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LE CORBUSIER and NATURE
with Tim Benton at Erno Goldfinger's home at 2 Willow Road NW3
Thursday 18th June 2020
Doors open at 6:30 pm, Talk commences at 7:00 pm
Trained in a school of decorative arts, the pioneering modernist Le Corbusier never lost the Ruskinian conviction that the close study of nature was the primary source of art. Even during the ‘Purist years’ in Paris in the 1920s, when he was making his name as an architect looking to engineering and machines for inspiration, he was still collecting and drawing sea-shells and other natural forms. His books – such as Urbanisme (1924) and La Ville Radieuse (1935) include illustrations of natural forms.
This talk will be hosted in the Hampstead residence of Brutalist architect, Erno Goldfiner, where hear historian Tim Benton will reveal how nature played an important role in the creative direction of Le Corbusier's work. Benton will discuss two notions of 'Nature' in relation to Le Corbusier - the tangible, mysterious organic world of natural growth compared to the belief in the ‘Laws of Nature’, the idea that the world is determined by unchanging constants such as geometry and harmonic proportions. This talk will focus particularly on the period 1926 to 1936, when Le Corbusier’s art and architecture changed radically, abandoning the ‘Five Points for a New Architecture’ for a more complex, textured and organic synthesis.’
Tickets £15 including a glass of prosecco.
Tim Benton
Tim Benton is a leading researcher in Modernist architecture, with Le Corbusier as his special field of expertise. Benton has published a number of books on Le Corbusier including a classic study of the design of his villas in Paris in the 1920s, 'The Rhetoric of Modernism : Le Corbusier as a Lecturer’,'Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer' and 'Le Corbusier Peintre a Cap Martin'. Benton has also contributed to several major modernist exhibitions at the V&A, Hayward Gallery and Fundación Juan March among others.
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