Le Corbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism: The Search for a New Architecture

Abstract

This essay explores Le Corbusier's debt to the nineteenth-century tradition of French Hellenism in the formulation of his vision for a new architecture, as reflected both in his polemical treatise, Vers une architecture (1923), and in his avant-garde Parisian villas of the 1920's. Two of Le Corbusier's principal interests — the architectural promenade, informed by the example of the Athenian Acropolis, and the Parthenon, appreciated as an aesthetic icon — derive from this tradition, which he received through the writings of Viollet-le-Duc and Auguste Choisy. These two theorists, moreover, are shown to have promoted ideas that belie their popular characterization today as “structural rationalists.” Finally, it is suggested that the historical periods usually associated with what is known as the Modern Movement, seen as beginning toward either 1890 or 1920, are, rather, phases within a longer historical cycle, which originated with the Romantic revolution toward the 1820's, when it became imperative to create a modern architecture expressive of contemporary culture.

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Notes on contributors

Richard A. Etlin

In addition to numerous articles on modern architecture, Richard Etlin has published The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1984). He now is preparing studies devoted to Le Corbusier and to twentieth-century Italian architecture. [School of Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742]