Corbusier
Sir: Stephen Gardiner (9 April) might have good cause for calling down Christopher Booker's attack on the rationalism of Le Corbusier but he is hardly helping it by insisting that Booker is a journalist (a sobriquet like 'politician,' I take it, that always becomes negative when stated on its own) or trying to catch Booker out on a footnote. Gardiner is right, of course, on the historical point he raises; Le Corbusier was the son, not the father, of the tower block as the father was the New York skyscraper which, until after the last war, developed outside the modern movement. But Booker knows this just as well as Gardiner himself. He was referring to the particular treatment of the tower block in Le Corbusier's proposal for a ville radieuse: a rigid geometry of hardangled towers in a parkland site. Would Gardiner deny that the Wile radieuse became the most influential architectural image of post-war modernism or that, whatever Le Corbusier might have borrowed, it was he who evoked it ? Booker was using a shorthand. Why should Gardiner find this so offensive?
I'll try a guess. The last ditch defenders of the modern movement—and no defender has been less unbowed than Stephen Gardiner—are up against it. The public has turned on modern architecture and is baying for blood. The architectural profession as a whole has been reduced to throwing schoolboy stink-bombs: every critic outside the profession is called a philistine or ignoramus. The official leaders, however, have already lost their nerve. The modern movement,
they remind their followers, is a mansion of many rooms. Let us close off the main rooms marked Le Corbusier or Gropius or Mies van der Rohe and retire to the wings' attics and outhouses marked Frank Lloyd Wright or Mackintosh, or de Kerk or Aalto or even Voysey and William Morris. A few diehards like Stephen Gardiner, however, have stayed in the main entrance and continue to make faces at the crowd. But Le Corbusier taught architects to think! Pre' tests Gardiner, trying desperately to Out 3 new gloss on the arrogant rationalism which Le Corbusier taught his many followers. Butthis schoolboy bravado will never,do. And Gardiner knows it. Whatever he might preach, his practice—vide his unusually attractive vernacular-based housing design.1 just completed for Milton Keynes--w1,11 betray him. The war is over. Le Corbusier s head is already on a pike. The modern architects crouching under the table in tb servants' quarters must come out soon art° face their tormentors, else they will starve to death for lack of commissions. it i5 n° longer dishonourable for modern architects to call quits.
Conrad Jameson
11 Bolt Court,
Fleet Street, London EC4
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