Towards An Architecture: The Latest Architecture and News

This article was originally published on Common Edge.

This year marks the centennial of the first edition of Vers Une Architecture, Le Corbusier’s epoch-making book. Though a new English translation appeared in 2007 to much acclaim, most other practicing architects read the first English edition that appeared in 1928, entitled Towards a New Architecture. Comparing the three editions is instructive, particularly in one crucial respect: the insertion of the word “new” in the title. The book wasn’t really about new architecture, because very little of it showed buildings in the International Style. Instead, it was in many respects a clever diatribe intended to convince Europeans that they had no choice but to renounce every kind of architecture that had been built before the Great War and begin anew. It was remarkably successful in fulfilling that aim.

“A model by Corbusier is the only image that brings to my mind the idea of immediate suicide.” - Ivan Chtcheglov

Despite their pranks and dirty politics, the Situationists may have been right after all. The death of architecture students will not be a result of excessive studio work, but will rather occur from the sermonizing repetition of modernist ideals that continue to be taught. In Le Corbusier's manifesto, Vers une Architecture (Toward An Architecture), he advocates for the adoption of modern architecture as the solution to 20th-century global crises, in a way that now seems rather limiting. 

If the discipline doesn't move past the black-and-white photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion or the reductionist designs of the Bauhaus, students will continue to produce what may now be incorrectly associated with the “right architecture.” In order to break away from these stereotypes of what architecture should be, here are six explorations of building, curating and writing that resist these notions:

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