Architecture Interruptus Book A by Andrew Vine

ISBN 10 Digits: 1-881390-42-X ISBN 13 Digits: 978-1-881390-42-8 $22.00

wexner center

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS - THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

ARCHITECTURE INTERRUPTUS

The Church of Saint Pierre, in Firminy, France, was designed by pivotal 20th-century architect Le Corbusier with a young associate, JosĂŠ Oubrerie, in the early 1960s. Now, after years of delays and interruptions, Oubrerie is bringing the project to fruition. This exhibition invites you to examine the interaction of their ideas. Featuring historical and contemporary photographs, sketches, and drawings, and a newly commissioned model, the exhibition strives to bring the experience of the building to the Wexner Center galleries.

Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio USA

This publication accompanies the exhibition

Architecture Interruptus was organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Architecture Interruptus Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University January 27–April 15, 2012

Major support is provided by Capgemini, NBBJ, and the Greater Columbus Arts Council.

Curator Megan Cavanaugh Novak Curatorial Assistant Rachel Choto Exhibition Designer Patrick Weber Designer Andrew Vine Editor Ann Bremner

The catalogue is made possible by a generous gift from Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown. Additional support for the exhibition comes from Linda and Jim Miller, auto·des·sys, The Columbus Chapter of The American Institute of Architects, Robert and Sally Wandel, Merilynn and Tom Kaplin, Myers Financial Services LLC, the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation, and Wexner Center members. Accommodations are provided by The Blackwell Inn.

Published by the Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University 1871 North High Street Columbus, Ohio 43210-1393 USA Tel: +(614) 292-0330 Fax: +(614) 292-3369 www.wexarts.org © 2012 Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University Library of Congress Control Number: 2006939610 ISBN 10 Digits: 1-881390-42-X ISBN 13 Digits: 978-1-881390-42-8 Distributed by D.A.P. Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, New York 10013 USA Tel: +(212) 627-1999 / +(800) 338-2665 Fax: +(212) 627-9484 www.artbook.com

CONTENTS

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD 1 Sherri Geldin INTRODUCTION 5 Megan Cavanaugh Novak A TIME FOR FREEDOM 9 Jeffrey Kipnis CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHS 22 ARCHITECTURE BEFORE GEOMETRY, OR THE PRIMACY OF IMAGINATION 39 José Oubrerie CONTEMPORARY DRAWINGS 45 CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTATION 59 GRANDEUR IS IN THE INTENTION 61 Anthony Eardley HISTISTORICAL DRAWINGS IN THE EXHIBITION 73 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 99 Megan Cavanaugh Novak

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD

What does it take to defy architectural historians, experts, Corbusian zealots or detractors...

If, as one leading critic proclaims, the Eglise Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert is “almost a triumph for Le Corbusier,” it is in any case an unqualified triumph for José Oubrerie, the architect who, against all odds, brought the church to fruition some forty years after it was begun. As a young apprentice in Le Corbusier’s atelier, Oubrerie worked closely on the church, only to see the project founder upon the master’s death in the mid-1960s. With only its concrete foundation poured, the project remained for decades relegated to preemptive ruin—a poignant vestige of what had never been and what might never be. Meanwhile, Oubrerie established his own reputation as a professor and an architect with such masterworks as the Miller House in Kentucky and the French Cultural Center in Damascus, Syria. But he never forgot the Firminy church; over time his relationship to the project would transform from an architectural to an existential commitment. As Oubrerie writes, What does it take to defy architectural historians, experts, Corbusian zealots or detractors…if not something which was initiated in the 60s, born out of one of the constant dreams of one singular man who transferred the task to one of his then asistants to continuously diminish the part of the unknown, to bring to existence this thing which kept growing in the 70s to the point of being partially cast in concrete and became suddenly frozen awake? What is it even more to be called upon three years ago to bring out of this long coma such a project which did not want to die, having been strong enough by itself, by its own nature and its antecedents, to resist demolition.… And herein lays both crux and crucible: a rare convergence of supreme will, fortune, talent, and tenacity that conjures from abandoned dreams a concrete reality, despite improbable odds and rampant skepticism in the academy of peers. For what does it mean to posthumously complete the work of another, especially when the other in question

is long since enshrined in the pantheon of architectural gods? Moreover, how dare something at once aspire to the historic and the contemporary? With what audacity and cheek does the one-time apprentice take up the pen and summon the redress of the master’s original design intent, now proven ill-conceived? And how does one reconcile the ambiguity of authorship in a project that looms so large on the landscape of architectural history? These are the questions we seek to probe in presenting Architecture Interruptus at the Wexner Center for the Arts. In doing so, we also honor the unlikely accomplishment of José Oubrerie, a colleague who for the last fifteen years has contributed to the intellectual and creative energy of Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture as professor, agitator, and mentor, even as he has lent his talents to the Wexner Center as exhibition designer and, more importantly, as devilish advocate and interlocutor. That a former student, Megan Cavanaugh Novak, eagerly assumed the role of exhibition curator, and his long-time friend and Knowlton School colleague Jeffrey Kipnis agreed to contribute a critical essay to this catalogue is testament to their keen regard for Oubrerie and his talents. But make no mistake: this exhibition and catalogue stand completely on their own merits, as rigorously conceived and vetted as any the center would undertake. In that regard, the Firminy church uniquely and simultaneously embodies dual but rarely convergent Wexner Center mandates: to focus on newly created work in all disciplines while also illuminating the historical context from which such work emerges. Here, in one project, we can at once illustrate that which is quintessentially Corbusian and that which bears the distinctive hand of Oubrerie circa 2006. Moreover, we are able to discern where the one-time assistant has acted primarily as preservationist, and where he has deliberately reinterpreted and even wholly reconceived crucial elements

of the design. As such, the church becomes a true dialogue across the decades, not between teacher and student, but between peers. And one This was by no means an easy project on which to cut one’s curatorial teeth, and I would like to recognize the fine work done by Megan Cavanaugh Novak to orchestrate every aspect of this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue. She joins me in expressing our abiding appreciation to the Fondation Le Corbusier for its generous cooperation in lending precious historical material to the show. We also thank the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, and the Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, for their kind assistance in lending works. Similarly, we both convey our thanks to Romain Chazalon, who has worked closely with Oubrerie over the last several years to bring the church to completion, and also assisted in planning the exhibition. We are grateful to Jeffrey Kipnis for his keen insights and suggestions along the way, in addition to his sweeping yet meticulously honed essay for this catalogue. I thank Helen Molesworth for her project oversight and the entire Wexner Center exhibitions team for their significant contributions to the realization of the project, particularly Patrick Weber, the lead exhibition designer for the show. I would also like to express my thanks to Dave Bull, our guest graphic designer, for his superb visualization of this publication and several related materials, and to Editor Ann Bremner for her always graceful and sensitive ministrations to text. We are delighted that Luis Burriel Bielza was able to visit the church upon its completion and provide entirely new photographs for this catalogue. For their dedicated efforts to raise both awareness and funding for the exhibition, I’m proud to recognize the center’s marketing and communications department under the leadership of Jerry Dannemiller and its development department, led by Jeffrey Byars. Under the strategic guidance of Deputy Director Jack Jackson, they (and so much else at the center) flourish. I am blessed with a supremely creative

INTRODUCTION

In November 2006, the Eglise Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert was finally unveiled to the public. This small church, situated in the town of Firminy about an hour outside of Lyon, was originally designed by Le Corbusier in the early 1960s. It was to be the fourth in a suite of projects by the famed architect in Firminy, part of a visionary mayor’s civic plan to create a new, green city out of a shabby industrial town. After several iterations of the design, which initially sprang from the unbuilt Le Tremblay church project of 1929, Le Corbusier passed away in 1965 before the Firminy church had even reached its final design stage, much less been built. José Oubrerie, the young apprentice working on the church with Le Corbusier, picked up where his teacher left off, and continued the evolution of the project’s design. There were many fits and starts through the design and the eventual construction of the building, but today, the Firminy church stands tall, a monument to Corbusier’s legacy and practice, and to Oubrerie’s tenacity and persistence. As you can probably imagine, the task of writing about Le Corbusier and this “last” of his buildings is fairly daunting. Luckily for me, neither this exhibition nor the Firminy church is just about Le Corbusier, or even just about him and José Oubrerie. In fact, both are undeniably more about the iterative process of design, the compromises that are created by people working together, the changes that happen as new information arises during the design process. These effects are magnified by the incredible talent of the two architects and the immense stretch of time that has extended from the first breath of the project until its eventual, emphatic completion near more than forty years later. Although the Firminy church poses many questions with no real answers, it is safe to say that José Oubrerie was the driving force behind the project: the energy and the persistence needed to deliver it to its new place in architectural history books, into the pages reserved for completed projects, comes from him. As Anthony Eardley details in his essay, first published in 1981 and reprinted here, Oubrerie became intimately involved in the design of the church as soon as Le Corbusier received the initial commission in 1960. Aside from some of the earliest sketches, many of the drawings from Le Corbusier’s studio were actually penned by Oubrerie while he worked there on the rue de Sèvres as a young apprentice. The design progressed fitfully, and construction had not even been considered at the time of Le Corbusier’s unexpected death. Following that tragic event, Oubrerie was allowed to keep the many drawings, models, and photographs on which he had been working. The project quickly became his passion, a never-ending apprenticeship assignment that he would not give up.

The cornerstone for the church was finally laid in 1971, more than ten years after it was commissioned. By this time, Le Corbusier had already been gone for six years, about the same amount of time that Oubrerie had worked with him. Yet Oubrerie was merely getting started . Actual construction on the building commenced in 1973; when it faltered for the first time in 1974, only the blocky base of three floors had been built. Construction resumed in 1977, and the slab for the church and the lower portion of the shell were poured. The balcony floor, an important part of the experience within the space, was also completed before construction again ceased, in 1979. At this juncture the project’s realization truly sputtered to a halt, and twenty-four years passed before another cement truck or toolbox arrived on the site. During this time, the building sat, unfinished and hulking, like a stocky Sagrada Família or Gothic cathedral. Surrounded by other Corbusian buildings that were not only finished but in use, this sad chunk of concrete lacked the height and detail to even hint at its potential grandeur. In 1996 the unfinished church was designated a “monument historique.” On the one hand this prevented certain changes from being made to the building and forced the completion to be officially considered an addition to the original building, but it did have one incredibly vital benefit. The protected status enabled the French government to intervene financially, and in 2001, the government provided the much-needed economic support that would give the building its last push toward completion. The final round of construction began in 2003, and although progress often moved slowly, the building was officially completed and opened in late fall of 2006. When I first visited in January 2006, the building was still very much a construction site, filled with a cold air of incompletion. It was still possible, however, to grasp the enormity of the structure and to

see its beauty through the fences and barricades. The building was still somewhat open to the elements and the ramp to the church’s entrance was missing, with the entry dropping off into thin air. The space inside, however, was truly awe inspiring. The compressed space at the entry leads to a vast expanse just beyond, and the progression is modulated by a sloping floor that spirals around and eventually becomes the elevated seating area. Concentrated beams of light enter the cavernous interior through pinhole openings that depict the constellation of Orion in the wall behind the altar, and large expanses of colored light flood in from the light cannons. The powerful visual sensation created by the striking juxtaposition of light and dark is further enhanced by the echoes that reverberate from the hard surfaces surrounding you in the otherwise silent sanctuary. The newness of this building exudes from its invisible pores, even though over half of it had been sitting unfinished, exposed to the elements, for longer than a quarter of a century. In the process of completing the project, the effects of time have been erased, leaving the building pristine and smooth. Many of Le Corbusier’s built projects have been ravaged by the forces of time and nature, but there are no such distractions here. One is compelled to notice the details, not the imperfections of what once was. The building gives little hint as to what is old and what is new; instead, the process of the completion has rather seamlessly blended the several stages of construction into one conclusive whole. The design itself also reflects a sense of “newness.” Although the outward “style” of the building might seem rooted in retired modernist or brutalist ideals, the ideas embedded in the project are still remarkably current. The manipulation of surface, seen both in the parabolic shell wrapping the sanctuary space and in the sloping floor wrapping up and over the entry passage, is developed to a degree unseen in many contemporary projects. The constant movement of these surfaces creates a dynamic “architectural promenade” that truly engages

s of this The newnes des from building exu pores... it ’s invisible

visitors and draws them into a carefully choreographed dance with the space. The expected relationship of a bulky base supporting a lighter top is inverted, with an incredibly solid but shapely cone resting on a dematerialized but rigid base. A porous, transparent envelope surrounds the cellular rooms of the bottom section, while the space above is closed, encapsulated,yet flowing. This duality of top and bottom is also reflected in the geometry of the forms and in their function. Being in the building, experiencing it, does not feel at all like walking into a forty-year-old project; it feels like walking into something very fresh and exciting. The now-completed building is opening with a new purpose. In its first iteration, the Eglise Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert was to be a parish church, and it included sleeping quarters for the few who would stay there. This part of the program was excised as early as 1963, and the lower portion of the building was modified to house support functions—offices, meeting rooms, lecture chambers—in orthogonal, regular spaces. The soaring space above was to be the actual sanctuary where church services would be held. As the project morphed along, it lost its original religious purpose and the patronage of the church. Today the building belongs to the government, and the sanctuary space serves as a public meeting hall. The rooms below are slated to function as gallery space for the nearby Museum of Modern Art of Saint-Etienne. This programmatic shift begs the question of the importance of program in the determination of an architectural project. As the building was stripped of its original programmatic requirements, did its meaning change at all? Does the way a building meets its programmatic requirements play a significant role in its success? Rather than concede to critics who believe that architecture need not function well to succeed, I prefer to believe that, in this instance, the new uses are being tailor-made to fit the space. The gallery spaces will look amazing filled with art, although admittedly only modern art without conservation issues will be well suited for display in such light-filled rooms. Perhaps

in some ways, the program isn’t that much changed: once this was to be a religious sanctuary and gathering place; now the church (especially with its three surrounding Corbusian projects) will become a destination for architecture pilgrims to visit as they pay homage to Le Corbusier and his legacy. Perhaps the most important question that this project raises is Who is the architect? Whose building is this? After some apparent deliberation, the Fondation Le Corbusier appears amenable to claiming the work in his oeuvre. And though he modestly refuses the credit, there are many who rightfully place a large portion of the authorship squarely on Oubrerie’s shoulders. The question is wrapped up in the complicated intricacies of architectural practice, past and present. Architects don’t work in a vacuum; they are constantly exposed to, and seek, outside influences and external stimuli. Moreover, they usually work in cooperative teams. However, to adequately credit all of the many participants who contribute to the design of a building would be an unwieldy and impractical process. When José Oubrerie began his apprenticeship at the rue de Sèvres with Le Corbusier, he was a member of a team in which he would do a great deal of work for which Le Corbusier would get nearly all of the credit. If the timeline of this project had not been interrupted, if it had been completed before Le Corbusier’s death, Oubrerie’s participation would be merely a footnote. But that is not how the project worked out. Le Corbusier passed away before all of the details (and even some of the major moves) were hashed out and finalized, and so Oubrerie was left to fill in the blanks. One can infer that Oubrerie’s years as an apprentice under Le Corbusier would have given him many similarities in thought and style, but it is impossible to know what Corbusier would have done with the project as it moved toward completion. So, Oubrerie delicately straddled the thin line between choosing for himself and choosing what he thought Le Corbusier would do. Maybe it would have been one and the same, anyway, as it is impossible to extract Le Corbusier from Oubrerie. And it would be impossible to extract either from this amazing building.

CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPH

CONTEMPORARY DRAWINGS

GRANDEUR IS IN THE INTENTION

EardleyFirminy is a mining, steel, and textiles town of some 25,000 people in the southern Auvergne. It lies in an undulating landscape at the head of a narrow region sprawling from the Rhone through St. Etienne, blackened with smoke and soot, and containing some half a million people. In the nineteenth century it was the scene of feverish industrial activity. In 1914 Baedeker’s guide to Southern France afforded Firminy’s urban and architectural heritage just two lines of text; the remaining two lines advised the visitor as to the means of transportation to somewhere else.1 However, it is not this jerry-built and unsanitary old fabric, shaken by mining subsidence and reduced to rubble in the frenzy of European postwar urban renewal, but rather the adjacent “green” Firminy which contains the last of Le Corbusier’s buildings to be realized, the parish church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert.2This last work was actually commissioned in the spring of 1960. Le Corbusier undertook it with reluctance,

and serious misgivings, which were overcome only through his deep friendship for the mayor of Firminy, Eugène Claudius-Petit. Indeed, even the Parish Association commissioned the work with some apprehension, for despite the encouraging impetus of the radical transformations suddenly taking place about them in a town which had been “practically abandoned by municipal officials of every political color for half a century,”3 they found themselves ill-equipped to assume the burdens of patronage for a major architectural enterprise. It was also looked upon with thinly concealed distrust by the conservative ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Diocese of Lyon, who correctly anticipated that it would represent the Mother Church in too obdurately antique and incarnate a form, and in fact, its fate has become a matter of indifference to the new left in the Church, for whom the separation of the sacred from the profane by means of ecclesiastical monuments would seem quite peripheral to the critically pressing crusade for a new world social conscience and political morality. Nevertheless, the cornerstone was finally laid on the intended site on March 28, 1970.4 Today, ten years later, the building stands some thirty feet out of the ground with about two-thirds of the concrete in place, almost seventy feet short of its projected dome— incomplete, seemingly abandoned, more closely resembling the ruins of the Telesterion at Eleusius or the sixth-century basilica of St. John at Ephesus than the new and gleaming contribution to the great white churches of France which its protagonists have so earnestly intended it to be. It owes its halting progress toward this end to the generosity of the local faithful, to a number of industrialists, to artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Jean Dubuffet, Félix Labisse, Alfred Manessier, and Victor Vasarely, and to a few architects also.5 But it has chiefly been dependent on the continuous dedication of two men: Eugène Claudius-Petit, cabinetmaker and professor of design, hero of the Resistance, Deputy to the National Assembly, Minister of Reconstruction and Planning, and Mayor of Firminy from 1953 to 1971; and José Oubrerie, Le Corbusier’s assistant in charge of the project since work first began at 35 rue de Sèvres in the spring of 1961, and architect of record since 1970.Eugène

Claudius-Petit had originally seen the building of this church by Le Corbusier as a fitting conclusion to the earlier commissions that his old friend had received and was already constructing in Firminy-Vert—first the stadium, then the youth club and cultural center within the declivity of the church site, and then the Unité d’habitation standing apart from the other new housing which occupies the hill above the crater.6 Now himself in his seventy-third year, Claudius-Petit deems his continuing effort to bring the church to completion as a personal obligation to Le Corbusier’s vision and a last gesture towards the city whose people recruited him and supported him as their mayor for almost two decades. The church commission came to the atelier in 35 rue de Sèvres some two years after José Oubrerie had joined Le Corbusier as a young painter who was becoming increasingly disillusioned by the experience of his Beaux-Arts education as an architect. This project became his substitute “graduate school” and a vehicle by which to talk with Le Corbusier. To Oubrerie, the church’s completion represents a necessary termination and release from an apprenticeship of more than twenty years’ duration. Ironically, it is perhaps in its present condition that the church most clearly reveals its classical and eastern ancestry, its primordial roots in the square, the cube, the pyramid, and the circle and the cone. However, until such time as it achieves completion and closure, the dogmatic reiteration of classicist principles, perceived by the observer to be embodied in the stasis of the base, seems to far outweigh its equally consistent efforts to escape the rational, to transcend the rational through the transmutation of cube to pyramid, of pyramid to cone, and of cone to dome. This unbuilt dome, distorted, flattened, and skewed, will become a tragicomic face, a face upturned to confront a universe and a cosmic force inconceivably more distant, infinite, complex, and From Le Corbusier ’s Fir miny of an exh C ibition m ounted by hurch, the catalog Architectu ue the Institu re and Urb te for Union Sch an Studie s and the ool of Arc C h ooper 1981. Use itecture, A d with per pril 29–Ju mis n Internatio 23 nal Publica sion from Rizzoli e 3, tions, Inc.

new town, but this location was challenged by the city clergy on the sociological grounds that “people do not climb to the church, they descend, like a woman going to market.”11 What they wanted instead was that the church stand at a point of convergence in the new town as a place of meeting and exchange. As a result, a new location was chosen and the master plan was revised accordingly. The new site area (now named the Place du Mail) is the area in which the church construction actually stands, in the excavated crater just below Le Corbusier’s Stadium.As the construction and occupancy of the new town progressed, a Parish Association building committee was constituted to formulate the program for the new church and parochial center and to select an architect. Le Corbusier, however, was not the first to receive the commission. Learning that André Sive, of Sive and Roux, the architect for the Firminy-Vert master plan and much of the attendant new housing, was dying of terminal cancer, the building committee, with Mayor Claudius-Petit’s approval,12 appointed Sive in appreciation for his work on the new town. The disease advanced so rapidly, however, that Sive was compelled to give up the undertaking. Faced with a new choice, and perhaps emboldened by mounting local pride in the fact that “the greatest of contemporary architects”13 was, by that time, already engaged in commissions for the new city, the committee obtained the agreement of Monsignor Maziers, Vicar General and Director of the Lyon Diocesan Office for New Parishes, to their commissioning Le Corbusier to prepare the plans for the church. That the Vicar General’s agreement to this proposal was not unqualified, nor that of Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, is evident from the tenor of the letter with which M. Baud, President of the Parish Association, confirmed the wishes of the committee to the mayor on March 23, 1960:

The Bishop’s admonishment to the parish was clearly made in the light of the clergy’s prior experience with Le Corbusier, but what was intended by it was never made explicit. Indeed, the Diocese’s objections to Le Corbusier’s scheme were continually being reformulated in terms of fresh rationales: in the beginning the pretext was the excessive cost of landfill foundations.15 When this was resolved (first by the offer of a donation to cover the costs of special foundations, which was rejected, and then by a written undertaking from the contractor to deliver the building for a fixed price), a new obstacle was found in a protracted reconsideration of the site’s location, which the Vicar General himself had originally pronounced as being appropriate, proudly demonstrating its logic at a blackboard. Even amid the final demands for both a new site and a significant reduction in the contract price there was never the least indication on the part of Monsignor Maziers or other members of the Diocesan hierarchy that their objections lay rooted in the nature and artistic integrity of the scheme itself. In fact, their studied air of detachment from this issue might lead one to believe that the form of the building was actually a matter of little consequence to them. M. Claudius-Petit’s introduction to this catalogue [Le Corbusier’s Firminy Church, 1981] relates that he and Le Corbusier had known each other since the fall of 1944, shortly after the Allied liberation of Paris, and that by the end of their American public works excursion together in early 1946 they had become firm friends. He also touches on the subject of his official support of Le Corbusier through difficult, and at times dramatic, experiences in connection with major postwar projects. Thus it causes us little surprise that, on learning of the building committee’s desires with regard to its new architect, and sufficiently armed and forwarded by their letter, he decided to

We have m church b ade it clear to o uil ur Bisho p priori so t by Le Corbusi er. His L that we are reso long as o l Le Corb who kno usier cre rdship is not op ved to have ou ws wha r p at osed to t’s what design b the idea and who es a fitting chur ut beaut ch.… a has ifu contemp orary ar l and representa in mind a churc He is a prelate chitectu h that is tive, for re.… s the futu re, of ou imple in r

pay a visit to Monsignor Jean Villot, recently appointed coadjutor to Cardinal Gerlier, with a view to smoothing out any eventual difficulties “similar to those that have never been lacking in any realization by Le Corbusier.”16 Not entirely reassured by his reception he also wrote to reinforce the wishes of the Parish Committee:They do not want any pseudo-building; they want something real. They desire neither richness of materials nor technical sensationalism. They wish the spirit to animate inert material and invest the volume, the space, the light, with a meaning. A meditation become reality. They think that Le Corbusier can give them that better than another; I believe they are right.At the same time, he applied himself to the task of persuading Le Corbusier to accept the commission. It must have been clear to him from the outset that Le Corbusier could be brought to acquiesce and accept such a ticklish commission only with reluctance, with premonitory misgivings which have been honed to near-paranoid sensitivity by a life-time of brave ventures and brutal disappointments, and with an unwillingness to risk, in years of advancing age and failing health, the least time or energy to his last remaining and most precious period of creative production. After protracted hesitation, Le Corbusier finally agreed to his friend’s entreaty, but not without some show of querulousness:

I don’t w ant to in volve yo a knack u for it! Th e Archbis in difficulties; I to build hav h so op of Bo logna ha e developed the outs me sort of cathe s asked kir dr me build dw ts of Bologna. I’ al on a magnifi cent site ve turne ellings, d n on ot turn in Firminy him dow is the la n t o . I a w c h a n urch buil st, for work der. This t to ing peop and I’ll do it bec o ne at ause it is le and th eir famil for work ies. ers,

NOTES 1 A concise and informative account of the

13 Prior to the modest commission for

urban transformation of Firminy is contained in an interview between André Parinaud and Eugène Claudius-Petit, “Firminy, Cité exemplaire,” La Galerie des Arts no.61 (Paris, December 15, 1968), pp. 21–25.

2 Since 1968, when the project was resuscitated, construction documents and contract supervision for the church have been the responsibility of José Oubrerie, working in association with Louis Miguel, another “ancien” of 35 rue de Sèvres from the period of the early Algiers projects.

3 “Firminy, Cité exemplaire.” op. cit., p. 21. 4 José Oubrerie, “Presque au but,” in Architecture no. 15 (Paris, May 1980), p. 19.

5 Circular by Les Amis de Le Corbusier,

“Achever L’Eglise de Firminy-Vert par Le Corbusier” (Paris).

6 These three projects are recorded in Le

Corbusier, Oeuvre complète 1957–1965, Willy Boesiger, editor (New York: Wittenborn, 1965), pp. 130–135, and Le Corbusier: The Last Works, Willy Boesiger, editor (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture Artemis, 1970), pp. 10–43.

7 Le Corbusier’s commentary on the

Pantheon and other monuments of ancient Rome is to be found, together with so much else that is indispensable to an understanding of his work, in Towards a New Architecture (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1927), pp. 154–159.

8 Ibid., pp. 164–172. 9 To avoid the cost of repairing the roof, the

municipality sold the church, presumably abandoned by the Diocese, to demolition contractors. See the circular by Les Amis de Le Corbusier, “Pourquoi et comment Le Corbusier apporta une architecture authentique à Firminy, Ville ouvrière” (Paris). 10 Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète 1957– 1965, p. 137. All translations other than this quote are by the author unless otherwise noted.

11 Eugène Claudius-Petit, “Note sur

l’implantation de St. Pierre de Firminy-Vert” (3 May 1966) pp. 1–2. Typescript.

12 The municipality had declared its intention to donate the church site to the Parish Association for a token franc providing it was consulted on the choice of the architect. Ibid., p. 2.

the stadium, Le Corbusier’s involvement in the development of Firminy-Vert had been confined to incognito visits to provide M. Claudius-Petit with advice. It was his old friend’s opinion that the populace was not yet ready for the architecture of Le Corbusier at the time when work on the development plan began in the early 1950s. The scope and ambition of the mayor’s redevelopment proposals were of such astonishing proportions that, quite clearly, he might risk the loss of bureaucratic and popular support for the plan if he were to unduly antagonize municipal officials by adding unnecessary controversy to a condition which, one suspects, it had already discovered to be painfully unlethargic. Eventually, all of Firminy took pride in the fact that Le Corbusier had accepted the stadium commission, not least the local architects, who took his presence among them as evidence that he found their architecture agreeable to him. “Firminy, Cité exemplaire,” op. cit., p. 22.

14 Eugène Claudius-Petit, “Firminy-Vert” in Le Corbusier: The Last Works, op. cit., p. 10.

15 On completion of the surface min-

ing the site had been rented from the coal

company by the municipality and used as the city dump for many years. Two unmined ridges provide support for the stadium and the Youth Club and Cultural Center, while the soccer practice field at the east end of the crater, the stadium field in the center, and the church area at the west end are all quite deeply filled excavations.

16 “Note sur l’implantation,” op. cit, pp. 2–3.

17 Eugène Claudius-Petit. “Firminy-Vert,” op. cit., p. 10. 18 “Note sur l’implantation,” op. cit., p. 3.

19 Le Corbusier, Mise au point (Paris: Editions Forces-Vives, 1966), pp. 31, 32, 48.

20 Le Corbusier, Letter to Edgard Varèse

in New York, 21 January 1954. Quoted by Martin Purdy, “Le Corbusier and the Theological Program,” in The Open Hand: Essays on Le Corbusier, Russell Walden, editor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1977), p. 318.

leaving on one site the crude realities of existence for the pleasures of automatic lucubrations!“On the other hand, how thrilling it is, before one sets pen to paper, to work out on a drawing-board this world which is almost upon us, for then there are no words to ring false and only facts count. “Our concern, then must be with precise inventions, fundamental conceptions, and organisms, that are likely to endure. Everything has to be allowed for at once. Set the problem, arrange it and adjust it, make it hang together, and still keep in mind the indispensable poetry which alone, when all is said and done, can move us to enthusiasm and inspire us to action.“What I have called an automatic lucubration does not lie in this difficult pursuit of a solution on the drawing-board. It is an act of faith in our own age. In the deepest part of myself I believe in it. I believe in it for the future and not merely because of the formulas that gave the equation, and I believe in it amid all the difficulties of special cases. But we can never have too clear or exact a conception in our minds if we are to solve the problems of special cases.” Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (London: John Rodker, 1929), p. 198. This is Frederick Etchells’s translation. It is one of the great ironies of architectural literature that it was Etchells, a Vorticist, who undertook to translate two of the most magnificently

atavistic works of the twentieth century, and transform them into Futurist platforms in the process: Vers une architecture became Towards a New Architecture, in its title and emphasis, and Urbanisme, despite the clear evidence of Le Corbusier’s avowals to the contrary, became The City of Tomorrow and its Planning.

22 Le Corbusier, Aircraft; L’avion accuse… (London: The Studio, Ltd. 1935), p. 95.

23 Ibid., p. 96. 24 Mise au point, op. cit., pp. 59–61. 25 Paul Turner, in his invaluable study of

The Education of Le Corbusier observes that in his reading of Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jesus during the period 1908–1909, the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret marked passages which “reveal the rather startling fact that Jeanneret actually identified himself with the figure of Jesus, and was seeking parallels between Jesus’ career and that which he himself was embarking upon…Indeed, Jeanneret seems to have read Nietzsche (Zarathustra) and Renan together, seeking out in both books the traits of the archetypal revolutionary prophet and reformer—and then relating these traits to his image of his own similar destiny.” Paul Venable Turner, The Education

21 “Note. It bores me more than I can say

to describe, like some minor prophet, this future City of the Blest. It makes me imagine I have become a Futurist, a sensation I do not at all appreciate. I feel as though I were

HISTORICAL DRAWINGS