The Barbicans Le Corbusier debate was less about ethics than architecture's genius virus, says Jay Merrick

摘要

A debate conflating Le Corbusier with world-saving design and ethics is inherently problematic, because one has first to assume that the Bakelite-spectacled chimera designed with an ethically open-handed appreciation of ideas and lives very different to his own. Unfazed by the challenge, Sean Griffiths of FAT, architectural historian Charles Jencks, Winy Maas of MVRDV, Cameron Sinclair co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and Fabian Hecker of Zaha Hadid Architects got down to it, with the BBC's Razia Iqbal in the chair.rnCharles Jencks set the tone: Corb was 'the Barack Obama of architecture': a charismatic convincer, the greatest architect of the 20th century, whose legacy was manifest in the 'cosmic' poetics of buildings like the Unite d'Habitation (1952) and Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp (1954). Cosmic, therefore ineffable, so never mind the Plan Voisin or letters to his chum, Benito Mussolini.