EXPRESSION OF THE DESIRE TO POSSESS ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL

A modern kind of primitive
By Edwin Heathcote
Published: March 10 2009 00:56 | Last updated: March 10 2009 00:56
One of the strangest stories in modern architecture is that of Le Corbusier’s obsession with a villa (modernistically named E 1027) by the Irish designer Eileen Gray at Cap Martin in the south of France.

Gray was a hugely talented but little-known designer whose reputation today far outstrips the one that she had during her career. (As if to underline how far, last month an armchair by Gray fetched an astonishing €22m [$28bn] at the Paris auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s collection.) Le Corbusier was the most famous and influential architect of the century. Yet Le Corbusier was so drawn to Gray’s villa that, after staying there, he returned to the site to build himself a cabanon, a retreat or hut of the most elemental kind.

A replica of that hut now stands in the loft of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Art Deco Florence Hall. But it is a strange object. Reproducing the interior only, it appears as a blind black box, its creators – the Italian furniture manufacturer Cassina – having apparently decided that the log cabin non-aesthetic of its exterior was somehow unnecessary.

This seems odd to me, as it embodies such an obvious, if subconscious, memory of Le Corbusier’s Swiss roots. Entering the tiny space feels a little like walking into a fun-fair ghost house and, indeed, it reveals a space haunted by the contradictory dreams of modernism.

Le Corbusier, imaginer of a world of towers in parkland, of elevated walkways and endless freeways, of the destruction of central Paris to create boulevards of terrifying but monumental banality, and inspirer of the worst high-rise housing in the world, built his primitive hut in 1952.

A minimal cell measuring only 14 square metres, exquisitely planned and furnished with considered rigour, it is surely something like the retreat every writer, architect or artist has dreamed of. Austere yet framing picturesque views of the Mediterranean, it is that seemingly paradoxical blend of luxurious self-denial characteristic of modernism’s great moments. The tea-chest stools, the industrial copper piping of the plumbing, the coarse bent steel of the simple light fittings – all embody a viscerally primitive variety of modernism.

Le Corbusier designed the Cabanon just as he was abandoning the sleek aesthetic of his earlier work for a more expressionistic, sculptural style. It was built as he was working on the church at Ronchamp, the powerfully primitive Maisons Jaoul and embarking on the Indian city of Chandigarh, each a vision of modernist monumentalism.

The Cabanon is an intriguing counterpoint to the Le Corbusier show at the Barbican. That sprawling exhibition, situated in London’s most famously Corbusier-inspired complex, presents the grand vision; here the hut appears as a refinement of all those years of theory.

Just to complete the story of Gray’s house, after she moved out, leaving it to her former lover, Le Corbusier painted a set of hideous murals over its exquisite whiteness. Gray was horrified. This has often been cited as an example of architectural rape, the expression of the desire to possess all that is beautiful.

Le Corbusier was a terrible artist but, as this little hut shows, an architect who still has things to tell us. He drowned mysteriously in the Mediterranean near his Cabanon in 1965, and the little hut and the villa he had defiled were probably the last buildings he ever saw.

‘Le Corbusier’s Cabanon 1952-2006 – The Interior 1:1’, sponsored by Cassina, RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London, until April 28. Tel +44 20 7580 5533; ‘Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture’, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until May 24. Tel +44 20 7638 8891

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009