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Organizer : Alka Pande, Delhi - Kiran Joshi, Chandigarh -
Balkrishna Doshi, Ahmedabad
Director : Jacques Sbriglio
• Delhi, India Habitat Centre 13 - 24 Novembre 2007
• Chandigarh, Fine Arts Museum 6 - 22 Decembre 2007
• Ahmedabad, Mill Owners Association Building 5 - 22 January
2008
Held jointly by the Le Corbusier Foundation, the India Habitat
Centre of New Delhi, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy
in India, the Alliances Françaises of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad,
this exhibition sets out to provide the Indian public with a view
of the final twenty years of Le Corbusier’s work.
The choice of this period, 1945-1965, corresponds to what is today
generally referred to as the work of his maturity. The years following
the end of the Second World War saw a significant change in the
scale of Le Corbusier’s production, with the arrival of important
commissions and public consecration on an international scale. “From
Marseilles to Chandigarh” goes from the building of the Unité
d’habitation in Marseilles (1945-1952) – the first large
scale work in France undertaken by Le Corbusier, at a time when
he was already fifty-eight, as he himself was fond of pointing out
– to the last works, finished or in gestation: the institutional
buildings in Chandigarh or the Hospital in Venice, and the other
important Corbusian icons of this period – the Chapel at Ronchamp,
the Couvent de la Tourette or, more modestly, the Cabanon at Cap
Martin.
This glorious record, the apotheosis of Le Corbusier’s life
and work, is not however exempt from equally resounding failures:
the failure of the Plan d’urbanisme for Saint-Dié in
1945, when the architect had already been ousted from Algeria in
1942, the failed venture of the competition for the United Nations
Headquarters contract in New York in 1947 or the failure of his
non-participation in the 1951 UNESCO competition in Paris. If we
add the death of Yvonne Le Corbusier in 1957, it becomes clearer
how and why, in these last twenty years of intense activity, Le
Corbusier distanced himself from the myth of the cold, rationalistic
theorist to take on the role of a humanistic and even spiritually-minded
architect,giving free rein to formal creative energies that were
to place him in the pantheon of the great architects of the 20th
century.
The invitation to work in India extended to Le Corbusier rested
not only on his international fame, but equally on the fact that
throughout his career he had constantly reflected on the possibilities
for the emergence of a culture of modernity in countries or continents
with a strong cultural tradition, such as Algeria or South America.
This ability to understand other cultures, and to discern in their
traditions the conditions under which contemporary forms of architecture
might be devised, can easily be seen in his research into climate,
lifestyles or the use of traditional technologies.
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