THE FORMAL RATIONALISM of LE CORBUSIER

The movement

The First World war acted as an enormous stimulus to the growth and
technological development of industry. This would form the basis for the
evolution of architecture in the 1920s. Transforming the city into a “productive
mechanism” was discussed both in Western democracies and new realities that
emerged following political evolutions, like the Soviet Union. This could only
lead to a general reappraisal of architecture and urbanism. The context was
characterized by the emergence of an increasingly politically organized
proletariat, as well as the foundation of an industrial production system, and a
professional bourgeoisie that gradually became a class of leading technicians.
A number of problems had to be tackled. These included:
 the unhealthy state of overcrowded and polluted cities;
 oppressive environments;
 the need to upgrade production systems to cope with the complexity and
quantity of demand

Modern architecture developed in different parts of the world according to

principles that had a lot in common. These principles were characterized by:
 the central role of urban planning in relation to architectural design;
 the use of particular materials to reduce costs;
 an emphasis on the absolute rationality of form as the expression of a
new aesthetic;
 the progressive industrialization of processes, including the prefabrication
in building and the design of objects for everyday use (industrial design)

All these ideas were manifested in different contexts, namely

 Formal Rationalism originating in France with the architect Le Corbusier as its
reference point
 Rationalism with a particular methodological and didactic foundation in
Germany (Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus)
 Soviet Constructivism
 Dutch Neoplasticism
 Italian Rationalism
 Empirical Rationalism in Scandinavian countries, represented by Alvar Aalto
 American Organic Rationalism (Wright)

The artist: Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was the nickname of the architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who
was born into a watchmaker’s family, in the Swiss town of La Chaux-De-Fonds.
At the age of fourteen he enrolled in the Swiss Art School, and between 1906
and 1914 he travelled widely across Europe. Although he had never studied
architecture theoretically, he began to work as an architect in 1920. He trained
in Berlin and Paris and, following his experience with Auguste Perret, he
decided to oper his own architectural practice in the French capital. Painter,
sculptor, designer, architect, urbanist and trainee, Le Corbusier was above all a
great cultural agitator, a catalyst provoking a lively debate about his work.
Organizer of the first CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture), he
had a profound influence on the evolution of 20 th century architecture.
In addition to a series of technological and formal innovations, he introduced a
new concept of architecture, based on a constant interaction between the city
centre and the surrounding area, which was aimed at promoting the need for
human communication.
Le Corbusier’s research as carried out on many levels:
- The elaboration of architectural types that reflect the changing eed of
society;
- Planning at an urban level to achieve a consistent integration of new
architecture into plans that take the lives of individuals into account;
- Hi activity as a treatise write which allowed him to continue theorizing his
ideas.
The constant exchange of opinion with the architects and urban planners of the
modern movement places him as the true soul of the CIAM.
In 1920 Le Corbusier founded the magazine “L’Espit Noveau”, a reference point
for French art and architecture in the first half of the 1920s.
Although his work was initially rejected by conservative academics for its
revolutionary stye, Le Corbusier later received unanimous international
recognition. His work left an indelible trace in the architectural and urban ideas
of the Modern Movement, displaying an ability to blend the stylistic needs of
architecture with the average social requirements of people.
He died in August 1965 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France.

The architectural conception

The critical experience Le Corbusier accumulated during the "Ésprit Nouveau"

years culminated in the publication of "Towards an Architecture" in 1923, which
brought together his essays from "L'Ésprit Nouveau". Here, Le Corbusier
presents the princi- ples of his art. In this treatise, which is the most important
theoretical work concerning 20th century architecture, Le Corbusier supports
the principle that art design and building can play a more effective role than
politics in the creation of a just and democratic society. Le Corbusier
synthesized his architectural principles in what he called "the Five Points of
New Architecture".

- Pilotis, or reinforced concrete pylons, designed to lift the structure from

the ground, creating a covered space that is open and in close contact
with the outside environment. This choice effectively removes the ground
floor of the building, minimizing the impact on the environment.
 - The toit terrasse, or the roof terrace, which must include skylights and
roof gardens. The result is an environment that connects the architecture
to external spaces. Sloping roofs are eliminated and liberated surfaces
are returned to the living space.
- Ribbon windows: long horizontal glazing that runs along the entire
perimeter of the building. The aim is to replace walls with a transparent
membrane that floods the interior of the home with light.
- The free plan: load bearing walls, which "slaughter" the building's design,
are replaced.
This frees the architect and allows him to construct the interior of the
building as he wants. In this way, each room can be created with the
features best suited to its function.
- The free façade is based on the principle that, thanks to the reinforced
concrete skeleton, the façade loses its function as the load-bearing
element of the whole structure. In this way, the façade can be made up
of horizontal and vertical elements, from transparent fixtures to
insulating walls.

The masterpiece
Villa Savoye The five points of Corbusier's theories on architecture found their
full realization in the Villa Savoye, built in Poissy in France, between 1929 and
1931. It is now a national monument to modern architecture. It consists of a
two-storey building with a square plan, made of reinforced concrete with floors
that are supported only by very thin circular section pilotis. This allowed for
interior walls to be placed with full freedom, according to the architect's
conception of the organisation of space.
On the ground floor, there is a covered porch that can be accessed by cars, a
garage with three parking spaces, laundry facilities and a small apartment for
the driver. On the first floor, there is a large rectangular living room with wide
horizontal ribbon windows and access to a large terrace. The villa has a roof-
garden, which includes a solarium, a drying room, protected by a curved
dividing wall with soft shapes.
The villa is totally innovative, not only because it adheres to Le Corbusier's five
points, but also for other reasons. First of all, there is the use of reinforced
concrete as the main building material.
This may seem trivial today but it was not at all so in the 1920s.
Another important point was the role of the car.
The car played a significant role in influencing the functional layout of the
building. A large portion of the ground floor was reserved, as we said, for a
garage for three cars, and the house also included a small flat for the driver. In
a letter from 1928, Le Corbusier himself wrote to Madame Savoye saying "it is
the minimum radius of the car that defines the size of the house". Another
important element was the care taken with fixtures, which included state-of-
the-art heating, water supply and artificial lighting.

The artorks

The Maison Dom-Ino and the Maison-Citrohan

Already before the war, Le Corbusier had investi- gated the possibilities of
reinforced concrete technology through the insights of engineer François
Hennebique, in the so-called Maison Dom-Ino. This would be the true structural
basis of his architecture. It uses standardized industrially reproducible
elements. It does not require skilled manpower and induces a combinatorial
game of units that refer to the "domino".
The ideas of the Maison Dom-Ino were developed further with the impressive
Maison-Citrohan design. Its name is a play on words, which alludes to the
Citroën car, and the idea of assembly-line mass production. These housing
units were conceived from a simple rectangular plan with two long load-bearing
walls and an external staircase leading to the upper floor and the roof garden.
The interi- or was characterised by a double storey and openings on the short
sides. Apart from the absence of the characteristic pilotis, all five points of
architecture that Le Corbusier would later formulate had been respected.

The Marseille Unité d'habitation

During the war years Le Corbusier focused on the study of large buildings with
a series of housing units served by internal streets, shops, hotels, and
recreational facilities. These ideas took shape in the Marseille Unité
d'habitation (1946-1952) which was organized on seventeen floors, with seven
covered streets functioning as common corridors. In turn it was interconnected
by stairs and lifts linking the 357 modules, housing, shops, a hotel and a roof-
garden with a race track, a children's garden and a gym. Housing cells were of
the duplex type, that is, arranged on two levels and connected by an internal
staircase. Considered to be a structure of high social value, the Unité
d'habitation recalls Fourier's Phalanstère. This monumental architecture, bound
to the mighty "brutalism" of reinforced concrete, was an attempt, as with the
Phalanstère, to bring back dignity to residential construction. It was seen as an
alternative to single-family houses in urban suburbs and the various services
provided in these structures had the role of making these buildings partly self-
sufficient, avoiding the alienating reality of suburban dormitories.
However, the limited amount of private space and resistance to associative and
community life, with too much top-down regulation, made these units, as well
as a lot of Soviet buildings, a failure, despite the rigors of the compositional
study and the charming invention of Le Corbusier.

City planning

The plans developed by Le Corbusier to make cities more liveable had great
resonance. In the "Athens Charter", a document that was drawn up largely by
him and developed in 1933 during the fourth CIAM, he advanced the idea that
in modern urban planning, private interest should be subordinated to the public
interest.
Le Corbusier belonged to the rationalistic and uto- pian philosophy that had
characterized the radical search by Fourier and Owen more than a century
earlier. He developed the idea of the Villes Pilotis, cities designed to be built on
pilotis, or supporting columns. At the "Salon d'Automne" in 1922, he had
presented a project for the Ville Contemporaine, a city of three million
inhabitants, characterized by high rise cruciform buildings (residential blocks
between ten to twenty storeys high, and twenty-four, sixty-storey-high central
office towers), raised on pilotis so that gardens could be located both
underneath and, because of the flat roofs, above them. Buildings were set
apart from the streets and would constitute an evocation of Khmer temples.
The large automotive traffic lanes and land- ing plans for the "air-taxi"
completed the futuristic project.
In 1951, Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret had the opportunity to
approach the design of an entire city with administrative buildings. Chandigarh
"the silver city", was to be the new administrative capital of the northern region
of India, the Punjab.
Due to the flat nature of the terrain, Le Corbusier relied on an orthogonal
trajectory and focused on the main monuments. He rejected references to
traditional Indian architecture (unlike Lutyens in New Delhi) preferring
references to fauna and the local landscape, which can be seen in shell shaped
covers in reinforced concrete. Rationalist language did not want to insist on
tradition, but to adapt and propose solutions that favoured the collective good.