Le Corbusier

Between 1907 and 1911, at about 20 years of age, Le Corbusier undertook several study trips. He travelled to Italy, Vienna, Paris and Berlin, followed by the Balkan region, Greece and Turkey. During his travels, he made hundreds of drawings, sketches and watercolours. Rapidly and with great concentration, he recorded his impressions in small notebooks. For him, the sketches became a library of memory from which he would draw his inspiration for decades to come. Here’s what he had to say in this connection:

“When you travel and busy yourself with visual things such as architecture, painting or sculpture, you look with your eyes and draw the things you see in order to internalize them and make them part of your own history. Once things have been recorded with a pencil, they stay with you for your whole life. They are recorded and become inscribed into you.”

His travels helped him in his studies of the history of art, architecture and cities. Le Corbusier was particularly interested in ancient architecture with its clear forms, ideal proportions and stringent geometries – its conscious and recognizable order, in other words.

In this drawing, Le Corbusier captured the Parthenon in Athens in pencil and watercolour. The ancient temple from the 5^th century BC has characteristic Doric columns which surround the interior of the temple. Le Corbusier chose a narrow cutout dominated by the columns on the left-hand side. The extreme perspective and the proximity to the columns make their monumental nature, exact geometry and stringent arrangement tangible. At the same time, Le Corbusier used this close perspective to contrast the ancient architecture with the vastness of the landscape on the right-hand side. Man-made order and harmony collide with nature and the landscape here.