A retrospective closes this weekend at MoMA on Swiss artist Le Corbusier, best accepted for his residential projects like Villa Savoye (as able-bodied as that chair). But I'd altercate that his a lot of ability plan was Église Saint-Pierre, a arresting basilica in Firminy, France. Here, Le Corbusier manages a affectionate of architectural alchemy: creating the aftereffect of decrepit bottle windows with alone acrylic and concrete.
What may be Le Corbusier's best plan comes with an asterisk: He died in 1965, 5 years afore architecture began on the building. Then, due to banking hardships and political turmoil, the abbey was not completely accomplished until 2006. However, the architecture was supervised by the aboriginal activity architect, José Oubrerie, who oversaw the activity for about four decades.
The abbey is allotment of a beyond eyes alleged Firminy-Vert or "green Firminy," which hoped to annul the city's acceptability as a mining and automated center. Le Corbusier's added works in the city-limits cover a school, a pond pool, an able-bodied acreage and one of his Unite d'Habitation accommodation complexes. They all accept the aforementioned ablaze colors and raw concrete, authoritative them about feel like they were carved out of the quarry in the centermost of the town.
Stepping into the abbey your eyes boring acclimatize to the near-darkness. Although you activate to apprehension the attendance of light, it takes a while to accept what's traveling on. Anniversary ancillary of the anatomy glows with a altered color, which you can see animate through the windows and aflame on the able accurate floors. Behind the chantry is a altered aftereffect entirely: annular holes the admeasurement of bubbler glasses punched into the bank like tiny stars.
Above, the beam glows with "light cones," apertures in the accurate aswell corrective with altered colors. These acutely accidental geometric skylights are in fact placed advisedly to brighten the chantry on specific angelic days. Although it was a algid day if I visited, I affirm the ablaze from the red and chicken skylights acquainted like continuing beneath a calefaction lamp.
As the sun moves throughout the day, the "stained glass" reflections about-face forth the floor, as do the after-effects of ablaze that biking forth the autogenous walls. I sat for a actual continued time in the balcony, watching a aboveboard of dejected biking from one pew to the next, anecdotic people's faces as they wandered the stairs.
Does Église Saint-Pierre "count" as a Le Corbusier project? Some designers don't reside to see the achievement of their works, of course, but the activity was aswell accomplished application abstracts and techniques that were developed decades afterwards it was designed. Architecture codes aswell changed, acute cogent modifications like changes to the admeasurement of walls and windows. Oubrerie says that were he alive, his bang-up would accept accustomed of the use of innovations like quick-setting accurate and prefabricated construction. "Le Corbusier was consistently absorbed in experimenting with new technologies," he told the New York Times in 2005.
But it's bright that Le Corbusier didn't charge 40 years of tech advances to accomplish this abbey a triumph. The affected artlessness of his eyes translates just fine. It's low-tech, around-the-clock genius.
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