Architecture News & Views We Need More Adventurous Buildings

Date Published:

27/05/2008

Debates between lovers of pastiche architecture and defenders of an aggressive high-tech Modernism have acquired a familiar and sterile tone. Both camps tend to argue their case without attempting to appreciate their opponents' objections.

Credit: Edina van der Wyck/Media 10 Syndication

In 1925, the Swiss Modernist architect Le Corbusier designed some houses for manual workers who worked in a sugar-packing factory on the outskirts of Bordeaux. The houses were exemplars of Modernism, each a series of undecorated boxes with long rectangular windows, flat roofs, and bare walls. Le Corbusier was especially proud of their lack of local and rural allusions and mocked the aspirations of what he called the 'folkloric brigade'. His admiration for industry and technology expressed itself in expanses of concrete, undecorated surfaces, and naked light bulbs.

But the new tenants had a very different idea of beauty. It was not they who had had their fill of tradition and luxury, of gentleness and refinement, nor they who were bored by the regional idiom or the detailed carvings of older buildings. In a concrete hangar, dressed in regulation blue overalls, they spent their days on a production line. At the end of a shift in the plant, being further reminded of the dynamism of modern industry was not a pressing psychological priority.

Within a few years, the workers therefore transformed their all-but-identical Corbusian cubes into uniquely differentiated, traditional-looking spaces capable of reminding them of the things their working lives had stripped away. Unconcerned with spoiling the great architect's designs, they added to their houses pitched roofs, shutters, small casement windows, flowered wallpaper, and picket fences in the vernacular style, and once that was done, set about installing a variety of ornamental fountains and gnomes in their front gardens.

In a way the high-handed Le Corbusier never appreciated, the factory workers were committed to a decorative style that evoked the qualities with which their own lives had been insufficiently endowed.