Treatment of Back Pain

Le Corbusier was a prolific writer and an accomplished painter as well as an famous architect in the history of architecture who produced an imposing and influential body of work. During the decade of the 1920s he executed a series of designs for private villas that crystalized the International Style.

When, in 1903, Lutyens declared “In architecture, Palladio is the game” he meant it literally and his work began to emulate classical forms and models closely. In an insightful essay, published in 1947, the architectural historian Colin Rowe compared the formal organization of Le Corbusier’s work of the 1920s with sixteenth-century Palladian villas.

For the modernist Le Corbusier, abstraction not emulation was the dominant design strategy underlying every attempt at form- making. In the reductive purism of his work, buildings are drained of mass and solidity and appear as weightless volumes hovering over the ground.

Citations of classical iconography are replaced by references to icons of the machine age such as ocean liners, and the perspectival construction of space according to Renaissance models is replaced by a Cubist-inspired spatial aesthetic. In Le Corbusier’s work the detailed vocabulary of the classical orders and the solidity and thickness characteristic of classical tectonics are banished.

The desire to deride the schematic basis of modern architecture and the ability to turn a design upside down and make it architecture are symptomatic of a state when the vocabulary is not being extended, and a parallel can be drawn with the Mannerist period of the Renaissance.

 

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