This summer’s big, unwieldy architecture show at MoMa, Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, has it that the architect “observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career." It’s an idea that challenges our conventional understanding of Corb, who favored frill-free, machine-inspired forms, and who rendered them, both sculpturally and scenographically, with unparalleled power. There are, on display, small watercolors Corb completed as a young man that capture landscapes with a lyrical economy. There are three recreations of rooms from his buildings, which all address the landscape through windows. And there are many, many drawings in which the architect renders landscapes and cityscaps as vigorous horizontal doodles, in the distance, visible above a roofline or through a window. But none of this suggests a deep connection to the landscape. Le Corbusier used windows to capture views, and landmarks to orient buildings and plans. But I can’t shake the received wisdom that Corb understood the landscape as a static field for buildings, which were its primary characters. When I visited Chandigarh, India I saw that the each of the main buildings, awesome in its sculptural gravity, stood apart from the walkways and pools of water that framed them, the broad roads that linked them, and the low-lying landscape all around. They were singular objects.

The great strength, and pleasure, of Le Corbusier’s buildings is their compositional mastery, the way they shape a dynamic interior landscape. The two Le Corbusier buildings I’ve visited that made the deepest impression – the Carpenter Center at Harvard and the ATMA Building in Ahmedabad, India – are essentially cinematic. These buildings lure a visitor inside and sweep her through with a sweet, practically supernatural power. The "modern landscape” Le Corbusier explored most deeply was an internal pictorial one, of the mind and the imagination, of platonic space and surface. The shadowed insides of the ATMA Building are enchanting, but arriving at the roof and wandering through its playground of forms is the climax. From here one can see the city and its river beyond, but also feel entirely liberated from them. As a friend of mine, an architect, noted, what are pilotis (the thin, unadorned round columns Corb advocated to lift buildings off the ground) but a refusal of the landscape? In his review of the exhibit Times critic Michael Kimmelman, who endorses its premise as a “provocation,” adds, “… Le Corbusier is too contradictory and controlling a genius to confirm to nature or any curator’s thesis." I agree.

ATMA Building, Ahmedabad, India. By Le Corbusier, 1956. Photograph by Nalina Moses

July 10, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Carpenter Center is Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the few modern buildings in Harvard Square. It’s both conspicuous and invisible. Set on a narrow, seventeenth-century block between two staid brick university buildings, it’s freakish and liberating. It doesn’t feel like an institutional building and it doesn’t even feel like a building, really. It feels more like a device for moving students in and out of its studios and galleries, a machine for coming and going.

The building is spectacularly porous. It has no center; in plan it’s two lung-shaped volumes connected with ramps that pass all the way through and spin off centripetally to the sidewalks at each side. Strangely, for a great modern building, there are no canonical photographs of it, and no single point of view from which you can see it as one whole thing. Approaching it on the sidewalk, you see the ramp and one half of the building, or the building cleft into two dissimilar parts. When I visited the Mill Owner’s Association Building in Ahmedabad I realized that Le Corbusier’s buildings, no matter how good they look from the outside, don’t lend themselves to one image. Instead they generate images for the moving visitor cinematically, and, in the case of that building, spectacularly. I could not leave the Mill Owner’s Building – I walked through it again and again. At the Carpenter Center, where I spent time roaming the galleries, I felt as if I were leaving it and then entering it again and again.