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Corbu Flies Again
By Ed Driscoll · August 5, 2006 05:03 PM · From Bauhaus To Our House

Architecture And Morality writes that 40 years after Le Corbusier's death, one of his unbuilt buildings has recently been completed:

A rather significant event occurred in the world of architecture in the last year—at least from the point of view of this writer. In the city Firminy-Vert, a historical mining community in France, a church initially designed by Le Corbusier was completed. It is the fourth Le Corbusier structure to have been realized in this town, the result of the architect’s fruitful relationship with its post-war mayor. The Church of Saint Pierre was realized by one of Le Corbusier’s numerous acolytes, Jose Oubrerie, who collaborated with the master architect in the last years of his life during the early 1960’s. More than 40 years after his death, the church is finally complete, and in spite of Oubrerie’s own influences, the design of the church of Saint Pierre is remarkably consistent of Le Corbusier’s later works.
A&M notes though, that while the form is pure Corbu, some of the detailing has changed:
Many details in the design were the result of stricter building codes, as well as Oubrerie’s own aesthetic predilections, but the rest of the structure combines formal elements that have become the trademarks of Le Corbusier’s most celebrated projects, such as his monastery at La Tourette, his Assembly building in Chandigar, India, as well as from his Chapel at Ronchamp du Haut.
And that updated detailing is probably a good thing. In The Master Builders, Peter Blake's hagiographic look at Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Blake quotes Eero Saarinen, who called Corbu one of architect's great "form givers". But as dramatic as Corbu's forms were, his detailing was frequently slipshod. (In contrast to Mies--there's a reason why the aphorism "God is in the details" was universally attributed to him.)

Architecture And Morality writes that it's not that unusual for a building to go up after an architect's death. However...

It is rare to build based on plans from several decades before, often because it requires another architect to interpret the design intentions of the original designer, divining on what he was thinking. The best way at ascertaining this kind of intangible information was to rely on an architect’s protégé. Frank Lloyd Wright, who surrounded himself by many sycophantic apprentices who lived and worked in his large private compounds in Wisconsin and in Arizona, produced dozens upon dozens of architects who mastered and internalized his style so as to be indistinguishable from Wright’s own work.
I remember that shortly after the Wall fell and Berlin was re-unified, there was some talk of building Mies's epochal Friedrichstrasse office tower, modernism's first all-glass skyscraper. It exists only in drawings and models (I've seen Mies's large, original conte crayon drawing in New York's Museum of Modern Art, which displays it from to time, and it's a powerful vision.) Fortunately, as the example of Corbu's church in Firminy-Vert illustrates, it's never too late.


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