Exhibit of the week: Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Through Sept. 23

Le Corbusier deserves better than to be merely “a whipping boy for modernism’s failures,” said Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. For decades, critics have blamed the Swiss-born architect (1887–1965) for championing the razing of human-scale city centers and their being replaced by freeways, apartment blocks, and towers. Yet one side of Le Corbusier always recognized that architecture’s clean lines have to bend to messy reality, as his subtle, sensitive buildings attest. The curators of this exhibition have gone one step further, claiming that Le Corbusier’s work was profoundly responsive to nature and landscape. The hundreds of his sketches, watercolors, paintings, and models that they’ve assembled make this landmark survey riveting and fun—even if the work on display doesn’t prove their argument. In the end, Le Corbusier was “too contradictory and controlling a genius to conform to any curator’s thesis.”

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Especially when that thesis is so flawed, said Christopher Hawthorne in the Los Angeles Times. “There’s no doubt that our understanding of Le Corbusier’s approach to nature could use an update”: The chapel he built in the eastern French town of Ronchamp in 1955 remains “among the most sublime readings of site and topography” that any modernist produced. Yet for each piece in the exhibition that suggests Le Corbusier’s attentiveness to environment, there is another that confirms his reputation “as a radical remaker of cities happy to raze forests and pave over fields.” Tellingly, almost none of the architect’s writings appear here, and “the reason isn’t hard to divine: It was in his books that the architect set himself up most clearly against nature.”

But in stressing an overlooked aspect of this master’s thinking, the show “provides important insights into the puzzle Le Corbusier was trying to solve in the first place,” said Anthony Flint in TheAtlantic.com. When this ambitious thinker proposed sweeping away almost every building in Paris on the north bank of the Seine, or running ribbons of elevated highways through the ancient city of Algiers, he may have been wrong in his prescriptions, but his goal was to find ways to make cities efficient enough to provide their millions with decent, sustainable housing. His inventiveness led him down different paths over time, inspiring a prescient interest, for instance, in green building and small, well-ordered rooms—like those of his humble cabanon on the French Riviera—that “aren’t too different from the micro-housing apartments so many large cities are clamoring for today.” MoMA’s show offers every viewer a chance to develop “a thorough sense of the man,” and “that may be its greatest achievement.”