Ordering Code and Mediating Machine: Le Corbusier and the Roots of the Architectural Promenade

摘要

This dissertation analyses the roots of Le Corbusier’s concept of “promenade architecturale” by examining his formative years between the early education in La Chaux-de-Fonds and the journey to the East. The architectural promenade is here understood as a basic concept of Le Corbusier that informs the many factors implicated in his work. I start by proposing a broad understanding of the architectural promenade, seeing the concept as an expression for the experiential dimension of architecture and landscape. This experiential dimension, I argue, is broadly submitted to a pattern rooted in his early formative years–a pattern which developed along with the other themes and concepts that he absorbed during this early period, and which, like these, had deep consequences in his work and thought.It is my argument that this experiential pattern is rooted in the dialectical categories of the picturesque and the Sublime in landscape experience. This is shown through an analysis of his academic works in La Chaux-de-Fonds, made between 1902 and 1907. The study of the following traveling period–the trip to Italy and Vienna in 1907-1908, the Parisian sojourn between 1908 and 1909, the German sojourn between 1910 and 1911, and the journey to the East in 1911–shows the many intellectual discourses that he was exposed to, and how, through these, the initial dialectical categories crystallized during the school years were gradually enriched with Romantic aesthetics and philosophical concepts, acquiring architectural specificity.The analysis of this process through his early works and writings allows us to understand the formation and meaning of the promenade’s experiential pattern, and reevaluate the extent to which it partakes in Le Corbusier’s rich and complex multilayered architectural discourse. What can be broadly termed as architectural promenade is seen as a manifestation of Le Corbusier’s code of ordering spaces and organizing the world, through which he invested them with a symbolic dimension and philosophical world-view. Together with technical, practical, and aesthetic factors, Le Corbusier’s architectural promenade is understood as a fundamental component of his Romantic project for integrating man and the world.