Le Corbusier and The Americas: Affinities, Appropriations and Anthropophagy

Abstract

[EN] The paper draws attention to Le Corbusier's first trip to the American continent, with a particular focus on his visions and expectations built before the corporeal dislocation to the New World in September 1929. This approach suggests not only an investigation of one single voyage, but of multiple ones, and above all intellectual ones. Voyages that cross biographies, discourses and practices – in a public and intimate scale – which are attentive to a history embodied in its social actors allowing a confrontation of materials that transcends the so called architectural field. It examines one critical moment of ruptures in Le Corbusier's production (1925-1930), and works across the architectural discussions at that time, placing Le Corbusier in a wider web of reciprocal influences and circulation of ideas in order to help to construct a sense of the fragmented, or even silenced, discourses within the artistic and architectural debates in the late twenties. Such an approach not only allows new interpretations but also the establishment of a new periodization on Le Corbusier's knowledge of- and interests in- the Americas, as well as the narratives produced.

[ES] The paper draws attention to Le Corbusier's first trip to the American continent, with a particular focus on his visions and expectations built before the corporeal dislocation to the New World in September 1929. This approach suggests not only an investigation of one single voyage, but of multiple ones, and above all intellectual ones. Voyages that cross biographies, discourses and practices – in a public and intimate scale – which are attentive to a history embodied in its social actors allowing a confrontation of materials that transcends the so called architectural field. It examines one critical moment of ruptures in Le Corbusier's production (1925-1930), and works across the architectural discussions at that time, placing Le Corbusier in a wider web of reciprocal influences and circulation of ideas in order to help to construct a sense of the fragmented, or even silenced, discourses within the artistic and architectural debates in the late twenties. Such an approach not only allows new interpretations but also the establishment of a new periodization on Le Corbusier's knowledge of- and interests in- the Americas, as well as the narratives produced.