Towards the Horizon Rituals Poetics in Le Corbusier’s Poem of the Right Angle G i or g o s C h at z op ou l o s , M A rc h I I Ha r v a rd G r a du at e S c h o o l of D e s i g n
COMPLIT 272, Ritual Poetics, Panagiotis Roilos
Figure 01. Le Corbusier, Poem of the Right Angle, Iconostasis
Figure 02. Le Corbusier, Poem of the Right Angle, Front Page
In this paper, I examine the ritual and symbolic geographies constructed in Le
Corbusier’s Poem of the Right Angle. In this textual and visual poem Le Corbusier creates a personal cosmology, after many years of intense study and work in various artistic media. This cosmology inspired by preexisting ritual and symbolic patterns of signification aspired to offer to the modern world a contemporary and at the same time atemporal mythology of habitation. The symbols and meanings, condensed in this poem, have been applied to many of his later works. Thus, for Le Corbusier the Poem of the Right Angle was not an abstract theoretical work but a manual with practical applications and for us an important hermeneutical tool.
The geography that marks the Poem of the Right Angle and that Le Corbusier
obsessively strives to experience and realize is the house by the sea, marked by the double liminality of the horizon and seashore. Both the horizon and the seashore become important metaphors in the Poem with a deeply existential meaning. In Le Corbusier’s architecture we can trace an aspiration – that appears in the work of many modern artists – to reconceive habitation as the irrational, the inconceivable, the unutterable, filling the void left by the materialist industrial culture. If modernism was in many cases a return to the most essential, to the hidden structure, the ritual patterns of habitation may be seen as an attempt to recover the more primordial elements of dwelling, washed out by the commodification of living brought about by the industrial revolution and onwards. Le Corbusier seeks to instill sacredness into everyday life and habitation.
Secular Sacred A contradiction that constantly appears in Le Corbusier’s work is the following: as an avantgarde architect he persistently and polemically turned against traditional architecture and conventional modes of living. At the same time, he employed “irrational” or prescientific modes of expression such as mythology and alchemy, trying to touch a deeper or a “universal” living condition. Why did one of the pioneers of modernism, the advocate of functionalism and of the machinic aesthetic, feel the urge to transfuse ritualistic and mythical dimensions to his work? Le Corbusier understood early on that architecture, being a quasi-science could not rely entirely on progress. He felt compelled to search for primordial modes of signification that would make his buildings not a product of the contemporary historical period but atimeless expressions of the human spirit. The ritual and mythological patterns of signification were also a way to overcome the alienation produced by the materialistic industrial society and the commodification of habitation. Le Corbusier did not seek to eradicate existing modes of living, but he strive to root his proposals in primordial tropes of habitations. In The Poem of the Right Angle, he constructs a personal cosmology by recovering the fragments of rituals and mythologies: “a primordial room oriented to the horizon, the contemplation of a paradigmatic woman by a creative male, a representational regime oriented to controlling the cultural background.”1
Le Corbusier’s notion on dwelling draws from the concept of the secular sacred.
This is related to the Romantic idea that the art is analogous to religion and that it can open to the individual epiphanies of the infinite. In Le Corbusier’s work there is a latent sacrality, freed from the presence of gods, retrieved through art. Sacredness is transformed into sacred experience and consequently into aesthetic experience. According to his own words form the inauguration speech of the Ronchampe church, “some things are sacred, others are not, whether or not they are religious.”2 For Le Corbusier, “the need for truth” can be found in the site: “contact with a site, situation of a place, eloquence of a place, word addressed to place. 1 2
Carl, Peter, The Godless Temple, p.01 Petit, Les cahiers forces vives, Paris 1961, p. 21
Figure 03. Le Corbusier, Immeuble Villas
To the four horizons.”3 This notion of “the eloquence of place” seems closely connected with Heidegger’s re-confguration of the sacred in terms of a dialectics of earth and language. The relationship of words and places is explicitly declared in Le Corbusier’s notion of l’ espace indicible. L’espace indicible is a space that is beyond words and thus can secure an impossible transparent communication of truth. L’espace idicible would be achieved by a synthesis of all the arts, an idea that can be traced back to the Gesamtkunstwerk. Through that synthesis one could have “a quasi-ecstatic transcendental experience.”4 In the notion of the l’espace indicible, space can communicate by an emphatic muteness that transcends the boundaries of language. While Heidegger in his book Building Dwelling Thinking tries to understand habitation in terms of an etymological unveiling of some essential German words, and by trusting the language as the embodiment of truth, Le Corbusier aspires to find the space that 3
Petit, Les cahiers forces vives, , Paris 1961, p. 17
4
Carl, Peter, The Tower of Shadows from Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, p.104
will disclose the notion of habitation without the interference of language.
Le Corbusier studied a significant number of sacred buildings, and mostly monasteries
characterized by ritualization in their spatiotemporal organization. For example, in his Immeuble-Villa (fig.03), he proposed an urban block that stemmed from the monastic typology of the Carthusian monastery. The monastic cells were stacked vertically, around a central “cloister”, envisioning this as the future urban block. In his urban proposal the dominance of nature made even more explicit the analogy of the city as a collection of monastic cells for anchorites of urban life.
Another contradiction that comes into play is that for Le Corbusier it was the
book rather than the built project that constituted the final product where he carefully reconstructed and reframed his work. The book conveyed the hidden meanings that the realized project failed to transmit. In the photos that illustrate the Oeuvre Complete – the books that present the full corpus of his work – there are many hints that point to ritual patterns of habitation. The placement of the objects, or the juxtaposition of photos always aimed to construct an argument than to simply present the work. In the Weekend house in a Paris Suburb, which belongs in the third volume of Oeuvre Complete, he presents two photos where a portrait of the ancient Greek goddess Demetra dominates the house kitchen (fig.04).5 This was the first house by Le Corbusier to employ Catalan vaults as roofing, thus investing the space with a cavernous atmosphere, while half of the house was buried beneath the earth. Le Corbusier justified and enriched his design choices by incorporating the house into a mythological system. Another 5 Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete Vol. 3, p. 122
Figure 04. Le Corbusier, Weekend House
Figure 05. Le Corbusier, Apartments situated at 24 Rue Nungesser et Coli, The tent
example, presented in the second volume of his Oeuvre Complete, is his apartment that occupies the top two floors of a block of apartments situated at 24 Rue Nungesser et Coli in the western Paris.6 The apartment is divided in two wings separated by a small corridor. The west wing is his wife’s realm – with a bedroom, dining room and kitchen, and the east wing is his realm with a big studio space. Both spaces are vaulted, and the photographs aim to construct an argument integrated in Le Corbusier mythology by contrasting the two spaces. Her space is presented as a cave and his as tent (fig.05). As we will later see, the cave and the tent as primary mode of habitations are important metaphors in the Poem of the Right Angle.
One of the most essential characteristics of Le Corbusier’s architecture also implies
a ritualized perception of space: the architectural promenade, i.e. the sequential and narrational design of space based on the moving body. The starting and ending point of this promenade, the points of rest, the frames of the landscape, all together aimed at the transformation of the daily life into a ritual of modern habitation. In Villa Savoye, for example, upon entering the house – and before taking the ramp – one encounters a small sink, encouraging the visitor to wash himself. The presence of the sink could be associated with the culture of hygiene and sanitation, advocated by the modern movement, but in many rituals the purification was also the essential starting point. The culmination of the architectural promenade was the roof garden where one could sunbathe. On the one hand this could be interpreted as a glorification of the advent of the culture of leisure, but on the other hand we can understand the ritual dimension that the sunbath implies if we take into account the role of the sun in the cosmology of the Poem.
Le Corbusier maintained that he designed spaces according to the laws of reason and
functionality; however, they are saturated with fictional features to such a degree that they undermine the rationality of his construct. Maybe the most prominent example is the ribbon window. As is well known, Le Corbusier condensed his architectural approach into five points: 1. The Pilotis, the elevation of the house into pillars that would free the ground; 2. The free plan; 3. The free façade; 4. The roof garden; 5. The ribbon window. Every point is inevitable 6
Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete Vol. 2, p. 95
Figure 06. Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, The ribbon window and derivative from the previous one except for the ribbon window, which is presented as an arbitrary formal choice (fig.06). If the façade is free of structural supports the windows could have any form the architect would choose to give them. The only way to justify this design choice is to consider Le Corbusier’s ritual geography and the symbolic importance of the horizon. The window has to be horizontal to perfectly frame the horizon. The house becomes the receiver of the horizon. In Le Corbusier’s cosmology, the horizon sets the boundaries of knowledge, and it is the horizon that introduces the irrational, the inexplicable in Le Corbusier’s Five Points. All of Le Corbusier’s utopian (or dystopian depending on the point of view) urban proposals could be interpreted as an obsessive recovering of the horizon at an urban scale.
For Le Corbusier the ideal geography, the geography that instantiates the very
essence of his habitation, is the seaside. At the end of his life he designed his Cabanon – a kind of primitive hut – by the sea where he spent his summers. As we will see in the Poem of the Right Angle, one can find all the symbols that enrich Le Corbusier’s architecture at the seashore.
Poem of the Right Angle
The Poem is composed of 19 poems, each one accompanied by a painting. Before
the beginning of the poem there is a diagram, which is called iconostasis (fig.07), suggesting an alternative non-sequential reading and a certain hermeneutic approach. Iconostasis in the Greek orthodox tradition is a wall of icons that separates the nave from the sanctuary in a church. Thus, iconostasis is a liminal place, a limit itself, that separates the main temple from the sanctum, marking a passage from the most public to the most sacred space of the temple. On the one hand, Le Corbusier’s iconostasis proposes a certain meaningful arrangement of the paintings, and on the other hand, it implies that if the reader delves into his cosmology a gate will open to the sacred mysteries of modern and primordial habitation.
The iconostasis has seven levels that are thematically structured: a. environment,
b. spirit, c. flesh, d. fusion, e. characters, f. offering (the open hand), and g. instrument. The number seven has in itself sacred connotations referring to the seven celestial levels, to the seven days of the creation in the Christian tradition, but also to the seven days of the week. Thus, the number seven primarily implies the poem’s structure as a ritual succession of different levels; secondly, Le Corbusier’s aspiration to be the demiurge of his cosmos; thirdly, a certain rhythmicality.
The central spine of the iconostasis has the most essential poems, regarding the
human’s position in the world that Le Corbusier constructed. It is a vertical line that forms right angles with every one of the seven levels, and as we will see later on, the vertical axis is the most important attribute of the human beings in the context of the poem. The seven levels of the central spine form a katabasis from spirituality to materiality and from light to dark. The ritual of katabasis is common to many mythical narratives, the more prominent of which is Plato’s Allegory of Cave, but also alludes to the descent to the divine bottle from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel that Le Corbusier studied intensively while he was composing the Poem.7 The iconostasis provides an abstract way to understand the ritual patterns of the 7
Carl, Peter, The Godless Temple, p.04
Figure 07. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, Iconostasis
Poem and to grasp the meaning of its totality. We will examine both the text and paintings that compose the Poem – since they function in a complementary manner – giving emphasis to the poems of the central spine that constitute the conceptual core. A. The first level is Le Corbusier’s natural cosmology composed from the sun, the water, the humans and binary oppositions. 1. The first poem starts with the sun, the “punctual machine” that gives time and rhythm, but also, the generator of binaries: night and day. As the sun sets and disappears, the binary of known and unknown that will be developed in the next poem (A.2) also makes its first appearance. In the poem this disappearance is expressed with a certain anxiety: “Yet brutally / he breaks in twice”.8 Le Corbusier’s placement of the sun at the beginning of his cosmology aligns with many mythological systems that worshipped the sun as the father of all gods. The sun here is worshipped as the most punctual machine, alluding to Le Corbusier’s early ideas on machines for living and to the idealization of the machine that characterizes many aspects of modernity. 2. The second poem is dedicated to the water and here Le Corbusier introduces the second binary that structures not only the poem but his architectural thought in general: that of horizontality and verticality. The waters are amorphous but they nevertheless maintain a fixed level defining the horizontal plane and the horizon. 3. In the third poem humans are introduced through the opposition between horizontality and verticality. Horizontality here implies death while verticality action. The horizon defines what is conceivable, what can be grasped by the human gaze and also the unknown that lies beyond it, l’espace indicible that we mentioned earlier. According to Le Corbusier’s own words: “The universe of our eyes rests / upon a plain edged with horizon / Facing the sky / let us consider the inconceivable space / hitherto uncomprehended”.9 In the illustration (fig.07) 8 Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.61 9 Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.65
Figure 07. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, A.3 Environment Opposite Page. Figure 08. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, A.5 Environment
the man is cut into two by the line of the horizon just below the umbilicus, while a double triangle is superimposed over the human figure implying the reciprocity between earth and sky. The binary of verticality and horizontality is reiterated in the bottom left corner of the illustration, forming a compass. The gaze towards the horizon is the primary action of the human in Le Corbusier’s cosmology and the poem closes with this line: “Vertical facing the sea here you are on your feet�.10 4. The fourth poem is about rivers, streams, and the law of meandering. By analogy, thought is a meander and truth emerges when the meandering water cracks, erodes, and spews out of the ground. 5. The fifth poem is about the reconciliation and synthesis of the opposites, illustrated in the painting as two intertwined hands (fig.08). Thus, the first level of the iconostasis ends by forming a full circle: in the beginning we saw the sun as the generator of opposites and in the
10 Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.65
end the human as their composer and reconciliator through artistic creation. B. In the second level we are moving from the natural to the manmade and to the human spirit governed by the laws of mathematics and proportion. 1. Mathematics are introduced as the underlying principle of the entire universe, from the human body to the seashells. In the painting, Le Corbusier depicts his famous modulor proportions, based on the Fibonacci sequence, that are to be found in the seashell, in the human body, and in his architecture. The absolute belief in number and proportion as the deeper structure of reality, is reminiscent of Pythagorean and Neo-Platonic ideas that deeply influenced Le Corbusier. 2. In the second poem of the second level architecture is introduced for the first time. While until now the human being was identified as a male figure, architecture is described as a female entity, implying that it complements the male creator in this universe of binaries. In the painting (fig.09), a blue figure which constitutes an abstraction of female figure in painting E.3 is set beneath the building, visualizing the parallelism between woman and architecture. In the bottom of the painting there is an owl – drawn almost exactly as it was depicted in the ancient Greek silver coin, the tetradrachm. The owl as a symbol of wisdom affirms Le Corbusier’s architectonic choices: “informed watch the owl / has found its own way / here / without being called”.11 3. In this poem Le Corbusier reintroduces the sun. He points to the cyclical and ritualistic perception of calendrical time explicitly articulated in architectural space. The solar rhythms acquire almost a material presence in the well composed architectural space. As Le Corbusier wrote many years earlier, “architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light”. The architect here becomes a rhythmanalyst – to use Lefebvre’s term – that synchronizes his buildings with the cosmic rhythms. 11 Le Corbusier, Poem of the right Angle, from Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.65
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Figure 09. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, B.3 Mind
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Figure 10. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, C.2 Flesh
C. The third level, which is named flesh, is about the male-female relationship and sexuality. 1. The first poem of the third level is one of the most complicated in the entire Poem, while the painting also expresses a state of confusion and anxiety. The poem is about the senses, the synesthetic perception of the world, and the transformative and associative potential of the drawing, that can fuse different forms together. Le Corbusier has emphasized the mixed metaphor of synesthesia and its importance in the design process by calling it “visual acoustics.”12 While in the poem D.3 the fusion is described in positive terms as an alchemic process, here the fusion is confusion. This brings in mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the confusion that senses can produce in the perception of reality. 2. The second poem of the third level is about the encounter of man and woman, the chances of this encounter and the dependence of life upon this fortuitous moment. In the painting, Le Corbusier depicts a masculine cosmos, where the male body is the landscape, the sky is the hand of the male demiurge, and the realms are connected by a phallus (fig.10). In the middle space of the phallus there is a woman in a position rife with sexual connotations. Le Corbusier’s images are always imbued with ambiguity: the creative hand in the sky looks like a woman’s body that is ready to be fertilized by the male body. Through this small detail, we can see that the male-female duality is transgressed, something that we will be more clear in poem E.3. We start to understand that the male -female is not about human sex only, but also a metaphor of different attributes of the human spirit. 3. The sea is a fundamental metaphor in the Poem. It defines two liminalities: the horizon and the seashore. The seashore has a transformative power, balancing between life and death, destruction and rebirth, which is expressed by the contradiction of wrecks and laughing harmony. “The Sea in us has never / ceased to wash its wrecks of / laughing harmony 12 Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Revenge of the Book from Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, p.17
Figure 11. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, C.3 Flesh
upon the shore”.13 The sea with its transformative powers and the seashells are sources of inspiration. Le Corbusier frequently used the metaphor of the seashell to describe his houses. In this poem the male-female relationship is further developed since the lapping waters are described with sexual connotations, while in the painting a woman and a seashell seem to have sexual intercourse (fig.11). Here the idea of the ineffable is touched upon for second time. After the sea has been described as the generator of new forms Le Corbusier states: “the ineffable precludes the control of reason”.14 If the horizon divides the utterable from the ineffable, the seashore allows us to grasp the unconceivable by offering an inventory of forms (like the seashells) that will inspire the artist to create artistic forms that transcend language and approach the indicible. The sea is a tank of representations – one could assume they are reflections of the inutterable truths lying beyond the horizon in apltonic sense – that offers a meaningful formal repertoire to the artist-creator. In this sense, we could drive a parallel between the Corbusean notion of the sea and the notion of Khora in Plato’s Timaeus. Khora, very much like the sea, is a matrix, a third kind between the ideas and the actual things, that are representations of the transcendental ideas. Khora is an interval between the visible and the intelligible realm, in which the forms were held. The painting that illustrates the poem is once more ambiguous. There is a woman and a seashell overlapping, and this can be interpreted in two ways: either the woman – the artist – is fertilized by the offsprings of the sea (the seashell) or the woman is a representation of the sea that gives birth to a seashell. 4. In the fourth poem the male-female relationship is describe as a synthesis of two opposites, as two halves that become a whole, an idea that can be traced back to Plato’s Symposium. In his speech, Aristophanes narrates the myth of the androgynous, which was an omni powerful creature composed of a woman and a man, before the two parts got separated from each other. 13 Le Corbusier, Poem of the right Angle, from Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.65 14 Le Corbusier, Poem of the right Angle, from Benton, T., Carl, P., Heynen, H., Jencks, C., Moos, S., Mostafavi, M., . . . Le Corbusier. (2003). Le Corbusier & the architecture of reinvention (Architecture landscape urbanism ; 9). London: AA Publications, p.65
Figure 12. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, E.3 Characters
5. In this poem the male-female figures have fused together forming a vessel that travels in spacetime. In the painting the female body is melting into the male hand, or the male hand becomes the wing in the female angelic body, while they both travel together into a sea stream that forms a right angle with the line of the horizon . The next four levels of the iconostasis – the three of which are comprised by a single poem are about artistic creation. The fourth level is about alchemic ideas of fusion and transition and the fifth level is entitled “characters”. To understand the meaning of alchemy and characters as well as their relationship, we have to take into account Le Corbusier’s architectural turn after the World War II. In the later period of his architecture, Le Corbusier begun to explore the theme of metamorphosis in a literal manner. He began to portray both natural and man-made environment anthropomorphically, striving to recover the spirituality extinguished in the mechanical age. Architecture too began to assume anthropomorphical characteristics. The architect now is an alchemist able to transform figures and characters into architectonic forms. The transformative approach that was imbued with confusion, uncertainty and operated only in the realm of drawing in poem C.1, in poem E.4 becomes an assertive methodology that the future architecture should align with. In poem E.2 Le Corbusier describes for a seemingly inexplicable reason the attributes of the fish, the horse and the Amazon, while in poem E.4 we learn that these attributes will become the characters of the future architecture. In poem E.4, he describes architecture as a creature, something that is a huge paradigmatic shift compared to his earlier description of home as a “machineà-habiter”. The architect assumes the role of a physiognomist, but also that of the pregnant woman. E. Taking into account the placement of poem E.3 between the two aforementioned poems we can start a hermeneutic approach. The painting depicts a woman that grasp a pencil with her hands intertwined (fig.12) – a symbol of reconciliation of the opposites as we saw in poem
Figure 13. Le Corbusier, The Poem of the Right Angle, G.3 Instrument
A.5 – while her whole body extends towards the windows to the sky outside. But who is that woman? She is the male artist now transformed into a female creator. Poems E.2 and E.3 have prepared us for this transformation. If “to make architecture is / to make a creature” then the architect has to become a pregnant woman, ready to give birth to buildings with characters. During the poem, during this katabasis which seems to be an alchemic process itself, we witnessed the transformation of the architect from a male creator to a female figure, thus transgressing the opposite pole of male-female that seemed dominant in the beginning of the Poem. The female figure’s shoulder is forming a right angle, a symbol of the perfect synthesis of the opposites. F. In F.3 Le Corbusier praises the hand. It is open because it offers, it constructs and materializes. Whatever the hand offers is knowable. The hand assumes the role of the sea in the human body. It is a liminal space that gives form to the unconceivable. It materializes the representational possibilities of the sea. While the seashore disclosed the conditions of truth in representation as a tank of possibilities the hand offers this representation as constructed concrete cultural artifacts. G. Poem G.3 is about the tools that the hand constructs and manipulates. In the painting (fig.13) we see a hand drawing a right angle with a charcoal, thus the circle of the Poem is now closed. What was an opposition that structured Le Corbusier’s universe, namely the binary horizontality / verticality, now becomes a signifier drawn by the human hand and ready to be filled with meaning. It is interesting to comment on a painting technique that characterizes Le Corbusier’s drawings. He superimposes line drawings on flat shapes of monochromatic color. The flat color shapes are sometimes abstractions of the imposing line drawings (like in F.3), while at other times they are either shapes that we already encountered in the corpus of Le
Corbusier’s paintings, or just undecipherable signs. While the line drawings are legible, the flat color shapes are like hieroglyphs to be deciphered by the reader. They are abstracted into ambiguous signifiers, with unstable meaning. For Le Corbusier, visual ambiguity was the vehicle to access the truth. “Cultivated for more than four decades in his many paintings, buildings and book illustrations, ambiguity provided the means to link the real with the ideal, the mundane with the profound. It served his as simile serves a poet; it was a discreet, covert manner of communication, while being the very essence of his art. Ambiguity allowed the figurative to be present yet hidden – accessible only to the privileged few who could see what others could not”.15 In order to approach the indicible, the unutterable and access the truth Le Corbusier proposes a new “hieroglyphical”vocabulary – for the initiated – that draws its meaning by a vast repertoire of mythological patterns of signification. It is a vocabulary composed by signifiers with ambiguous meaning.
It is interesting to compare Le Corbusier’s new visual vocabulary with Elytis’ word-
making approach. Elytis by constructing new words aspired to “transgress the lexical boundaries aiming to reenact the disjunction between normal and ritual language”.16 In his poem The Obscure Verb from The Oxopetras Elegeies, he designs a new verb the utterance of which could transcend the boundaries of life and death. This new verb, like Le Corbusier’s color shapes, has not any specific meaning. It is an elusive signifier operated outside of the “commodified modes of commonsensical communication”.17 In the case of Le Corbusier, his new visual vocabulary – driven from primordial symbols but aiming at new forms of artistic and architectonic expression – will act as a bridge between the modern era, which demands new forms, and primordial patterns.
These new visual words composed by Le Corbusier have been elaborated through a
painstaking and transformative process of drawing and redrawing. In that sense Le Corbusier works like an alchemist. He drew things from everyday life, fused them together, instilled them with sacred meanings drawn from his personal mythology, until they transformed into
15 Naegele, The Image of the Body in the Oeuvre of Le Corbusier, from Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Reinvention, p.18 16 Yatromanolakis, D., & Roilos, P. (2004). Greek ritual poetics (Hellenic studies ; 3). Washington, D.C. : Athens, Greece : Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University ; Foundation of the Hellenic World ; Distributed by Harvard University Press, p.91 17 Ibid. p. 97
new lexical units.
Le Corbusier aspires to become a poet prophet, a poeta vates – which is a common
pattern in modernist poetry – in a double sense. Firstly, his visual and lexical utterances are characterized by semantic ambivalence like the oracles given in Delphi. The truth is to be found in the semantic ambiguity of poems (visual and textual), that the reader must interpret. Secondly, Le Corbusier assumes the role of a creator of his own cosmos and indeed we could drive many parallels between the Poem of the Right Angle and Genesis. In that sense his words are magical utterances with performative efficacy.
Rituals and Architecture
By now, we have studied Le Corbusier’s visual and textual poems. At the end of
the paper we will examine a spatial poem: the Ronchamp church. Le Corbusier designed his buildings based on the perception of the moving human body, and as I argued this architectural promenade produces a ritualized sequence of spaces. In his residential buildings the spatial rituals aimed to instill a sacred aura in everyday life that would awake the users from the commodified way of living. In his sacred buildings the ritualized architectural promenade aimed to initiate the visitors into his cosmology.
In Ronchamp we will not
examine the building itself but rather the way Le Corbusier presented it in the sixth volume of his Oeuvre Completes, arguing that the illustrated presentation of the work is curated as a ritual itself. We will examine the ritual of initiation produced by the sequence of the photographs in relation to the topics Figure 14. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp
established in The Poem of the Right Angle. On page 17 we follow the crowd that ascends towards the church (fig.14), situated on the top of a hilly site. As we become one with the people that have gathered to visit the church the sense that we participate in a ritual is created. In page 19 the church is presented in its massive white volume and roof, similar to some kind of extinguished creature, a topic already examined in the Poem (E.4). As the church does not refer to any traditional church typology, but it has creature like characteristics, the reader is free by established modes of symbolic representations and is ready to enter into a new vocabulary. The first thing that strikes the reader is that the roof is inverted, like a huge plate. It does not direct the water away from the building but collects it. This significant inversion makes the reader immediately conscious of the presence of water, outside the
Figure 15. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp context of its commonsensical view.
From the plan of the church as presented on page 20, we realize that the church is
designed as a synthesis of two opposites into a unique whole. The church is composed of four walls; two concave and two convex. The two concave walls in the plan are
like seashells that form three smaller chapels by folding inwards, while the two concave walls create space outside and they embrace the landscape.
On page 22 the south façade is presented,
which is what visitors encounter as they ascending the hill (fig.15). As the wall of the south façade curves upwards, it seems as a vessel’s sail alluding to the metaphor of the boat. On page 24, we see the east exterior side of the building (fig.16), which is like a small open-air church where the liturgy can take place during the sunny days. In plan, this space has the form of a boat while the roof is presented in the picture as a boat’s keel. The east elevation becomes the metaphor of the vessel and the sea, which are two of the most essential symbols in the Poem. On pages 27, 28 and 29 we see the back of the building marked by a huge drainpipe (fig.17), like a tail that directs the water collected on the roof into a small concrete tank. The tank encloses three abstract volumes: a cone, a pyramid, and a cylinder. This small sculptural event at the back of the building encapsulates the essence of poems A.2 and C.3 and it is a representation of a microcosm. The tank is a metaphor of the sea while the inverted roof that feeds the tank with water is a metaphor of the sky. The geometric Figure 16. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp
volumes that the tank/sea encloses allude to the forms that the sea casts up at the seashore. As the volumes are weathered by the falling water, the transformative power of the sea is brought to mind. In the back of the building the walls are sculptured as giant seashells while the roof that was dominant in the front facades is now absent.
We have two groups of facades, two concave -metaphors of the seashells- and two
convex -metaphors of the boat-. The seashells are connected with the formal generator capacity of the sea, operating as khora between the liminalities of the seashore and the horizon, while the boat was connected with the personal journey of the artist in his strive for artistic invention.
On page 32, we are moving in the interior of the building with two unexpected images
Figure 17. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp
Figure 18. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp (fig.18): a photo of a glass pane with the words la mer, and a photo of a wedding ritual taking place within the church. This evokes the importance of the male-female encounter in Le Corbusier’s universe as a synthesis of the two opposites, while the inscription la mer puts into words the metaphor that traverses the whole design of the church. Pages 29, 30 and 31 have photos from the interior. The roof here is presented as weightless, hovering above the walls like a cloud, while the numerous small apertures on the east wall create the image of a constellation. On pages 32, 33, 34 and 35 the interior south wall with which the presentation started reappears (fig.19). What appear like small holes in the body of the wall from the exterior, reveal themselves as luminous glass panes with illustrations and words from the interior. We realize that this wall is an iconostasis instilled with life by the sunlight. Instead
of religious icons, this iconostasis is decorated with vitraux designed by Le Corbusier, giving material presence and rhythmical vibe to the southern light. The presentation closes with images of the church door, which is decorated with two paintings, one on each side.
In conclusion, the whole presentation is structured as a movement from light to
shadow and back to light again. First, one sees the exterior of the building and then the shadowy and cavernous interior, while the door, a symbol of liminality, suggests the return to the light again, this time as an initiate. This journey of photographs is curated as a katabasis. The door as the symbol of liminality closes the presentation of the church by disclosing and condensing Le Corbusier’s cosmology.
Figure 19. Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, Ronchamp