Upside down or sideways up: corporeality, architecture and urbanism in translations between ground and image plane

摘要

To turn an object upside down or sideways up in order to spark imaginative transformation engages a primordial motive of play. Painters, composers and choreographers, associated with the New York School, such as Jackson Pollock, Earle Brown and Trisha Brown, have appropriated this motive to inform a range of works and performances through which cardinal reorientation runs as a common thread. In 1950 Le Corbusier inscribed 'action sculptures' on the beach, to be cast in plaster and then uprighted for display, thereby paraphrasing Pollock's phased working process. Even before and after this episode, transposition between horizontal and vertical planes constitutes a pervasive undercurrent infusing Le Corbusier's practice and writing, with the conception of the 'vertical garden city' as its most visible index. Cardinal transposition, which negotiates between corporeality, image and diagrammatic abstraction, resurfaces in the work of Le Corbusier's contemporaries and successors. The analysis is threefold. It first explores corporeal practices in the arts; further it traces strategic usages in architecture and urbanism; lastly it examines the inversion of its premises in architectural critique. Using Le Corbusier as a central figure, this paper makes visible a twentieth-century meshwork of practices and strategies which imagine, simulate or actualise cardinal transposition, thereby challenging tectonic certainties, and releasing new possibilities for comprehending and designing space.