Le Corbusier

A hearty welcome to the exhibition “Le Corbusier. The Order of Things”!

Le Corbusier is considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern architecture. With great passion, he advocated a radical reorganization of residential and urban spaces with the aim of improving the quality of life for human beings and bringing forth a new lifestyle. His goal was to use the possibilities of technical progress and combine them with classical principles of aesthetics.

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in the Swiss town of La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887. He died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in France in 1965. This exhibition is centred on Le Corbusier’s working process, marked as it was by artistic experimentation in the “studio of patient research”, as he called it. The exhibition focuses on his cautious approach to architectural form and his struggle with composition as well as space, light and colour. It also examines the sources flowing into the design process. These range from objects found on the beach to the architecture of the ancient world.

“We maintain that it is the task of humans to create order and that their thoughts and actions are determined by the straight line and the right angle; we also maintain that the straight line is an instrument innate to humans which represents a noble goal in their thought processes.”

… as Le Corbusier himself once said. He saw the act of creating order as being one of the fundamental tasks facing art and architecture. For him, creating order meant establishing a harmony between form, material and colour. Order was an important compositional principle in his purist painting. The term also refers to philosophical aspects of art and building. For Le Corbusier, order was a liberating gesture allowing human beings to confront chance and arbitrariness and serving as a requirement for freedom and progress. He used the term for simple geometrical forms and bodies, right angles and mathematics. With the concept of order, Le Corbusier became part of the avant-garde utopia seeking to refashion the world from the ground up rationally and in the spirit of progress.

We hope you have an entertaining and thought-provoking tour!