While describing the genius of his originality and his ‘intuitive flashes of insight’, Le Corbusier systematically obliterated unwanted references from the works of his biographers and set up a carefully vetted archive called the Le Corbusier Foundation.
This lecture considers the discovery of a recently discovered handwritten entry in a ‘lost’ (ie thrown away) Le Corbusier notebook, which indicates that he found (more than) inspiration in the work of a relatively forgotten modernist architect of the late 18th century. What are the implications for the modernist notion of originality versus that old-fashioned Beaux-Arts concept of ‘émulation’? And when did modernist originality begin?
Lecture given on 16 November 2006.