Le Corbusier

In the course of his training at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Le Corbusier was already making nature studies of pine cones or flowers. Over the decades, he established a “collection particulière” – a private collection. This included contemporary artworks, Greek and Byzantine artefacts and ancient objects, but also all kinds of odds and ends and curiosities as well as about 2,000 postcards. These served him as “Objets à réaction poétique”: objects which triggered a poetic reaction in him for aesthetic reasons. They could be the shell of a crab, which inspired him to design the roof of the chapel in Ronchamp, or a pebble and a root, which led him to the motif of the bull in the 1950s. In a depiction of a project from the year 1948, he combined the drawing of snail shells with a photograph of the façade of a villa he had designed. Here’s what Le Corbusier had to say in this regard:

“A building should be like a snail shell surrounded by a garden providing nutrition and food for thought.”

There are connections and relationships everywhere, and these can in turn lead to a reaction. Le Corbusier’s collection is part of his “patient research” and the associated quest for order and classification. Le Corbusier felt that the external surface of nature was chaotic. To him, the outlines of lakes or hills seemed “chopped up and fragmented” and were nothing but “confusion”. By collecting, classifying, selecting and exploring, Le Corbusier tried to find rules, laws and structures allowing him to impose order on this chaos.

“Human beings are creatures of the universe who incorporate the universe into their point of view; they act according to its laws, which they claim to have deciphered; they have formulated these laws and organized them into a cohesive system, a rational state of knowledge according to which they can act, invent and create.”