Le Corbusier and the space of photography

Abstract

In 1933, after a decade of adamantly opposing the decorative arts in architecture, Le Corbusier adorned his recently completed PavilIon Suisse with a photo-mural. Comprising forty-four square photographs and extending the length of a long, precisely curved wall, the photo-mural served as focal point to this dormitory for Swiss students in Paris. The black-and-white images combined highly abstract microscopic and aerial views of nature with equally abstract views of geometric, man-made objects (figure 1). In a lecture in Prague two years later, André Breton — his Surrealist viewpoint the antithesis of Le Corbusier's Purist perspective — heartily praised the photo-mural, commending it as an example of ‘concrete irrationality’. He saw in it ‘the desire for ideal things’ often found in Art Nouveau architecture, describing it as ‘irrationally wavy’ and comparing it with two ‘surreal’ monuments: the Ideal Palace of the mailman Cheval and Antonio Gaudí's Barcelona cathedral, a ‘magnificent church, all in vegetables and crustaceans’. And though Breton felt that the Swiss pavilion answered ‘all the conditions of rationality and coldness that anyone could want in recent years since it is the work of Le Corbusier’, he nevertheless viewed the photo-mural as indication that architecture was again attempting ‘to break through all its limits’. His lecture was titled ‘Surrealist Situation of the Object’.1

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