Exhibition

The exhibition explores Le Corbusier’s formative and study travels through some thirty rarely exhibited original works.

The 20-year-old Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s first trip outside his native Switzerland in 1907 was devoted to visiting Tuscan cities and discovering Trecento frescoes. The original works presented reveal the traveler’s dual approach: an analytical, descriptive approach to architecture, with graphite drawings; and, through vivid watercolors, the colorist’s approach of the La-Chaux-de-Fonds art school student, who wanted to be a painter.

In 1911, the future Le Corbusier embarked on “le voyage utile”, a long, six-month initiatory journey to the Orient, taking him through the Balkans, Turkey and Greece to reach the hoped-for goal of the Acropolis and return via Italy. The hundreds of pages in his notebooks reveal the young traveler’s methods of observation and transcription. The sketches capture, in a few strokes, the essence of what his eye chooses to retain. The traveler examines history, architecture – both popular and monumental – and the cities (Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Pompeii) he explores along the way.

The travels of his early maturity took him to Latin America in 1929, where he discovered “La terre vue d’avion” (The earth from an airplane), and was swept up in the changes that transformed his vision of the world. In 1931 and 1933, the revelation of the cities of the M’zab, an emotional, aesthetic and cultural shock, fueled his reflection on habitat, city and landscape. He also discovered the beauty of Moorish women, for whom he produced dozens of drawings, in situ or from postcards, on his return to Paris.

In this way, his travels played a fundamental role in the evolution of Le Corbusier’s thinking. While his early travels provided lessons that accumulated as nourishing sediment for the future project process, those of early maturity reinforced the foundation of an architectural doctrine. These journeys were also an opportunity to draw simply to express a visual emotion, and many pastel and watercolour studies bear witness to a blissful “pleasure in drawing”.

The exhibition features mostly originals, with only the notebook pages reproduced in facsimile. It also includes letters written by the young traveller to his family and friends, photos (those of him on his travels and those taken by himself), slide shows (travel notebooks from the Orient, Latin America, albums from the M’zab), books by the architect, in which his sketches are reproduced to illustrate his doctrinal statements, and works by authors on Le Corbusier’s travels.

Danièle Pauly, architectural historian, doctor and professor at ENSA d’Architecture, has devoted a decade of research to the work of Le Corbusier, another to theatrical space and scenography, and yet another to Mexican architecture. In addition to exhibition catalogs and numerous articles, her publications on Le Corbusier include: Le Corbusier, la chapelle de Ronchamp, (translated into 6 languages) and Le Corbusier. Albums d’Afrique du Nord, FLC/AAM (2013), Le Corbusier et le dessin, “ce labeur secret” (2015), Le Corbusier. Drawing as process (amer. trans., 2018). More recently, she has published volumes I and II of the Catalogue Raisonné of Le Corbusier’s drawings (2020 and 2022). After three exhibitions devoted to Mexican architecture and several on Le Corbusier’s drawings (Nancy, Antibes, Münster, Mendrisio), one of the last major exhibitions she curated was Le Corbusier, The Paths to creation, in Seoul (2016-2017).