Browsing by Subject "Le Corbusier"

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    Le Corbusier's Unite d'habitation: a slab for all seasons?
    (1973) Avin, Uri Pinchas
    Most arguments about high-rise housing are waged in the shadow of Le Corbusier. The pervasive effects of his dogged half-century spent advocating the benefits of high-rise dwelling are still everywhere apparant. His watchwords - "soleiI, espace, verdure”, "le grand gaspi Iage du temps moderne", "les services communs", "Ies prolongements du Iogis" - are stiII in one form or another the uItimate weapons of the apologists and detractors of high-rise, and the Unites, in particular, have become the touchstone for much of the slab-building around. In view of alI this, one would expect that there exists a solid corpus of critical works explicating Le Corbusier's precise position whose meaning, as a result, would unambiguously and by common consent be implied whenever the Corbusian Freudian-father is invoked. There are not however, any such rigorous citical studies of Le Corbusier's housing proposals and among the general works that do exist, Iittle consensus and indeed some contradiction exists on the definition of the Corbusian solution; that is, on the question of the Unites proper context - the planning matrix within which it fits. The Unite itself, its genesis and its ultimate canonization, has been the subject of even less objective investigation. This study set out to fiII that gap; in the course of my research it was found that Le Corbusier's supposedly-consistent proposals concealed during their long evolution many shifts, disjunctions and non sequiturs. This uneven and disconnected dialogue between the former and latter parts of Le Corbusier's 'oeuvre' that is described in this study reveals the Unite finally as being not at alI firmly embedded in or clearly resulting from his overalI design contexts and housing proposals. It stands, finally, as a separable declaration of Le Corbusier's particular understanding of the psycho/visual nature of human perception, and this is judged to be an inadequate and over - exclusive raison d'etre.