"Architects and architectural historians might know Karel Teige (1900–1951)—Czech poet, critic, and avant-garde artist—through his unexpected and rather severe criticism of Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum project.(1) Teige’s 1929 text attacked Le Corbusier for grounding this project in an archaic and formalist attitude that glorified vague and unscientific notions such as “harmony” and “sacred space.” Teige defended the radical position that Modern architecture by necessity was no longer an art: “Whenever the work of the architect is guided by the needs of practical life, it is the end of the arts. The criterion of usefulness, as the sole reliable one for evaluating the quality of architectural production, has led modern architecture to abandon ‘the mastodontic bodies of monumentality’ and to cultivate the brain: instead of monuments, architecture creates instruments.”(2) Since Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum project was not answering a concrete, practical need, since it emerged from an ideologically flawed idea—an international museum representing all times and all cultures—it could not be anything but a monument. It was not “constructed” according to scientifically based and clear criteria, but “composed” according to aestheticist principles such as the Golden Section. And being a monument, it could not be modern and failed, in Teige’s opinion, as a piece of Modern architecture."
|
- bill 10-20-2003 3:19 am