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PAVILION LE CORBUSIER. "MON UNIVERS". ZURICH (2019)
MON UNIVERS
ZURICH
PAVILION LE CORBUSIER
MAY 11 2019 - NOV 07 2019
The Pavillon by Le Corbusier, is the last building designed by the master of modern architecture, has been brought back to life, with the abundance of bright and vivid colors it sported at the time of its inauguration, in 1967.
The pavilion has always been used as an exhibition space to present Le Corbusier's works and ideas. An architect and urban planner, as well as a draftsman, painter, sculptor and furniture designer, Le Corbusier left a diverse portfolio of work and has exercised great international influence. In the case of the pavilion, the first point of interest to visitors is the building itself.
The pavilion represented the "ideal exhibition venue", a building designed by Le Corbusier for his own works. A place where art, architecture and life could merge into a new symbiosis, a "synthesis of the arts". Indeed, the building embodies many of his renowned architectural principles. The shape of the nave, for example, is based on the Modulor system of proportions, developed by Le Corbusier. It also includes the prefabrication, the access ramp and the hanging garden: all the elements theorized by the architect, commonly seen in his other work.
Numerous sketches and projects carried out from the mid-1950s demonstrate how long the design phase of the pavilion was. The completion of the work must be heralded to the patience and perseverance of Heidi Weber. It was she who obtained from the city of Zurich the right of use for fifty years of the land, the Blatterwiese meadow, and it was also she who strove to overcome the many difficulties that arose, the main one being the death of Le Corbusier. Indeed, the works, started in 1964, were interrupted after the death of the famous architect in August 1965.
"The exhibition “Mon univers” that opened the museum after its renovations, took place across the four floors of the building and was dedicated to one of Le Corbusier's passions: collecting"
The construction of the building was resumed with a new project team and was definitively completed in 1967.
In 2014, the building passed into the hands of the city of Zurich. The careful and meticulous restoration project that has restored the initial chromatic vivacity has been carried out by the architects Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg, from October 2017 and February 2019, who have taken the upmost care to work in line with the spirit in which it was designed. From 11th May 2019, the pavilion reopened as a public museum, now managed by the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich on behalf of the city of Zurich.
The exhibition “ Mon univers” that opened the museum after its renovations, took place across the four floors of the building and is dedicated to one of Le Corbusier's passions: collecting. The exhibits, from the Le Corbusier Foundation and from important private collections, presented a thematic dialogue with the pavilion and were shown together with videos by Le Corbusier and the permanent exhibition of photographs taken by the famous photographer René Burri between 1955 and 1965, in his role as visual chronicler of Le Corbusier.
Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (Switzerland in 1887, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin France, 1965) who chose to be known as Le Corbusier was an architect, urban planner, painter, writer, designer, designer and theorist, who was most prolific in France.
In 1922, Le Corbusier, with his cousin, Pierre Jeanneret opened an architectural studio in Paris at 35 rue de Sèvres, a partnership that would last until 1940. They began experimenting with furniture design and invited the architect Charlotte Perriand to join the studio in 1928. Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand presented several works the following year, including (a big and small versión) the Grand Confort armchair, a chaise longue, a table, and standard storage units at the Salon d'Automne in an installation titled Equipment for the Home.
For Le Corbusier, the proportion was always the central focus of his design philosophy. His confidence in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden section, which he explicitly used in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. His work on The Villa Savoye (1929-1931) illustrates the ideas that Le Corbusier' had been developing throughout the 1920s in his publications "Five points of architecture" and "Vers une architecture."
After World War II, Le Corbusier dedicated time to find the most efficient way to house large numbers of people in response to the housing crisis across many cities of the world. He thought that his new, modern architectural forms would provide solutions that would raise the quality of life for the lower classes. Le Corbusier was at his most influential in urban planning and was a founding member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). He realized some of his urban planning schemes on a small scale by constructing a series of unités (housing block units) around France. The most famous of these was the Unité d'Habitation of Marseilles (1946-1952). In the 1950s, a unique opportunity arose, allowing him to transform his concept on a larger scale. It was the construction of Chandigarh, India.
His visionary books, bright white houses, and progressive urban plans set him at the head of the modern movement in the 1920s, while in the 1930s, he became more of a complex and skeptical explorer of cultural and architectural possibilities. Le Corbusier frequently shifted position, serving as an 'Old Master' of the establishment of modern architecture and as an unpredictable and charismatic leader for the young.
Before his death in 1965, he established the Foundation Le Corbusier in Paris to look after and make his library, architectural drawings, sketches, and paintings available to scholars.