Slawomir Turek Maisons Jaoul Essay

AR2020 History of Modern Architecture Slawomir Turek K1129471 10/01/2013

Le Corbusier & The Journey Towards Modernity

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In his early works Le Corbusier was absorbed by the idealistic features of architectural forms being a spiritual matter, by the means of concentration and meditating. He aimed to introduce religious emotions through form, light and space. He believed that spirited and existential religious aspects of architecture should not be achieved with force but with free play of imagination.1 “I have not experienced the miracle of faith, but I have often known the miracle of indefinable space, the apotheosis of plastic emotion.”2 In his early years Le Corbusier continuously developed his interests towards nature, natural forms and their divine character. 3 This sort of interest started from an early age, when Le Corbusier was encouraged by his teacher to look closely and observe the nature and to look beyond what is apparent to the plants and fossils, concentrating on their beautiful simple forms.4 Le Corbusier‘s design for an art school in 1910 clearly shows a practical use of his early thinking. The prominence on simple cubic and pyramidal forms: the art school shows a slight balance of Egyptian architecture and eighteen-century classicism.

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By 1914 Le

Corbusier invented the Dom-ino frame; which divides the plan into independent concrete frame of columns and floor slabs.6The architect then published the ‘Five Points of a New Architecture’, a set of rules of a new architectural system based on the pilotis, free plan, roof garden, horizontal window and free facade; system on which Le Corbusier based most of his projects.7The design of La Tourette in 1956 was strictly based on the Five Points of a New Architecture, although the number of architectural elements has increased. There were now directional piers, robust walls, concrete studs laid out according to the Modulor and the wooden ventilating panels. The system became the foundation for Le Corbusier’s ‘patient search’.8 ”Each new project became a testing ground for new ideas as well as an extension of the old ones.” 9La Tourette designed approximately at the same time as Maisons Jaoul demonstrated how the increased number of architectural elements can benefit on much wider variety of articulations, functionally and formally.10 Maisons Jaoul, La Tourette and any other houses built in 1950’s were partly just ‘fragmentations of his expectations’, and did in result become prototypes.11 The late 1940’s France and the post-war world forced Le Corbusier to leave his ‘standards’ and the industrialized prototypes from having an effect. The architect had to change the way he used to reach for his individual metaphor. He 1

William J.R Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900,(London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1996) p.421 Curtis, p.421 3 Curtis, p.421 4 Curtis, p.163 5 Curtis, p.164 6 Curtis, p.164 7 Curtis, p.424 8 Curtis, p.424 9 Curtis, p.425 10 Curtis, p.425 11 Curtis, p.419 2

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started to seek inspirations in the ‘miracles of contemporary life’; it was the beginning of his journey towards modernity. 12 The architect travelled to Brazil, Africa and the Mediterranean, sketching and recording his experience and interests in folk forms and in the harmony between people, buildings and landscapes which were a part of the vernacular world. In his notes Le Corbusier talks about his attraction towards the natural order of things. 13 Le Corbusier’s ideas of ‘the machines’ started to be clearly defined as natural and organic. There was a significant change in the architects thinking, the structure of nature started to emerge, human figure started to replace the machine parts, object such as shells and bones were the focal point of his new transformation. Curves and shapes became more random and devious. The strict and uptight shapes were shifted from their normal context to become open and reveal more complicated and essential subjects.14 In order to understand architects approach and intellectual though which stood behind the design of Maison Jaoul, we have to refer back to simple creations of mathematics and the measured crafts. The working tool used to provide a new source of well-being, a tool which would be to co-ordinate, unite and bring into harmony the work which is divided by two systems: the foot and inch system of the Anglo Saxon work, and the metric system.15 “A harmonious measure to the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and mechanics.”16 The Modulor, a measure based on mathematics and human scale based on the six feet man, constructed and possessing the properties of numbers which determinate the ‘containers of man or extensions of man.’17 The system led by the idea of mass production of prefabricated houses.18 Houses which just like Maison Jaoul were built on the standards applied by the Modulor. 19 Albert Einstein

Figure 1, The Modulor Grid.

described the Modulor as; “a scale of proportion which makes the bad difficult and the good easy.”20

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Curtis, p.419 Curtis, p.320 14 Curtis, p.231 15 Le Corbusier, The Modulor, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1961), p.17 16 Le Corbusier, p.34 17 Le Corbusier, p.60 18 Le Corbusier, p.45 19 Le Corbusier, p.43 20 Le Corbusier, p.58 13

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Maisons Jaoul represents not only the magnificence of the Modulor grid, but Le Corbusier’s attraction to primitive and vernacular architecture, as well as his artisanal and industrial approach towards the design.21Maisons Jaoul is a significant project that represents Le Corbusier’s post-war ideology, as well as his search for a specific tone of texture and delicate materiality as well as concrete quality of building which is related to his interests in the practice of Jean Dubuffet.22 Le Corbusier received the commission to design two houses for the Jaoul family in 1951. Andre Jaoul and Le Corbusier were long-time friends since they first time met on the cruise ship to New York in 1935. An idea of professional collaboration emerged from their friendship. 23 Le Corbusier believed in the industrial world and its influence on culture and architectural avant-garde. Their friendship thus made it easy for Le Corbusier to collaborate and to convince Jaoul to choose his group of artisans with whom he had already established both professional and compassionate relations.24 In Maisons Jaoul, the architect wanted to evaluate the fundamental bases of the art of living, emphasising on alternative models that would improve upon the lifestyle within. Le Corbusier was keen in collaborating with the Jaoul family, although he insisted on one condition that dominated the entire project. To incorporate the Catalan vaults into the Figure 2, View of the house showing the concrete beams that contain the Catalan

two houses; Le Corbusier treated them as an architectural vaults. feature that was essential to create an effect of well-being.25

The Catalan vaults were one of his newly developed ideas; he decided to replace them with the illuminated floors, reinforced concrete slabs and windows. The question is, what value did Le Corbusier attach to the vaults? His interest in the Catalan vaults as a replacement of slabs and windows, and his use of the lowered vault constructed of exposed brick recall aspect of his architectural culture. Stanislaus von Moss pointed out that “the vault contains two of Le Corbusiers dominant themes, the industrial vault: the Hennebique shed-type, the Auguste Perret thin concrete shell and the Monol-type that Le Corbusier applied in one of his projects in 1919.On the other hand Perret was fascinated by the warmth of the interiors, a vessel of light and 21

Caroline Maniaque Benton, Le Corbusier & The Maisons Jaoul,(New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p.10 22 Caroline Maniaque Benton, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 63 (2009) p.31 23 Maniaque Benton, p.29 24 Maniaque Benton, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, p.31 25 Maniaque Benton, p.9

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distinguished elements that provide or bring in light.” 26 To highlight the beginning of his interest in the Catalan vaults we would have to refer back to his travels. In his voyage to Columbia, Le Corbusier observed the low vaults and the system of wooden shutters in Pizano houses. The use of raw brick and uneven mortar joints emphasizes his technique of ‘beauty by contrast.’27 “I have decided to make beauty by contrast. I will find its complement and establish a play between crudity and finesse, between the dull and intense, between precision and accident.”28With this approach the architect attempts to come close to the aesthetics developed by the artist of the Art Brut movement Jean Dubuffet As for the proportional measurement system for the Maisons Jaoul design, Le Corbusier applied the Modulor grid. He uses the system to regulate the dimensions of spans of 3.66m and 2.26m and a height of the soffit of the vault-carrying lintels of 2.26m.The Modulor system played a double role in the design , that of coordinating and uniting the design, and integrating the contribution of various collaborators who took a part on the design. It was used as a form of communication between Le Corbusier and his collaborators.29 With the Maisons Jaoul, Le Corbusier started to look in a different direction from his previously designed houses, moving away from the machine-age aesthetics. He now turns to the ideas of exposing rough materiality of concrete, brick and wood. 30These radical changes were partly influenced by the work of the artist Costantino Nivola, whom the architect had met in 1946.

Previous

collaboration

with

Nivola

reinforced

Le

Corbusier’s confidence in exploring a rough, direct and tactile handling of raw materials. 31 Mary C. Mc Leod has stated that formal changes in Le Corbusier’s work should be based on his political engagements. She suggests that Figure 3, Typical construction of the exposed brick work.

the architects style and political transformation cannot be separated, as they influence each other.32Le Corbusier’s activity in politico-ideological events such as the “mur diplomatique (diplomatic wall)” or the invention of “return to land” movement

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Maniaque Benton, p.42 Maniaque Benton, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, p.34 28 Maniaque Benton, p.84 29 Maniaque Benton, p.51 30 Maniaque Benton, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, p.31 31 Maniaque Benton, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, p.33 32 Maniaque Benton, p.84 27

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resulted in his Brutalist aesthetic choices. The architects Brutalist aesthetics were already seen in his previous designs of the 1920s and 1930s. The Swiss Pavilion is an important example: the rough concrete pillars, along with the materials with perceptive rudeness and crudity.33 The rusticity of materials in the Maisons Jaoul had rather a negative and shocking response in the public as well as the Jaoul family. Francois Barre has argued that the Brutalist exterior of the houses, built of tough brick walls and massive concrete arches, attracted undesirable attention.34 Marie Jaoul, the daughter of Michael and Nadine Jaoul, suffered from the oddness of the house “My school friends would say: Why do you live in a factory? They would thought that it was a factory because it was not finished off like the others... What I liked were the houses that used to be in the rue de Longchamp.”35 Despite the negative criticism that the Brutalist finish of the Maisons Jaoul received from the professional public and such, this ideology of exposed rough materials was appreciated and accepted by many artists from The Brutalism movement. Maisons Jaoul became one of the underlying components in the Smithsons’ “Cluster City.”36 Reyner Banham also stated that the urban and social aims understood in the Jaoul design had a great importance for the Smithsons’.37We could easily relate Le Corbusier’s, Maisons Jaoul with the Smithsons, Hunstanton School design which was built in the same time as Maisons Jaoul. They both exhibit their basic structure and materiality: this sort of emphasis on basic structure and rough materiality was so compulsive that many critics have taken this to be the whole of New Brutalist Architecture. 38The New Brutalism requires that the building should be immediately understood visually, and that the form grasped by the eye should be confirmed by the structure and the buildings use. This kind of relationship between structure, function and form is the basic component that makes a good building.39Both the Jaoul and Hunstanton designs have all these elements. The Maison Jaoul has all the qualities necessary to be described as of a New Brutalist building: memorability as an image, clear exhibition of structure and valuation of materials ‘as found’. Its image is what affects the emotions and the structure is its fullest sense. 40

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Maniaque Benton, p.88 Maniaque Benton, p.128 35 Maniaque Benton, p.129 36 Maniaque Benton, p.139 37 Maniaque Benton, p.138 38 Reyner Banham, The New Brutalism, in Alison and Peter Smithson a Critical Anthology, Max Risselada ed.2011, p.117 39 Banham, p.120 40 Banham, p.123 34

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Word Count: 1829

Bibliography:     

Banham, Reyner, The New Brutalism, in Alison and Peter Smithson a Critical Anthology, Max Risselada (2011) Benton Maniaque, Caroline, Back to Basics: Maisons Jaoul and the Art of the mal foutu, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 63 (2009) Benton Maniaque, Caroline, Le Corbusier & The Maisons Jaoul,(New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009) Curtis, William J.R, Modern Architecture since 1900, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1996) Le Corbusier, The Modulor, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1961)

Illustration Credits:

Illustration on title page: From Caroline Maniaque Benton, Le Corbusier & The Maisons Jaoul, (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p.17 Figure 1: From Le Corbusier, The Modulor, (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1961), p.51 Figure 2: From Caroline Maniaque Benton, Le Corbusier & The Maisons Jaoul, (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p.21 Figure 3: From Caroline Maniaque Benton, Le Corbusier & The Maisons Jaoul, (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), p.87

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