I was in Paris in late April for this year’s PEM & ENM lectures…. with a focus on front-end theory & political economy issues associated with carbon trading, as well as China’s new efforts in this area. Sidney Lambert-Lalitte agreed to tackle the middle ground: the EU ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme), & efforts over recent years to accomplish reforms in this key arena. I outlined America’s important historical intellectual contributions to pollution control ideas & economic theory…. but made no attempt, however, to justify its current political idiocy.

You might have noticed that I’ve been on a bit of an ‘modernist’ architectural binge lately…. taking ‘mid-century modernism’ tours in California, checking out Gaudi’s “Catalan modernisme” works in Barcelona, etc., etc. So I decided to use this Parisian visit to visit one of the godfathers of the movement: Le Corbusier.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who adopted the name Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-born architect who later became a French citizen. I mentioned in the recent Palm Springs posting that Albert Frey, the architect who designed that city’s earliest modernist buildings, had worked for the French architect in Paris – and Le Corbusier had a similar influence on architects all around the world, in both building design and city planning.

La Roche house interior

His buildings were guided by his famous “five architectural principles”: 1) The use of ‘pilotis’ – supporting columns – to carry the structural load of the building; this allowed 2) a free plan, since walls no longer had to bear the weight, and the interior could be freely designed; 3) the building’s façade was similarly freed, and could be made of light materials or even glass; 4) the light façade allowed the use of horizontal/ribbon windows throughout, providing plenty of light for all rooms; and 5) the roof should be flat (not sloping), and available for gardening, flowers and other (usually outdoor-type) domestic purposes.

These principles can be found in many of the Palm Springs (& numerous other) buildings, but the real showcase for them was Villa Savoye, a house Le Corbusier designed and built in the late 1920s/early 1930s in Poissy, a town about 25 km (15 miles) west/northwest of Paris. One of the exhibits at the Fondation Le Corbusier headquarters (located in the La Roche house in Paris’ 16th arrondissement) had a video showing various stages of construction at the Villa Savoye….. & so after checking that out, I hopped on the Metro & RER and headed to Poissy.

Villa Savoye

I find both the La Roche house and the Villa Savoye visually pleasing…. although I don’t think I’d like to live in either one of them. I had just come from a comfortable, heavy, stone-solid chateau in the south of France (see posting below)…. & suspect that that might have influenced my views. But I also routinely use Le Corbusier’s city planning ideas in the urbanization portions of my environmental lectures – as an example of what NOT to do. Most people are very glad that his ‘Plan Voisin’ was never built, as it would have wiped out the Marais section of Paris, replacing it with soulless 300 foot towers and a layout well-suited to the automobile instead of pedestrians.

Plan Voisin for Paris
Credit: Fondation Le Corbusier

Straight lines & glass & open-floor spacing can certainly be attractive at small scale…. & I tend to think the same thing about modernism itself; it’s nice, but only in small doses.