The Architectonic Colour - 010 Publishers

1 Introduction
The review of the architectonic polychromy of Le Corbusier
The first part of Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre complète was published at the end of 1929,
immediately after his return from South America. The book is a summary of a
decade of modern architecture, the conclusion of a period. In the introduction
to the second part of this Oeuvre complète, which embraces the period from 1929
to 1934, he wrote: ‘It was by chance that the first volume came out in 1929. This
year meant to me, to a certain extent, the end of the first period of investigations.
1930 opened a period of new tasks; it relates to important works, great
events in architecture and town construction, to the marvellous epoch of evolving
a new machine civilization.’¹ Le Corbusier regarded his architectonic revolution
as complete.
It is interesting to know that, of the realized works, only three were allocated
any elucidatory words on the subject of colour use: the La Roche-Jeanneret villas,
the housing project in Pessac, and the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau.² Altogether,
Le Corbusier expended no more than nine hundred words on this topic.
In comparison to the enormous quantity of his other writings, it comes off
rather poorly.³ The text on Pessac appeared in L’Architecture Vivante and later in
Oeuvre complète I; the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau was a little more expansively
treated in Le Corbusier’s Almanach d’architecture moderne and also returned in an
abbreviated version in Oeuvre complète; the colour of the La Roche-Jeanneret
villas was only discussed in Oeuvre complète. These articles, plus a text in Cahiers
d’art, are the meagre textual remains of reflections on colour from the period of
Le Corbusier’s architectonic revolution. For coloured pictures, one had to rely
upon L’Architecture Vivante, in which seven different projects were presented.⁴
In the context of historiography, the wallpaper samples book he compiled for
the Salubra company forms a rich supplement, giving greater insight into the
polychromy experiments he had undertaken in previous years. The samples
themselves consisted mainly of plain colours that corresponded to the previously
painted colours. A colour keyboard was supplied along with the samples
book, providing the opportunity to make colour choices. This offers insight into
the combination patterns that he used in various buildings. What he had used as
experiments in his houses in the twenties was commercialized with the wallpaper
and made suitable for large-scale application.
The actual accompanying text of the Salubra collection was never published by
Le Corbusier himself. Although the samples book itself came with a short explanation,
the text entitled ‘Polychromy architecturale’, which was first made public
in the eighties, contained a comprehensive explanation of the wallpaper collection
in addition to an equally extensive outline of the polychromy in his
architecture.⁵ In conjunction with the samples book, this text provides the most
9
1 Le Corbusier, Oeuvre complète
II 1929-1934, 15.
2 For all Le Corbusier’s texts
on colour, see Appendix V.
3 See Appendix V.
4 For all coloured drawings
and coloured-in photos in
publications from the twenties,
see Appendix IV