Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
On the one hand the mass of the people look for a decent dwelling, and
this question is of burning importance. On the other hand the man of
initiative, of action, of thought, the LEADER, demands a shelter for his
meditations in a quiet and sure spot; a problem which is indispensable
to the health of specialized people. 18
Accordingly, the apartment blocks imagined for the masses complement the
villa, stocked with Purist paintings, that Le Corbusier designed in 1923 for the
Swiss banker Raoul La Roche. In practice the nature of rationalization is clarified:
its technical aspect serves a social content, class difference, just as the
supposed superiority of the capitalist organization of labor, vaunted by theorists
from Adam Smith to Taylor, with its prohibition of dawdling or “soldiering,”
reflects the viewpoint of the employer, not the employee. The irrational element
of the social system emerges in Le Corbusier’s text in the figure of the charismatic
leader, with whom the architect completely identifies, dreaming as he does
of the destruction of the ancient city of Paris and its reconstruction according to
his “rational” design.
At the center of the urban ideal Le Corbusier presented to the public in his
plans for a “Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants” of 1922, glass
towers housed the administrative elite: “captains of business, of industry, of
finance, of politics, masters of science, of pedagogy, of thought, the spokesmen of
the heart, the artists, poets, musicians.” 19 Luxury apartment houses for the elite
surround the towers, while lower-level bureaucrats and workers live in more
modest suburban areas. Le Corbusier’s conception of the governing elite clearly
descends from the nineteenth-century capitalist utopian Henri de Saint-Simon’s
doctrine of the class of creative industriels, and indeed Le Corbusier had good relations
with French neo-Saint-Simonians, as well as with the similarly-minded
Redressement français, a technocratic movement under the leadership of utilities
magnate Ernest Mercier that aimed to reinvigorate the national economy by
means of efficient mass production and a government headed by “experts.” 20 The
Redressement’s monthly bulletin, distributed free of charge to 25,000 to 30,000
18 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, p. 24.
19 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris, 1925), p. 93, cit. Robert Fishman, “From the Radiant City to
Vichy: Le Corbusier’s plans and politics, 1921–1942,” in Russell Walden (ed.), The Open Hand:
Essays on Le Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 241–83. See also the extended discussion
in R. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le
Corbusier (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 151–263. The “Radiant City” of 1935, designed
after his disillusionment with capitalist patronage led Le Corbusier to involvements with fascism
and syndicalism, featured egalitarian housing, but still concentrated decision-making vertically
in a centralized command structure.
20 See Mary McLeod, “‘Architecture or revolution’: Taylorism, technocracy, and social change,”
Art Journal 43:2 (1983), pp. 131–47. On the St.-Simonian revival, see Sylvie Schweitzer, “Rationalization
of the factory, center of industrial society: the ideas of André Citroën,” International
Journal of Political Economy 24:4 (1991–2), pp. 11–34.
80