Introduction 0.2 Drawing of a stone from Le Corbusier, Le Poème de l’angle droit (1955).
surroundings. “Let me recall to your mind that man seated at his table… The furniture, the walls, the openings to the outside… all speak to him.”19 The building here offers structure to the narrative and acts as a protagonist in its drama.20 If a radiant edifice, such as the Parthenon, was for Le Corbusier “spurting” lines out to the horizon,21 what does this mean for the promenade? Where indeed does it begin and end? Wendy Redfield has illustrated how historians have largely ignored the issue of site in their accounts of Le Corbusier’s work22 while Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn have written convincingly about the need to be critical of the traditional view that the site ends at the limits of the building plot, recognising that boundaries are never fixed and suggesting that it is more accurate to think of site as a network, a territory influenced by the act of designing in a specific place.23 The limitations of the site are more clearly defined in Le Corbusier’s early work, but are less obvious in the case of a piloti building like the Unité 24 where the reduction of tangible boundaries between inner and outer worlds is likely to have been a conscious decision. Here the promenade creates a public continuum from ground to roof, a quasi exterior route through the building, its progress interrupted by the most minimal of glass doors at ground level ( Fig. 0.3). These cause a blurring of interior and exterior space, pulling the exterior route into the house and up to the rooftop garden.
19 Le Corbusier, Talks with Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), p.54. Originally published as Entretien avec les étudiants des écoles d‘architecture (Paris: Denoel, 1943). 20 Sergei Eisenstein, Yves-Alain Bois, Michael Glenny, “Montage and Architecture”, Assemblage, 10 (1989), p.113. “The building itself is allowed to make the film” as Le Corbusier wrote of a documentary that was made about the Unité in Marseilles. Le Corbusier, Œuvre Complète Volume 5, 1946–1952 (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architecture, 1973). Originally published in 1953. p.10. 21 Le Corbusier, Modulor 2, p.26. 22 W. Redfield, “The Suppressed Site: Revealing the influence of site on two purist works” in C. J. Burns and A. Kahn, Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories and Strategies (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.185–222. 23 Ibid. 24 W. Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), p.81. Benton notes that in one of the earlier versions of the scheme a concrete triumphal arch spanned the driveway at lodge level. Benton, The Villas, p.181.
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