Review: Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in Liverpool

Ellis Woodman on Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture in The Crypt, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

There is a moment early on in Liverpool’s new Le Corbusier retrospective which perfectly encapsulates its subject’s public persona.

It is a short film, from 1925, showing the man known to his mother as Charles Édouard-Jeanneret peering out from behind those fearsome thick-rimmed, circular spectacles that he invariably wore.

He is explaining his proposal for the construction of the Plan Voisin, a modest scheme to bulldoze much of central Paris and replace it with a series of 60-storey cruciform towers laid out on a grid.

As he turns to the map behind him, draws a large rectangle around the proposed site and calmly proceeds to black out the medieval street pattern, you can’t help thinking what a magnificent Bond villain he would have made.

Such moments of provocation proved wildly effective in promoting Le Corbusier to international fame. They also, however, served to caricature him as a deranged technocrat, an image that the work of his lesser post-war followers did much to reinforce.

And yet the exhibition powerfully conveys that this is only a fraction of the story. Yes, the urban plans still look absolutely barmy – thankfully, very few of his large-scale projects were realised – but Le Corbusier was also a painter, sculptor, furniture designer and, of course, an architect of some of the greatest buildings of the 20th century.

At Liverpool, all these aspects of his output are brought together, giving an indication of how developments in art – notably Cubism and Surrealism – played as large a role in shaping his architectural imagination as did developments in reinforced concrete technology and the growth of motor car use.

The show also describes a figure who was Picasso-like in his quest for reinvention. His early work draws on both classical architecture and the vernacular buildings of his native Switzerland.

It is only when he arrives in Paris in the 1920s that he adopts his pseudonym — which can be translated as “the crow-like one” — and begins to produce the series of highly abstract, spatially complex houses that bring him to the world’s attention.

The post-war work is as different again: muscularly sculptural, where the earlier work had been composed of thin planes; and in rough, exposed concrete and brick where it had previously been painted a pristine white.

One wall of the exhibition is devoted to Le Corbusier’s very substantial influence on the British architecture of the Fifties and Sixties. However, he never built here, and visiting much of his greatest work — the church at Ronchamp, the La Tourette monastery, the string of major buildings that he realised in India in the 1950s — demands a considerable trek.

The Liverpool show represents the next best thing, offering an Aladdin’s Cave of original models and drawings. As a bonus, it offers a rare opportunity to see inside the crypt of Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, the only part of Lutyens’s original design for the building to be built.

However, quite what Lutyens would have made of the show being staged here, I dread to think. On admission to his office, new staff members were notified that ownership of Le Corbusier’s books was considered a sacking offence.