Reading Response – Le Corbusier and Ideal Representation

Le Corbusier’s apparent dissatisfaction with photography – specifically, that kind associated with “passive, consumeristic, fetishistic” practice – seems to stem from a more fundamental dissatisfaction with “reality”, or at least, relatively objective, two-dimensional photographic reality. Beatriz Colomina, in “Le Corbusier and Photography”, discusses his love of drawing, and how drawings, to his mind, helped reinforce memory rather than replace it (as a tourist’s photograph might). Yet a habit Colomina refers to as “aimless” – his redrawing of certain photographs taken on various travels – seems indicative of the opposite, replacing the photographic “truth” of a representation with a subjective idealization of it: “the sketch learns from what the photograph excludes” (10). Because photography flattens space and forms into plane and shapes, perhaps this habit was a rebellion against the reductive nature of the medium. Yet drawing does the same, albeit with the sketch artist’s sense of interpretation left relatively unbounded.
Instead, as the instances of photographic manipulation, mentioned in both Colomina’s article and Jean-Louis Cohen’s introduction, might indicate, Le Corbusier and his colleague Ozenfant (who Cohen credits with the actual manipulation) were more concerned with idealized or utopian design principles than with a more pragmatic approach to sites, structures, and their representations in media (Cohen 8). Indeed, Cohen quotes Ozenfant as saying, through its manipulation, the image was “restored to purity”. The anecdote about designing his parents’ villa before knowing the site runs completely counter to the rudimentary knowledge of architecture I grew up hearing, yet it reflects his belief, and the modernist belief in general, in universal needs to be satisfied by universalized structures.
Of course, architects regularly break with realistic representation in order to more clearly illustrate their concepts – sections and isometric grids are two examples – but these readings indicate more than the utilitarian function in those instances: Le Corbusier’s preference for principle over context, a coherent philosophy rather than an adaptive, and potentially incoherent one.
The utopian perspective may be important, even necessary, for constructing theory, but, especially with architecture, it strikes me as somewhat irresponsible when actually practiced as such. Colomina suggests, in her “Architectureproduction” chapter, that “architecture, as distinct from building, is an interpretive, critical act,” but I wonder why, other than (possibly) semantic purposes for academic discussion, one should even make that distinction (207). Only in the idealized world of representations – of photographs, of critical writing – is it possible to do so, and to remove discourse about the built world from the world itself may make it easier to comprehend or address in a classroom, but it also contradicts that most famous modernist maxim about form and function.