Round table facilitated by:
Sylvie ANDREU, Journalist and author, specialist in urban, landscape and territorial issues.
With:
Nicola BRAGHIERI, Architect, professor at EPFL, director of the architecture section ENAC/EPFL.
Rémi PAPILLAULT, Architect town planner, professor at ENSA Toulouse, administrator of the Le Corbusier Foundation.
Yannis TSIOMIS, Architect town planner, director of studies at the EHESS Paris
He was the man who accompanied and preceded the battles, revolutions, illusions and disillusions of a century of artistic and societal turmoil that invented Modernity.
Le Corbusier was guided throughout his life by the “new spirit” of his time. He never stopped fighting the conservatism of his peers, dictating what he calls the “Three Reminders to Architects: Volume-Surface-Plan”, opposing them on all occasions the innovative spirit of engineers. From 1922, he expressed his hostility to suburban housing, which consumes space and energy. He sensed the end of an era and the time for man to “break free”. His world was machinist, poetic and visionary.
A provocative architect, Le Corbusier quickly became an iconoclastic urban planner. Doesn’t the future of the planet play out in these cities or rather these world-cities whose hypertrophy, insecurity and segregation are feared? Le Corbusier had understood this by laying the foundations for town planning which failed to win unanimous support. However, the public is now addressing questions of density and urban sprawl, of landscaping, of nature in the city. These are all themes that refer to Corbusian research on “the green city” and urban density. What should be remembered or forgetten about Le Corbusier, arid and insatiable autodidact, humanist and sectarian, adulated or despised, who denied himself no artistic expression, wanted the happiness of men at all costs and believed only in his judgment? How not to wonder about this notoriety which still and always divides, even fifty years after his death? His admirers and detractors still quarrel over his work, which has not yet been classified as World Heritage for its “exceptional contribution to the modern movement”.