A Paradoxical Avant-Garde: Le Corbusier’s Villas of the 1920s

Richard Etlin, “A Paradoxical Avant-Garde: Le Corbusier’s Villas of the 1920s,” Architectural Review 181 (January, 1987): 21-32. Building on the writings of Colin Rowe, Kurt Forster, Alan Colquhoun, this essay explores Le Corbusier’s paradoxical use of history to inform meaning and to provide form in his avant-garde Cubist villas of the 1920s. Section titles: The Romantic Legacy 1. The Architectural System 2. Philosophical Eclecticism 3. The Architectural Promenade La Roche-Jeanneret Houses and the Sittesque Tradition The Lessons of Egypt and Greece Maison Cook, the French Hôtel, and Synthetic Cubism Villa Stein, the Pylon Temple, and the Ocean Liner Villa Savoye, the Acropolis, and the Second Machine Age Errata: p. 24 left column: not “en échelon” but rather “en enfilade” p. 24 right column: not “Henri Martin” but rather “Camille Martin” p. 25 caption 16 should read: analytical drawing from Choisy’s Histoire of the Hôtel du Maine, Paris, 1728-30. This article is one of two sequential essays developed out of a talk presented at the University of Virginia in December, 1981, and later at the 1985 Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. The first essay was published as “Le Corbusier, Choisy, and French Hellenism,” Art Bulletin 69 (June, 1987): 264-278. The ideas presented in both articles were further developed in my book Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier: The Romantic Legacy (Manchester University Press, 1994, paperback 1997).