You might say it’s about time. Finally a retrospective of the pioneering master of modern architecture has been mounted by the Architecture and Design Department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes (on view until September 23), presents a vast range of the work of the influential architect who was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland in 1887, and died in 1965 after practicing most of his life in Paris. As the show demonstrates, Le Corbusier never stopped innovating with the language of architecture, refining a rational vocabulary of modernist taut planes, open plans, and gridded structures to reinterpreting vernacular building methods or generating organic sculptural forms using poured-in-place concrete. Nor did Le Corbusier stick to architecture alone. He painted, sculpted, photographed, wrote treatises, and designed furniture along with buildings and cities. This exhibition, organized by guest curator Jean-Louis Cohen, an architect and historian, with Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of the museum’s architecture and design department, frames the vast oeuvre with the relationship of Le Corbusier to the landscape—from the small domestic scale to the large regional one. The comprehensive exhibition, featuring a vast array of drawings, original models, still-life paintings, and even films by the architect, brings to life the outpouring of this creative force of the 20th century. Just before the show’s June 15 opening Record discussed the exhibition with Cohen.
Why did the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) take so long to present a retrospective exhibition of Le Corbusier? As you point out in the catalogue accompanying the show, he was included in the landmark Modern Architecture: International Exhibition of 1932, plus an exhibition in 1935 devoted to recent work, along with several smaller shows in 1963, 1978, and 1987. But no retrospective.
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