The World at the tip of a pencil

The exhibition explores Le Corbusier's educational and study trips through some thirty original works that are rarely exhibited.

The first trip, in 1907, outside the native Switzerland of the young Charles-Édouard Jeanneret aged 20, is devoted to visiting Tuscan cities and discovering the frescoes of the Trecento. The original works presented reveal the dual approach that the traveler takes: an analytical and descriptive approach to architecture, with graphite drawings; and, thanks to lively watercolors, the colorist approach of the student of the art school of La-Chaux-de-Fonds, who wanted to be a painter.

In 1911, the future Le Corbusier undertook “the useful journey”, a long initiatory journey to the East, lasting six months, taking him through the Balkans, Turkey, Greece to reach the desired goal of the Acropolis and returning via Italy. He then filled many notebooks where hundreds of pages reveal the young traveler’s methods of observation and transcription. The sketches capture, in a few strokes, the essence of what his gaze chooses to retain. The traveler thus questions history, architecture – popular and monumental –, cities (Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Pompeii), surveyed during his wanderings.

Then, the travels of early maturity took him to Latin America in 1929, where he discovered “The Earth Seen from an Airplane”, carrying him away into upheavals that transformed his vision of the world. In 1931 and 1933, the revelation of the cities of M’zab, an emotional, aesthetic and cultural shock, nourished his thinking on housing, the city and the landscape. Also revealed to him, was the beauty of the Moorish women, of whom he made dozens of drawings, in situ or from postcards, upon his return to Paris.

Thus, the role played by travel was fundamental in the constitution of Corbusian thought. If the first journeys were the occasion for lessons that accumulated like so many nourishing sediments serving the process of the future project, those of the beginnings of maturity came to reinforce the base of an architectural doctrine. These journeys were also the occasion to draw to simply express a visual emotion and many studies in pastel and watercolour thus testify to a blessed “pleasure in drawing”.

The exhibition presents mainly originals, only the notebook pages being reproduced in facsimiles. It also consists of letters written by the young traveler to his loved ones, photos (those representing him during his travels and those taken by himself), slideshows (travel diaries from the Orient, Latin American diaries, M'zab albums), works by the architect, where his sketches are reproduced to illustrate his doctrinal statement, and works by authors on Le Corbusier's travels.