TWENTY YEARS LATER

摘要

It's 1911, and the oldest of the youngsters of the Modern movement is getting ready for a trip to the Orient at 24 years of age. Le Corbusier's voyage was going to be without excess, without hitches, without error - a perfectly scientific and self-contained trip. Although undertaken without the easily justifiable indulgence toward distraction and flanerie that is characteristic of a young man's initiation travel, it was to be a perfectly modern trip. Could he not have limited himself to X-raying his own continent of Europe? No. Scouring through exotic territory far removed from architectural reasoning was what Le Corbusier needed to determine the invariables that would give this discipline its structuralist theory for the 20th century. Before Claude Levi-Strauss had even begun conducting his fieldwork, Le Corbusier was immersed in the savage architectural thinking that was to give him the very sense of modernity to come.