(History of contemporary architecture and urbanism, Le

Corbusier essay, In the Cause of Landscape, Jean-Louis Cohen)

Landscape’s most prolific responsibility in Le Corbusier’s philosophy retained nothing of the
literal; it involves neither geographic interpretation nor landscape’s active or reactive
presence in his projects. Landscape was edifying, if I may say so, because it generated
analogies and metaphors, figures of speech that had immense importance in all of his work,
as in his most provocative aphorisms such as “The house is a machine for living in.” Along
with the machine and mythology, images of landscape were summoned to support a project
or biographic episode.
Le Corbusier was very interested in the integration of architecture and landscape but was a
poor landscape architect. This point is best illustrated by his designs for Chandigarh. Part of
the problem, notwithstanding the Modular, was that he thought more on an Alpine scale than
on a human scale. He also loved aerial views. The places he made were too large and
insufficiently people-friendly – as with the Ville Radieuse (below). There is a remarkable
contrast between the total failure of Corbusier’s design for the Capitol Complex in
Chandigarh and the total success of the design for the adjoining site (Nek Chand’s Rock
Garden) by an untrained roads inspector who worked illegally and without funding.
Dissimilar temporalities administrated Le Corbusier’s reaction to landscape. One is that of
the site infrequently intimated, commensurate to a solo moment, even though the knowledge
might consequently be immortalized otherwise protracted in inscription. These photographs
established a circumstantial in photomontage, an inflexible of reproductions that powered his
primary discoveries and convoyed him completely his lifetime. Through recording landscapes
correspondingly visually and vocally, he may perhaps frequently reprocess the locations that
encouraged him, transfiguring them into what might be called landscape-forms, afterward his
object-types. These landscape-forms remained often formed by means of reminiscences that
might be said to be Le Corbusier’s fundamental scenes.

My comments are: I contemplate that, concentrating to mutually the magnificent landscapes

of mountains also shorelines over and above to those of the metropolitan, Le Corbusier
accumulated his perceptions over the years, alimentary his written treatise with his
impersonation and implementation various mediums. This comprised photography, a brief
practice of film, and, principally, illustration, satisfying the pages of the pocket sketchbooks
that make available an accurate record of his explorations around the world. One of the
preferred themes of his symbolizations was the correlation between buildings and vegetation.
Le Corbusier dismissed the rudimentary segregation of Haussmann’s Paris between building
blocks and parks. He would announce, what may perhaps be more appealing! than cathedrals
set in vegetation, a circumstance that a radical resolution such as the Plan Voisin would have
empowered. In that proposal the antagonism between the city of stone and the city of
vegetation would have been determined in indulgence of the latter, and he visualized that the
Tuileries gardens might be sustained over complete quarters of Paris in the arrangement of
parks, whether of the conventional French kind otherwise in the fluctuating English method,
and possibly will be composited by means of purely geometrical architecture.