How ONE Architect Influenced Generations Of Artists | Le Corbusier Effect

On the 12th of April, 1963, I came into this world in the maternity ward at the hospital in the town of Firminy, in County Loire. My first impression of the outside world, perceived in my mother's arms through the window in my place of birth, was most probably the hill opposite the hospital, which two years later would be home to Le Corbusier, the nickname of the housing unit that was part of the biggest complex designed by Le Corbusier in Europe. This housing unit was an integral part of the new Firminy-Vert district, a veritable urban laboratory where Le Corbusier had planned for a cultural centre, a stadium, a swimming pool and a church, in addition to the Unité d'Habitation. Fifteen years later, I returned to Firminy to enter high school, Lycée Jacob-Altzer. On Wednesday afternoons, I would play football on the playing field of the Le Corbusier complex. Many of my teammates lived in Le Corbusier. On weekends, I sometimes went to the Maison de la Culture that overlooked the stadium, where I saw experimental theatre or concerts of progressive rock. On Tuesdays, we had sports and went to the track. An impressive set of steep bleachers that I loved climbing crowned the track and field. Wednesday mornings were spent at the The pool building was flooded with daylight. The rest of the time, I hung out at the bunker, that is the concrete ruins that would later become the Church of Saint Peter, completed in 2006, based on the drawings by Le Corbusier. These spaces and buildings were my daily surroundings, and I was surprised and intrigued by their unusual shapes, by the rough cast materials, by the bright colours. I thought a lot about aesthetics and function. Little by little, I began to grasp a few basics of architecture, urban planning and design. After graduating from high school, I went to the École des Beaux-Arts, School of Fine Arts, in the city of Saint-Étienne. Later on in life, I discovered that many artists, architects, designers, choreographers, filmmakers, composers, historians and others had experienced the same shock I felt in contact with Le Corbusier's work. I became a filmmaker and started gathering their testimony on their relation with Le Corbusier and his work. I also interviewed the people who lived in Le Corbusier's building, who shared their feelings on their surroundings. I had long heard about the Madman's House. I remember seeing it for the first time, the first time I went to Marseille, as a teenager. The building seemed so familiar to me. I had the same building in my hometown. We called it Le Corbusier, and in Marseille, they called it the Maison du Fada. Artist Alexandre Périgaud was directly inspired by the city Radieuse, to the point of using its nickname as the title of his work. a psychiatric expert to demonstrate that living here for the first time, because it is the first building where 2,000 people are going to live, would drive you crazy. The idea was that we don't see it sleeping. It's a work on perception. We are ourselves contaminated by a disorder that we are living. My Maison du Fada is the 15th reproduction of the original, of the city of Radieuse. Fada comes from Provençal, and if we use the Latin etymology, Fatum, it means inhabited by fairies. That is, it is not totally pejorative. We can say Fada to all degrees. If we quarrel with someone in the street, it can be almost affective to Fada, but it can also be extremely pejorative. From the flat rooftop of the city Radieuse, very similar to the rooftop where I used to play with my friends, you get a totally different landscape than the one I saw as a child. On the one side, you have the tentacular city of Marseille, and from the other, the seemingly infinite Mediterranean. My memories were of green rolling hills instead of this vast blue sea. However, the one thing both did share was the immensity of the sky above, and the feeling of flying like a crow, another nickname for Le Corbus. Designer Aura Itou purchased it and turned the former gymnasium and the esplanade of the city into an art centre, the MAMOU, which stands for the Modulor in Marseille. It's true that when you look at this promenade, this promontory with this view, this place located between the mountains and the sea, it's a perfect place to perform, to create, to exhibit. And once I saw that, I was convinced that this was what had to be done. Le Corbusier is both essential and, at the same time, sometimes it's not very interesting because it's so in the middle of everything. But at the same time, he's an architect who hasn't built much, oddly enough, compared to his reputation. Each building is quite emblematic and important. He's a very, very, very complex personality. So there's an almost adventurous side, almost playboy, while on the other hand, he's the son of his mother, a little sad, a little austere. I'm trying to define the architectural figure as much as the person. And I have to say that I still haven't really identified him. I wanted Le Corbusier with a mobile phone that was a bit like a cloud of ideas that was gravitating, like a cloud of smoke. There was this very elegant photo, with a crossed suit, really a form of dandyism. I had drawings. There was this figure that I wanted to make in a statue, surmounted by these balls of the mobile phone with its balls. And then I thought I was going to link them, as if the character was the counterweight of his ideas. Maybe this duality between the person in his little human essence and the great figure, the architect. The only annoying thing about Le Corbusier is his omnipresence. It's like Marcel Duchamp or Picasso in the field of art. You can't raise your little finger without hitting them. So after a while, it gets annoying. But otherwise, of course, these are people who are very important, who are the capital. More recently, the artist Daniel Buren took over the flat rooftop and the gymnasium in Marseille. There, he performed a series of in-situ works that played with reflection and dazzling colours. When I was an adolescent, the primary colours that created the tempo of the building facades were what had first intrigued me, then enticed me. When he paints, in my opinion, he's not good at all. And on top of that, he's more inspired when he does his architecture, which remains much more original. In my works, there's nothing that touches or takes anything from Le Corbusier. It's a dialogue, it's not an osmosis in one way or another. The only thing that's directly related to Le Corbusier is the fact that he extracted these three colours and used them in ceramics on certain walls here. I'm so close to what's given by doing something like this. It's absolutely almost logical that the result is very much in relation to the architecture in question. Whether it highlights it or, on the contrary, it discusses it or it upsets it, it's the basic architecture that's there. It's a place that can be very dangerous. Very dangerous because it's already a work of art in itself. And so inviting an artist here can also be a trap. It can be a trap because it has to be someone who has the capacity to occupy the space, to impose himself. It's a kind of boxing match between the heavyweights. The hallways in the common spaces in the city of Adieus are called streets. That is not surprising, for the building is a city. My memories from Fiameni are of empty streets. But here in Marseille, one of these hallways is a busy street, for there is a restaurant, a hotel, a bakery, a real estate agency and even a bookshop. Le Corbusier has dealt with so many subjects that we can talk about architecture and literature, architecture and wine. And with Le Corbusier, we always find this synergy. I like to see this way of projecting oneself in time and always being at the forefront. It's because Le Corbusier imagines the city of tomorrow. And for him, the city of tomorrow is housing which is not far from the services he defines as the extension of housing. That is, in the building, in the housing unit, we will have a hotel and a restaurant from the start, because for him, we will all be submerged by work. And having a restaurant allows us to have a collective kitchen and to be able to prepare dishes that can be distributed in the apartments. And we can see that things are evolving because of the people. It is the people who make architecture, at some point, really habitable or not habitable at all. Even if the architect puts all his generosity, all his poetry in it. Roads Are Also Places by the Catalonian artist Dominic is a model of the city radio set up on the trailer bed of a remote-controlled truck which wanders the streets of the radiant city. This playful mobile sculpture provides a vision of the building in the form of a self-portrait. Le Corbusier's architecture has always made me think of a miniature garage with its streets, its flat deck roof with ramps where you can circulate freely, a magical space for playing. And really, that day, I said, I'm going to do a work on the unit of housing. Although it took me a few years to do it, from the first time I saw it, I thought I wanted to work on the unit. And what I did was build a truck, a toy, which was a remote-controlled truck that carries its load, which is the model of the unit, which circulates freely. I imagined transferring that playful toy that circulates freely through the corridors and the roof of the unit of housing to create that poetic, ironic, fun clash in relation to the inhabitants of the unit of housing itself. The purists will tell you that it is not the best architect, but maybe it is not the best of the 20th century, I don't know. But surely it is the most interesting, it is the most complex, it is the one that raises the most questions, more love-hate relationships. Therefore, I am very interested in it as a character, because it goes through all the doubts, the contradictions of the century. Sometimes it is almost always brilliant, sometimes it is not, sometimes it is wrong enormously, but precisely that makes it more human. There is a photo that, for me, Le Corbusier explains very well. It is a classic photo that you can see him looking, he has in his hands the model of the unit of Marseille, and he is looking through the model as if he were looking through the windows. Whenever I see that photo, I think, Le Corbusier is thinking, looking if the tiny inhabitants fulfill their program, if they live well in their house, if they really know how to use their great living machine. That is why I say that it is a relationship of fascination, although not of total agreement with Le Corbusier. The stilts, or pilings, on which the housing unit is built create an appearing and disappearing effect. They have a special alignment that creates a play of open space and through space that, for me, represent veritable choreography on the stage the architect has proposed. The Belgian choreographer, Frédéric Flamand, worked with French architect Dominique Perrault to create a dance performance that draws entirely from the figure of the Modulor, Le Corbusier's anthropometric scale of proportions based on the height of a man with his arm raised. The Modulor is systematically placed on every one of Le Corbusier's constructions in the form of a drawing, a sculpture or a bas-relief. I thought of Dominique Perrault because I like his work a lot, and this notion of mesh, of transparency, has always caught my attention. The work that we did with Frédéric Flamand, here we enter a field of live theater, of dance, of choreography, and the geometry of the Modulor has been used both horizontally and vertically, as well as in the elements of metallic weaving. Everything is set according to the Modulor. Le Corbusier's body is obviously very important because it is a human-scale architecture, the Modulor, a man with his arm raised, 2.26 m. At the same time, what was very interesting was to discover that he really liked dance. This was extremely interesting because it also explains a lot of things, including the Modulor, probably. The relationship with Le Corbusier is at a distance, it is even more so where we are, in the National Library, because the National Library is in a way an aesthetic and urbanistic critique of Le Corbusier, because architecture has nothing kinetic, so the movement clings to it, but architecture, by definition, is rather clinging to the ground and does not move. Whereas with Frédéric Flamand, the choreography, the movement, was perfect to evoke Le Corbusier in a kind of enchantment such as I love Le Corbusier, that is to say, Le Corbusier which gives a kind of sensual humanity. Ultimately, it means respect but at the same time critical respect. It was very interesting to question the notion of utopia, that architecture can bring happiness to men. To move from that to the contemporary world, a world where the virtual and the real are sometimes confused, a world where the image is sometimes more important than the reality. But here, it was about how to get out of this narrow framework. It's an expression of Le Corbusier, to get out of the narrow framework of his discipline. To make sure that the movement and the architecture leave the backstage, go back to the backstage, disappear in height, really make the space dance. That was a kind of utopia, if you like, but we worked a lot on that. I first came to the Le Corbusier unit of residence. After a long stay in Peru of several years, almost six years, I arrived with my partner. For her, it was important that she could integrate, let's say, have a social life, meet people. And for that, the Le Corbusier unit of residence was perfect because it really contributed very strongly to her integration, as they say. She came with her little daughter, and so she was able to be educated on the terrace at the nursery school. And that also played a big role in their integration, both of them. We practiced the buildings with a certain fascination, with our children's eyes, it must be said. But it was our daily life. It must be said that in those years, the local population did not have at all the look that we have today on this architecture. We didn't necessarily know who Le Corbusier was and that it was an emblematic architecture. And I realized, in fact, the importance of all this heritage. Later, having left the region, meeting people who had gone to architecture schools and who were absolutely amazed at the fact that I was able to grow up in a firm universe. in the housing unit for the first time, when I was invited over by a friend. I had gone down the central corridor with apartments on both sides, then entered directly into his large living room. Flooded with light from the big glazed windows. To his room, I had to go up a stairway that spanned the street and went to the other side of the building. In 1994, Pierre Grange, a filmmaker from Saint-Étienne, decided to shoot his film, En me fais ce qu'il te plaît, In May, Do What You Want. He shot it in seven apartments in Firmeny housing unit. But the building itself was the structure of the scenario. And it's the building, the building of the museum. It's not just a coincidence. It's also because he wrote a lot about community life, the housing unit, the fact that there are streets in the place of the alleys, as they are called in other buildings. It tells something about the philosophy he had deployed to design these housing units. So there's this idea of community. And how we live next to someone else as best we can. And in any case, as best we can from the moment when the architect asks himself the question. There's a kind of circulation like that, which is permanent, and which made me really want to use dramatic objects. And in particular, even disturbing objects from the camera. How do we film these places where we keep going up and down the stairs? And from there, I got the idea to try to work on the shot, and then really show physically that the camera goes up with people. It talks to them for a moment, it goes down with them. It's there, it's there too, like a nth character, but it has this physical act all the time of going up and down. So yes, of course the stairs are extremely important. At the time, no one wanted to live in Le Corbusier. The place had a bad reputation, like other neighbourhoods do today. The Unité d'Habitation was criticised for the inhuman size of the housing project on top of the hill, whereas the apartments themselves were criticised for being tiny. At the outset, it was intended as subsidised housing. But today, the apartments have become very sought after by wealthier families and middle-class lefties. By living in a vertical village, in a vertical city garden, you inevitably get to know your neighbours, you get to know the world, meet people. I have a friend who also lived in the Unité d'Habitation, who had been a guide on the Le Corbusier site for quite some time, and who informed me about the job offer to be a receptionist and a surveyor. I had no idea about art, architecture, and culture in general. All my life at Le Corbusier, it was pure chance. There were a lot of people who lived on the margins, because it's really special. When you live here, you can't have furniture in the traditional sense of the word. You have to adapt to the architecture. It's not the architecture that adapts to us, we have to adapt. In any case, you have to create a complementarity, a synergy, if you will, between the inhabitant and the inhabited. So those who stayed were truly unconditional. Charlotte Perriand worked in collaboration with Atelier Le Corbusier on the interior fittings, and is an absolute reference in the design of the built-in storage and other modular furniture in the Unité. Outside, I was always fascinated by the strangely shaped benches, designed by the architect, that created a rhythm at the foot of the buildings. The Scottish artist, Neil Beggs, turned the base of the Unité d'Habitation into a table. He transposed the slanted pilings into the legs of the table, and the concrete slab into the tabletop. Veritable symbol of, we're all in this together. The table and the building invite people to gather and lay friendly foundations for the connection between art and life. I'll go down to Marseille and take a look at this building and see if there's anything in this building that I can utilise. And as soon as I saw it, I just saw this big table with a building on top of it, which is effectively what Le Corbusier did. He constructed a coffee table in a kind of modernist style, and put the apartments on top of it. Le Corbusier, some folks say, was a great prophet and an architect of social change, concrete and design. Unifying nature and the human body, constructing boxes for you and I to live in, in many different ways. The beauty of song and lyrics and art is it doesn't have to be correct. And there's so many things about Le Corbusier which are probably not correct. There's a lot of stereotypical views, and maybe I have many of them myself, and they're probably completely incorrect. While some of them may not even be even half correct, they might be much worse, but it might be much better, too. He was a human being. And in the song, I tried to express this sort of sorrowful humanness. You know, this chap who tried and succeeded, but also not everything went to plan. The sports field was a torture chamber for me. I hated running in circles around the track or repeating moronic exercises endlessly. To hold boredom at bay, I observed the unusual architecture of the Maison de la Couture. Built atop a rocky cliff, where there used to be a quarry. And I used these futuristic buildings as the backdrop for science fiction films I would daydream scenarios for. We discovered this building, we went to see Gaudi in Barcelona. All this in response to the Académies des Beaux-Arts, but also in response to the Académies of the Le Corbusier Tardif, which left us a bit cold, us students, revolted. So this Le Corbusier Académique, which was a bit scary for me, I eventually started to put it away by discovering this building, which had momentum, a freshness, a simplicity, which ultimately was very appealing. Blue, red, yellow, green. During sessions of arts and crafts that we did at the Maison de la Couture de Fiameni, we chanted the colours that formed the pattern of the façade. Was I aware that this was a musical fresco that had been created by composer and architect Yanis Xenakis, who collaborated with Le Corbusier? When I attended shows, I was both surprised and a bit impressed by the steep slope of the bleachers, which duplicated indoors the angle of inclination of the outside elevations. For me, this architectural invention was a decor in and of itself. Le Corbusier was attentive to the dissemination of his legacy, but I would apply to Le Corbusier this famous quote by Karl Marx, who was very irritated by the divergences of his disciples, and who said, I, in any case, I am a man of the world, I am not a Marxist. And I would say that Le Corbusier was not a Corbusierian, and that he had a certain horror of those who literally imitated his work. I think that the real fidelity to Le Corbusier would be found more on the side of a Rembronas, who had this look that Le Corbusier had on the contemporary world, saying, look at what cities are, look at what the techniques of the time are, and look how I interpret them. For this new exhibition venue in Paris, architect Rem Koolhaas designed a device of mobile stages which partitions the space any way you like to adapt to each exhibition configuration, like the sliding partitions that Le Corbusier had created so as to be able to reduce or expand children's bedrooms. As a teenager, the rough-cast construction materials implemented on the Fiameni site propelled me somewhere I had never been before. Due in part to his unique use of concrete and his spare grammar of shape, Japanese artists and architects is one of Le Corbusier's main disciples. In Japan, more than four generations of architects claim Le Corbusier's influence on their work. Ever since Junzo Sakakura, one of Le Corbusier's assistants, Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, Toyo Ito, and Shigeru Ban had very freely combined traditional Japanese influences with modernist spareness. Architect Kengo Kuma, who built the regional public collection of contemporary art in Marseille in 2010, clearly claims Le Corbusier's influence while also seeking new directions. Most of the high-rise buildings in the 20th century were closed boxes, no conversation with the environment. But like this building, Le Corbusier tried to create the conversation between the environment as we tried to follow that direction. The conversation with the environment is most important for the building in the city. In 1979, before going to Africa, we decided to ship the car from Tokyo to Barcelona, and then from Barcelona we drove the car to Marseille and stayed in a hotel room. It was the first time to see his building, and I could sleep in the building. It was a fantastic moment. I was very much influenced by Le Corbusier to create a kind of conversation with the environment, to create a semi-outdoor space, and to bring that kind of strong topography to the building. Le Corbusier also picked up the beautiful outdoor space to give life to the building. Shintoism was of the big influence by Le Corbusier to Japan. For Shintoism, the conversation with nature is very, very important. After having designed emblematic buildings throughout the world, Le Corbusier built a small cabin in Roquebrune on the French Riviera in 1952. Le Corbusier, who had used concrete to build imposing structures, built a tiny building out of wood, a building anyone could reproduce on their own and still claim his heritage. Architect Marc Barani, who was born in Roquebrune, restored Le Corbusier's cabin and built the extension to the cemetery where Le Corbusier is buried. What is very moving here is to understand that it was for Le Corbusier an essential place of life. It's very small, but it still has a corridor. When you have a small space like this, you say, I'll go straight in. No, you have a corridor. The theme of the spiral that comes into play with the roofs, the discovery. And beyond all this science, it's a kind of cocoon protector from which you capture the Mediterranean in a different way. He spent his last stay in a way. He dies right here on the beach. He tells us, with the ability that we have to anticipate the future, we can live with better. And we can settle in nature without disturbing it too much. That is, basically, the challenges of sustainable development today, Le Corbusier had done them here. I was born in the valley just below. So at the time, we had the hill as a playground. It was not barred from private property. And so with my brother, we both left. This landscape, I lived it before dissecting it to make it part of the project. The challenge that I worked on as we advanced the project was to make a link, or in any case to make these elements feel. And when you get into the project, you have several stages. One is connected to the water, to the sea. Another, we enter the heart of the rock. This is the second level. And the third level, we find ourselves facing the sky with the horizon in front of us again. Le Corbusier, I maintain another relationship with him. I was born where he lived. Or as I often say, I was born where he died. So it creates a link, of course. Here we are in front of Le Corbusier's tomb. We recognize Le Corbusier in this tomb, of course, with the regulatory traces, the gold module, the square plan. And then there are a few oddities which are also Le Corbusier, the footprints, the shells. And then I took a little time, because I knew him since my childhood, since my family tomb is just below, almost at the base of Le Corbusier's tomb, on the rest of the bottom. And I saw the primary colors of Le Corbusier, yellow, red, blue, etc. But before I understood that what he captured was the landscape and its sunset on the horizon. There are around Le Corbusier's work different issues related to his transmission. His transmission through the work of other architects, and then what I would call, more than his transmission, his accomplishment. That is to say, the realization of the projects that were on the Rue de Sèvres drawing board in 1965, at the time of Le Corbusier's death. Some of them ended up being abandoned. Others were completed by the architects who were responsible for them, such as the Maison de la Culture, which was largely drawn. All these projects completed on the board raise the question of the interpretation of Le Corbusier's work, which is not simply a work of drawing, but also a work of construction. As a tribute to Le Corbusier, the Lyon Contemporary Orchestra Ensemble, along with the Saint-Étienne Conservatory, designed a program of contemporary music specially composed for the Church of St. Peter in Fiameny, completed in 2006. Today, the bunker, that mysterious edifice of my adolescence, has given way to a nave, alive with the colors coming well from the light, with its very special acoustics. What was so important to me was the connection with the constellation behind it, with the title of the work, Naos, the central place of the temple. Every time a piece is written, there is a certain dimension of recollection that is amplified here. In this way of searching, we also need a lot of time and calm. Time has no longer the same duration as in everyday life. In fact, everything stretches like sound here. I don't think I could have invested myself in a work if the place had been marked by such a specific destination as a particular religion. So this opening to the constellations, to the sky, to the universe, I think it's something that can be brought together rather than divided. As I met and talked with these and other people, I was able to verify just how artists could passionately claim their affiliation to Le Corbusier and how, on the contrary, his thought could be violently rejected. Either way, there was no way around him. Le Corbusier is and will remain enigmatic to most, which is also what drives many contemporary creators to draw inspiration from his work. For me, his work was a decisive turning point in my life, which remains ever-present.