Allen_Le Corbusier and Modernist Movement_The Carpenter Center_2000

7/28/2019 Allen_Le Corbusier and Modernist Movement_The Carpenter Center_2000

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stanallenessays

practicearchitecture,technique andrepresentation


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contents

introduction to the series VII saul ostrow

acknowledgments IX


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buildings4

mies's theater of effects: 71the new national gallery

5the guggenheim refigured: 87

the solomon r. guggenheim museum6

Ie corbusier and modernist movement: 1O}the carpenter center for the visual arts

media


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.... ,Pierre Chenal. Stills from L'architecture d'aujourd'hui, 1931.

i, 1IIIIII" \.

Ie corbusierand modernistmovementthe carpenter centerfor visual arts,'cambridge, ma

the movement-image.. . film and calculus, both pornogra-phies of flight.

-Thomas PynchonTHE CARPENTER CENTER FOR THE VISUAL

Arts at Harvard University: a late realization of the modernist dream of move-ment in continuity, or a new kind of movement? Thirty years before, LeCorbusier had written:"A stair separates .. . a ramp connects:' 1At the Visual ArtsCenter, the ramp traces the mobile section drawn by the observer in motion. Itspath moves the spectator through the building, opens interior up to exterior,and connects the building to the life of he campus. The visitor is drawn into the

; .\ structure on the oblique, lifted up assertively from the ground plane, andallowed to view the campus before being d rawn inside. "The line does not gofrom one point to another, but runs between points .. . the line has become thediagonal:'2 In this movement, two conventional expectations are contravened.The first is the building's frontality, the polite face expected (and maintained) inevery other building on the Harvard campus. Instead of producing a facade


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{I04} BUILDINGS

that separates itself from the surroundings,Le Corbusier brings the negativespace of the context into the spatial force-field of his own building.3 The secondis the possibility of entering the bui lding at all. The ramp does not so much penetrate the building, as slip in between its parts, making visible the openness of hestructure; one does not enter the Carpenter Center so much as pass through it. Itis possible to enter at the landing of the thi rd floor, where the ramp touches, buteven here, entry is delayed. Inside the door the first sensation is of nternal transparencies. One looks from inside throu gh outside to inside again. Big chunks ofexterior space seem to be lodged inside the building . This furthe r delays the senseof having entered. This effect is present throughout t he Carpenter Center.One ofthe building's most striking passages is the long interior window that looks downfrom the first floor lobby into the auditor ium, connecting tha t usuallydark spacedirectly to the exterior. Transparency codes all the public spaces of the building.The building is a shell-like space, lightly protected without but radically opene dwithin; not penetrated at its periphery, but unfolded from inside.4

The ramp, which at first appears to be a device limited to the entrysequence, in fact conditions the entire spatial organization. Robert Slutzky hasnoted that, typical of Le Corbusier's late work, the ramp allows the observer toenter the building as the eye enters a painting, at the center of its spatial field, asopposed to the hierarchical stacking of a classical facade. 5 John Hejduk extendsthis, noting the importance of he diagonal in the Carpenter Center: "The rampis a three dimensional torque .. . Like a bicycle pedal, when pressure is broughtdown upon the termina l ends, the whole building starts to revolve and spin:'6Yetthis is not a simple dialectic of movement and stasis. What is astonishing aboutthe Carpenter Center is the almost total absence of fixed point s of reference. Tosay that an object is destabilized implies a dis tortion from a prior stable state;that prior condition is difficult to identify in this case. If the ramp, for example,is the most obvious measure of movement, it is equally important to note thatthe entire ground plane swells downw ard as the ramp moves up in space. As onemoves toward the center of he site, the ground drops away, front and back. Justas there is no facade as a stable vertical datum against which horizontal movement is registered, there is no fixed ground plane as horizontal datum. This isevident even in the detail of the ramp itself, which slopes asymmetrically incross section to acc ommodate a drainage channel.

Hejduk's analysis delves deeply into the order of the building, showing howeven the column grid participates in the mobile dynamic. His exacting formal

LE CORBUSIER AND MODERNIST MOVEMENT: THE CARPENTER CENTER FOR VISUAL ARTS {I

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Allen_Le Corbusier and Modernist Movement_The Carpenter Center_2000