Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France

“GRATEFUL READER” writes:

Your photographs of Roman doorways capture the character of the holy Christian city magnificently. Two recent book reviews came to mind from your following comment,

The grandeur of these doorways and their useless ornamentation are deeply attractive to those who find so much of the modern world visually cold, austere and brutally ugly.  

The book called Le Corbusier, the Dishonest Architect by Malcolm Millais has been reviewed by Nicholas Salingaros and Theodore Dalrymple.

Le Corbusier

Salingaros, a professor of mathematics and architecture, writes of the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and his cult following:

“Millais analyzes numerous structural faults with the iconic 1952 Unité d’Habitation apartment block in Marseilles, France [photos here]. Here is the original model for dark, dreary, double-loaded internal corridors, and apartments with one side in darkness and the other with impossible glare. Cult followers reproduce it as a perfect prototype, whereas Millais’s authoritative conclusion is damning. How could a building containing so many errors of design and construction—most due to untested ideas—have received a permit? The answer is that the Housing Minister waived all building regulations. Architectural culture deliberately ignores all these faults, while critics endlessly repeat self-serving lies that Le Corbusier himself invented to cover up his ignorance and mistakes.

“Le Corbusier’s unbuilt design for slaughterhouses for the French industrialist Max Du Bois was recycled to become the Unité d’Habitation. Later, Le Corbusier revisited this macabre theme in his idea for the Philips Pavilion, a building financed by the Dutch Electronics Company Philips for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Corbu describes his chilling idea: “It should appear as though you are about to enter a slaughterhouse. Then once inside, bang, a blow to the head and you’re gone.” So, Monty Python’s 1987 The Architects Sketch starring John Cleese was spot-on after all.”

 The following excerpt from The Architects Sketch indicates the comedians’s recognition of pathology in the modern architect’s intentions:

Mr. Wiggin [John Cleese]: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these…

Client 1: Excuse me.

Mr. Wiggin: Yes?

Client 1: Did you say ‘knives’?

Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.

Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?

Mr. Wiggin: …Does that not fit in with your plans?

Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.

Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn’t fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses.

Clients: Ah.

Mr. Wiggin: Pity.

Clients: Yes.

Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut. None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially) My life has been leading up to this.

Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.

Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.

Clients: Well…

Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn’t regret this. Think of the tourist trade.

Client 1: I’m sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.

Mr. Wiggin: …I see. [raising his voice in crescendo to loud vituperation.] Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered philistine pig-ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage.…

The psychological pathology of Le Corbusier, which informed his designs, is aptly characterised by Dalrymple, a psychiatrist, who writes:

“The French fascist architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, was another of this charmless ilk. Jeanneret’s inhumanity, his rage against humans, is evident in his architecture and in his writings. He felt the level of affection and concern for them that most people feel for cockroaches…

“Jeanneret’s writing is exhortatory and often ungrammatical, and is full of non sequiturs and dubious assertions without foundation. He raves rather than argues; everything is written in an imperious take-it-or-leave-it mode, interspersed with scribbled sketches or photographs of little relevance, and if you choose to leave it rather than take it, he soon insults you by claiming that you cannot see, do not understand, are incapable of real thought, etc. To read Jeanneret is to be cornered by a religious fanatic threatening you with eternal hellfire unless you accept his doctrine in full. It is a very unpleasant experience…

“Jeanneret’s pronouncements, and the belief in them, led to the construction of a thousand urban hells, worse in some ways than traditional slums because they were specifically designed to eliminate spontaneous and undirected human contact or social life.

Dalrymple also characterises Le Corbusier’s followers and their suppression of reality:

“…to criticize him is to put oneself beyond the pale of polite discourse, and indeed careers have been obstructed if not actually ruined by doing so. He seems to have established a grip over minds, and those who are attracted to him are attracted also to totalitarian methods of keeping control over opinion.”

May the portals of Rome open a door of inspiration for future architects to love Christ and, therefore, to design spaces where people can live and love one another.

The Sainte Marie de la Tourette convent in France

— Comments —

Lydia Sherman writes:

Architecture changes landscape more permanently than other arts. It sometimes takes a lifetime or more to remove an architect’s mistakes.

Le Corbusier ruined the landscape in many areas of the world with his crazy designs. Some of his buildings have deteriorated and no one thinks well enough of them to restore them or provide funding to maintain them. In the opinion of some, was not really an architect or an artist, but was good at being famous.

Some of his designs were so bad, the owners threatened legal action if he didn’t correct the flaws that made the structure unusable. See here.

His public housing designs were a failure and have been dismantled and replaced by normal houses with porches and streets. Most of his office buildings are wasted spaces and sterile atmospheres.

In his explanation of utilitarian design, he also said that human beings could live in stalls like animals. He created dorm-like dwellings that made people feel imprisoned.

He was promoted in the School of Architecture here, and some students objected to his being called an architect.

This writer exposes Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright.

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