The modernism of “les trente glorieuses” was a direct reaction to the formal, smooth, pre-war Modernism whose master was Le Corbusier. The reaction to Le Corbusier was led by Le Corbusier – an artist who was forever reinventing himself.
He was a Swiss peasant who wanted to be a French genius. He was a sculptor, collagist, an activist, a catastrophic theorist, a totalitarian toady, a collaborator, a monk, a socialite, a cultural colonialist and a utopian follower of Fourier and Godin.
The five “unite d’habitations” that he designed owe much to the example of those pioneers. Once the machine is taken for granted, it no longer demands glorification. Like Roger Excoffon’s typefaces, Le Corbusier’s post-war manner uses machines, but doesn’t worship them. The architecture is plastic, expressive. There are deliberately rough edges. The materials play at primitivism. Purity of form is suppressed, impurity of form is more interesting.
Did I realise this in 1962? No. But it did prompt wonder and delight. I didn’t ask why. Nor did I make the link to the Citroen DS and the Mistral typeface.
Ronchamp was a piece in an unmade jigsaw, which, whatever it ended up looking like when finished, would proclaim the conjunction of France and tomorrow. In my second country the future had already arrived. Rather, “a future” had already arrived. A future that had nothing to do with nuclear-tooled ideological gangsters in 405-lines black-and-white. That future did not belong to us.
Jonathan Meades On France; fragments of an arbitrary encyclopaedia
middleton van jonker 