Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
The distinction Le Corbusier draws between engineering and architecture is the
basis for a comparison between the two stressing the contemporary “unhappy
state of retrogression” of the latter and the former’s present-day achievement of
“its full height.” In particular, Le Corbusier contrasts the sorry state of French
architecture with industrial design, especially as practiced in the United States:
We are all acquainted with too many business men, bankers and merchants,
who tell us: “Ah, but I am merely a man of affairs, I live
entirely outside the art world, I am a Philistine.” We protest and tell
them: “All your energies are directed towards this magnificent end
which is the forging of the tools of an epoch, and which is creating
throughout the whole world this accumulation of very beautiful things
in which economic law reigns supreme, and mathematical exactitude is
joined to daring and imagination. That is what you must do; that, to be
exact, is Beauty.” 15
Great architecture requires a synthesis of efficiency and beauty, in which the
means of modern technology are mobilized for the ends of fundamental form.
With such words the young architect addressed himself to a ruling class whose
aesthetic was still rooted in the nineteenth century. 16 Following a world war
which revealed the economic and political might of the United States and led to
social revolution in Russia, Le Corbusier offered principles of design evoking the
system of production identified with the names of Taylor and Ford: standardization,
repetition, accuracy, efficiency. Illustrations in his book took American
commercial buildings as models for apartment houses assembled from modular
units. Similarly, L’Esprit nouveau, the journal Corbusier edited with Ozenfant, celebrated
modern office furniture for its clear and efficient design and praised
Fernand Léger for reconfiguring such classical themes as the group of women in
an interior so as to incorporate into painting the principles employed in the construction
of steamships. 17
At the same time, the limits of standardization emerge in Le Corbusier’s text
when he differentiates between two distinct architectural needs:
15 Ibid., p. 22.
16 For a discussion of the professional situation Le Corbusier confronted in the 1920s, see Reyner
Banham, Theory and Design, Chapter 16; the book as a whole is fundamental for an understanding
of modernist ideologies of design. See also Rassegna 2:3 (I clienti di Le Corbusier) (1980).
17 In the same vein, Walter Gropius, propagandizing the spirit of the Bauhaus to an English and
American audience in the mid-1930s, would assert that standardization “is not an impediment
to the development of civilization, but, on the contrary, one of its immediate prerequisites.” It
works “by the elimination of the personal content of their designers and all otherwise ungeneric
or non-essential features” (Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Boston: Charles
T. Branford, 1935), p. 34).
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