Honor where honor is due. That's what the curators of the Center Pompidou in Paris thought and they are celebrating Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, with a large exhibition of works until August 3rd. Like hardly anyone else, the architect, urban planning theorist, sculptor and painter who died 50 years ago laid the foundations for how we live and furnish ourselves today. What's more, what we call "modernity" would be unimaginable without his works and thoughts!
He was obsessed with the law of proportion between building and occupant, which he worked out as a principle of the “measures of man”, and the basis for his entire work. The average man, Le Corbusier determined, was 183 cm tall, 226 cm with arms raised. Appropriately, the exhibition shown in Gallery 2 is also called "Mesures de l'Homme".
There you can see an interestingly prepared cross-section of the extensive oeuvre of the native Swiss, who took French citizenship in 1930: a total of 300 paintings, sculptures, sketches, architectural drawings, models, objects, films, photographs and documents. Enough "material" to immerse yourself completely in the world of Le Corbusier and the range of his intellectual and very practical examination of houses and humanism for a morning or afternoon. That sounds like a stimulating treat, n'est-ce pas ?!
All information about the exhibition can be found here .
Photos: FLC, ADAGP, Paris 2015; Center Pompidou/Dist. RMN-GP/B. Prevost; ADAGP, Paris 2015
