Harmony and proportion incite the intellectual faculties and arrest the man of culture.”īut even apart from his irritating self-certainty, I found myself strongly disagreeing with his perspective. “Decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is colour, and is suited to simple races, peasants and savages. In fairness, it’s hard to get in the mindset of 1923, and I think the past 100 years haven’t been kind to elite European men who believe their opinions constitute an immutable and universal truth. Is this a foundational text that gives me a better framework for understanding 20th-century architecture? Yes.
Most architecture since then either follows its dictates or rebels against them. This book is his concise statement of his philosophy. Unfortunately, this is often forgotten today. Orchestrating those, and making sure that the visitor is always oriented to the whole, is the basic given of good architecture, like writing a grammatical sentence is a given for a good writer. And he taught me, and a generation of architecture students, 'the discipline of the route.' Buildings, as he taught us, are not experienced whole, but as a series of experiences. His drawings and his furniture are exciting, without being gaudy.
He had a zen spareness about his work, and a sculptural gift. In his hands, it was beautiful and practical, and also economical. He stated the case for modern architecture so convincingly that it seemed the only possible altenative. When I was in architecture school in England, Corb, as we called him, was the master (and Alvar Aalto the disciple).
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