Architect: Le Corbusier
Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier
12 January 2019
Alternative Histories: Robbrecht en Daem Architecten on Le Corbusier12 January 2019
A Rain of Light It is our true belief that light is particles of dust. When light is driven through impurities it intensifies, and we assign it a mineral quality. We feel empowered by the ‘photon theory of light’ by Albert Einstein. – Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, January 2019
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India
7 September 2018
Le Corbusier: Sketch for the Governor’s Palace, Chandigarh, India7 September 2018
Niall Hobhouse remembers that Jullian de la Fuente, the Chilean architect who worked with Le Corbusier, told him the story of how he came to own the twelve pages (of which one is shown) extracted from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook: In the late 1950s the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal… Read More
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation
1 August 2016
Le Corbusier: Unité d’habitation1 August 2016
This letter from Le Corbusier, to Marseille photographer Louis Sciarli, responds to a request from Elle magazine for photographs of the school on the rooftop of the Unité. Le Corbusier includes a drawing that instructs the unfortunate photographer as to exactly how he would like the children to be posed. M. Sciarli… Read More
The Open Hand (1954)
1 November 2015
The Open Hand (1954)1 November 2015
The Open Hand will affirm that the second era of the machine-civilisation, the era of harmony, has started. -Le Corbusier
The hatred of rendering (1930)
1 August 2015
The hatred of rendering (1930)1 August 2015
The following has been extracted from a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1930. I should like to give you the hatred of rendering … Architecture is in space, in extent, in depth, in height: it is volumes and circulation. Architecture is made inside one’s head. The sheet of paper is… Read More
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s
29 November 2013
The changing metropolis 1940s–1980s29 November 2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
Displaced persons
3 October 2012
Displaced persons3 October 2012
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Architects are extraordinarily reluctant to incorporate into their visual descriptions of buildings any evidence that the real subject their structures serve, and around whose activities they are so carefully formulated, is people. Here’s a look at a few of the moments when this unspoken rule has been broken. Distances: Using… Read More
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978
13 March 2016
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–197813 March 2016
– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg
This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More
exhibition DMC