1950-55.
Projects and plans, Chandigarh, Punjab (with Fry, Drew and Jeanneret). 1951-64. Maisons Jaoul, 1951-5.
Ahmedabad villas and Mill Owners Association, between 1954 and 1959.
Ste Marie de la Tourette monastery, Eveux-sur-l’Arbresle, 1957-60.
Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass. (with stria), 1959-63.
Centre Le Corhusier, Zfirich, 1963-5.
Cultural Centre, Firminy, 1965.

Bibliography

Charles Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Etude du mouvement d’art decoranf en Allemagne, La Chaux de Fonds, 1912 (reissued, New York, 1968); Vers taste architecture, Paris, 1923; Urbanisme, Paris, 1925; L ‘Art decoratif d’aujourd’hut, Paris, 1925 (1959); Le Pemture moderate, Paris, 1926; Une Matson – un palais, Paris, 1928; Precisions: sur on Etat present de !’architecture et de l’urbanisme, Paris, 1928 (1960); La Ville radieuse, Paris 1935 (1964); Quand les Cathedrales etaient blanches, Paris, 1937; Les Trois Etablissements human’s, Paris, 1945; UN Headquarters, New York, 1947; Le Modulor, Boulogne-sur-Seine, 1950; Modulor 2, Boulogne-stir-Seine, 1955; Le Livre de Ronchamp (c.1956, multilingual editions), etc.
S. Von Moos, Le Corbusier: Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge, Mass., 1968, 1979.
R. Walden (ed.), The Open Hand, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.
W Curtis, Le Corbusier: ideas and Forms, London and New York, 1986.
For a full bibliography with English and other foreign-language titles, see D Brady, Le Corbusier: an annotated bibliography, New York, 1985.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Neo — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:28:50 +0000

Frank Lloyd Wright
b. Richland Center, Wisconsin, 1867;
d. Phoenix, Arizona, 1959.

Frank Lloyd Wright was the most talented famous architect of the c20; an American with Welsh ancestry. He was inspired by his mother to become an architect. Boyhood summers on his uncle’s farm embued a love of nature. Wright’s first building dates from 1886. In that year, as a young man, he was cited as job architect of Unity Chapel, Helena Valley, Wisc., designed by J. L. Silsbee. From then until his death he produced countless architectural projects; in 1974 it was estimated that some 433 buildings remained extant. His own publication output was phenomenal and he and his pupils, admirers, writers and critics produced about 2000 noteworthy items. Wright became a legend in his own lifetime; his lifestyle and extra-marital affairs scandalized America. He was claimed as the model for the character of Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead; it was also rumoured that he was a near communist. He had to fall back on farming as a way of surviving during lean times. The first period of his career was connected to the indigenous Prairie School and followed his short apprenticeship to his Lieber Meister Louis Sullivan of Adler & Sullivan. Wright’s family houses for middle-class businessmen, with “gently sloping rooves, low proportions, quiet skylines”, initiated a spatial revolution, where rooms were not box containers but were volumes overlapped and interpenetrated. In 1909, with his lover Mrs Mamah Cheney (n?e Borthwick), Wright travelled to Europe, where his early work was published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth (1910-11). It had a profound influence on continental architects. In 1913 Wright was in Japan, where he secured the Imperial Hotel commission. It brought him fame when it failed to collapse in the 1923 Tokyo earthquake. Wright’s own world, however, had collapsed in 1914 in the most appalling circumstances when he was building Midway Gardens, Chicago; Mrs Cheney and her two children were murdered. Apart from the Imperial Hotel he did little work until the textile block houses for the Los Angeles area of the mid-1920s. These include the famous Millard House. Some of the West Coast houses were supervised during construction by his son, Lloyd Wright. A year later he began the most important relationship of his life with Olgivanna Hinzenberg, a Gurdejieff disciple, whom he married in 1928. The second most successful period of Wright’s career followed, with many important houses, including the two Taliesins, Kaufmann’s “Fallingwater” and the Johnson Wax Company offices in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Johnson house, “Wingspread”. Wright believed in and promoted an “organic” architecture and way of life within a framework that was democratic, even at times utopian (e.g. the Broadacre City and Mile High projects, and his “Usonian” houses – a concept of modest dwellings close to earth, for the average American). During his “international” period of the 1930s, he visited the USSR and gave the Princeton and Sulgrave Manor lectures, which effectively summarized his philosophy. In 1941 he received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. In the post-war period large-scale projects followed, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Marin County Court and offices as well as more houses, theatres, churches, and auditoria.

Major buildings /works:
Prairie School houses in and around Chicago, Illinois, including Oak Park (Unity Temple, Own Studio and House (now museum), Fricke, Martin Gale and Cheney Houses etc.); River Forest (Winslow, Roberts Houses etc.) and Riverside (Coonley Residence etc.), from 1890. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, 1915 (Annexe, 1916). Millard House “La Miniatura”, Pasadena, California, 1923. Taliesin III, Spring Green, Wise., from 1925; Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona, from 1937. S. C. Johnson and Son Offices, Racine, Wise., 1934 (Research Tower, 1944). Edgar J. Kaufmann Sr Residence “Falling Water”, Bear Run, Penn., 1935 (Guest House, 1938). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue, New York, 1956. Grady Gammage Memorial Auditorium, ASU, Tempe, Arizona, 1959.

Bibliography:

F. L. Wright, An Autobiography, London, New York and Toronto, 1932 (new eds. 1943, 1977).
On Architecture, 1941, and The Future of Architecture, 1953 (his major lectures).
W. A. Storer, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Cambridge, Mass., 1974.
R. L. Sweeny, Frank Lloyd Wright: An Annotated Bibliography, Los Angeles, 1978.
Edgar Tafel, Apprentice to Genius: Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1979 (now reissued as Years with Frank Lloyd Wright, New York).
Brendan Gill, Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, New York, 1987.

Famous Architects » Frank Lloyd Wright

Le Corbusier

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