The Need to Reform

The case of Le Corbusier’s UNESCO World Heritage Listing is of particular importance in how the architect is framed as a figure. Essentially, the crux of the issue is that his “outstanding universal value” was deemed to not be individual buildings, like other modern architects, but rather his “influence over others” (^{UNESCO, 2016a}). This view reproduced not only the master narrative but facilitated the virtual canonization of Le Corbusier, as it fulfilled every colonial desire that universal modernism had professed. Enshrining his legacy was far more insidious than imagined if viewed and deconstructed from a colonial perspective.

As we think through Le Corbusier’s pristine white boxes, we also should be reminded that none of this was invented from scratch, nor his invention per se. Le Corbusier absorbed, transformed, and colonized the architecture of 'others' to fit his agenda and build his vocabulary and methods. When asked to project a modern vision for Algiers, Chandigarh and Buenos Aires, his view was the same Paris view that Unesco has always used the colonial gaze. He imagined his universalizing modern fantasy for how a postcolonial state would operate as massive projects that were as unwelcome as he was,

It should also be noted that... Le Corbusier sought not his own vernacular, but that of other people. In today’s parlance he sought the other, a pure and natural man, in contrast to Western man corrupted by the turmoil of the nineteenth century. (^{Passanti, 1997}:438)

There is today a broad and growing interest in critiquing architecture using feminist, queer, and other post-colonial lenses to deconstruct a profession so deeply mired in the archaic and sexist institutionalization of power and privilege. However, the utility of UNESCO to bypass these needs and desires for reform quells new voices and forecloses such perspectives, which have been further institutionalized by enshrining Le Corbusier’s oeuvre. A dangerous hegemony of thought, methods, and perspectives remains dominated by the same ghosts: Gropius and Le Corbusier, among others.

Calls for systemic reform of the modernist canon are not new, and indeed, The Decorated Diagram (^{Herdeg, 1983}) provided a foundation for an attack upon a regime of

not only the teaching methods but the whole approach to architectural design espoused by Walter Gropius... Since Gropius was the most nearly central figure in the whole culture of architecture during its modernist heyday (although by no means its most distinguished designer), the book by implication is also an attack on much of architectural modernism as such. In that respect, it joins what has become a flood of such criticism in recent years. (^{Campbell, 1984}:149)

Critical Regionalism

Some methods for reform have been instituted, taught, and practiced, but even these are haunted by the legacy of the modern masters, and Le Corbusier, in particular. The clearest example of how post-colonial criticism and postmodern critique can be institutionalized and taught was the byproduct of Kenneth Frampton’s iconic Modern Architecture: A Critical History as represented in his chapter on “Critical Regionalism” and in his original Perspecta publication (1983). Critical regionalism proposed a methodology framed as an invitation into a reflexive, global, self-aware architectural practice that would permit architects situated in the Global South - and others who seemed to fantasize about vernacular architectures, like Mario Botta - to reconcile their own Corbusierian methods with more human desires to be local while caring about time and place. This was another flawed colonial fantasy, on Frampton’s part, of epic colonial proportion. And, as Keith ^{Eggener (2002}:235) points out, “The reception of critical regionalism until now has been largely uncritical. Most of the publications discussing it have centered on explication, elaboration, or illustration of its concepts.”

In this famous chapter, Frampton attaches the greatest value to the work of figures like Mario Botta and Luis Barragán, mainly because they had worked in Le Corbusier’s office and had successfully “absorbed” his lessons, which they would carry with them back into the wild of their native contexts (situated on the fringes of civilization) to practice a hybrid form of “locally inflected” modernism that seamlessly intertwined the lessons of the master with the quaint local traditions embedded within their regional idioms. Nothing could be more colonial. As Frampton discusses their work, revelations about Ticinese stonework (Botta) and warm equatorial light (Barragán) describe a Corbusierian methodology of design that moves beyond the sterile white boxes of Western Europe to take up local materials, place, and context in a hybrid white fantasy of post-colonial fetishization.

In the end, critical regionalism remains yet another post-colonial trope, which merely reinforces Le Corbusier’s systemic dominance as a figure. Keith Eggener’s rebuttal of Frampton’s theory remains among the clearest to this day.

Insufficiently recognized is the fact that critical regionalism is, at heart, a postcolonialist concept. This is worth noting because it provides a broader intellectual basis than otherwise exists for understanding critical regionalist language and ideas. Like post-colonialist discourse in general, critical regionalist writing regularly engages in monumental binary oppositions: East/West, traditional/ modern, natural/cultural, core/periphery, self/other, space/place. Frampton made evident the postcolonial underpinnings of his work via his frequent references to Ricoeur’s “Universal Civilization and National Cultures” essay. Like the postcolonialist project Ricoeur described, Frampton’s version of critical regionalism revolved around a central paradox, a binary opposition: “how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.” (^{Eggener, 2002}: 234)

Outstanding Universal Value

In 2016, it was announced that iconic Franco-Swiss modern architect, Le Corbusier, and his nearly complete oeuvre of seventeen buildings, would be included on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s World Heritage List. With this notable decision, Le Corbusier, the figure, moved from beatification as a ‘modern master’ to achieving the architectural status of canonical sainthood. No other architect had been so completely enshrined on UNESCO’s list.

The 2016 UNESCO listing of nearly every significant building that Le Corbusier had built in a serial nomination remains the key evidence in calling out his colonial legacy. To canonize Le Corbusier’s “outstanding universal value” and his lasting “influence over others” a global swath of projects that covers a transnational landscape of domination that included Western Europe, Japan, and India was needed. The path in making this listing a reality was highly fraught, complicated, and mired in objectives and attitudes that had nothing to do with architectural or cultural preservation, but rather proved that Le Corbusier’s figurative role was to perpetuate colonial domination and to perpetuate colonial and post-colonial attitudes and ideologies around architecture, authority and with the view from Paris at its center.

Most problematically, the UNESCO listing proves that the Corbusierian figure remains foundational in architectural pedagogy, modern architectural history text writing, and in the imaginaries formed in aspiring students of architecture as a global project that is both colonial and hegemonic. The decision to highlight seventeen of Le Corbusier’s architectural projects as a “transnational serial nomination” and the decade-long process it took for this to happen resulted in Le Corbusier’s “outstanding universal value” being situated within a colonial framework to both prove his legitimacy and to perpetuate deep-seated colonial regimes using the global spread of Western modern architecture as a very particular material manifestation of an ongoing colonial project in need of uprooting.

The fundamental basis for inclusion on the World Heritage List is formed by ten criteria with achieving “outstanding universal value” as the key criterion. Nomination dossiers are completed by choosing the most appropriate criteria for the basis of each case and then arguing these as a basis for the nomination. In Le Corbusier’s case the criteria are indicative of colonial intentionality and purpose:

Criterion (ii): The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier exhibits an unprecedented interchange of human values, on a worldwide scale over half a century, regarding the birth and development of the Modern Movement.

Criterion (vi): The Architectural Work of Le Corbusier is directly and materially associated with ideas of the Modern Movement, of which the theories and works possessed outstanding universal significance in the twentieth century. The series represents a “New Spirit” that reflects a synthesis of architecture, painting, and sculpture. (^{UNESCO, 2016b})

A key component of my research relied upon data gathered through a series of interviews conducted in Europe over the summer of 2017. which focused on the histories and struggles related to Le Corbusier and his fit into the UNESCO World Heritage criteria. The question: why him? Dominated discussions. Interviews were framed to draw upon insights, reactions, and stories surrounding the decision to reframe UNESCO World Heritage Site criteria to include Le Corbusier’s oeuvre and how his “outstanding universal value” would be defined, defended, or denied as the decision cycled through UNESCO. This decision required a cast of experts, a decade of work, and produced a vast amount of data to draw from. All of it leaving most people outside of this rarefied circle of experts to ask, “why this guy?” Others have pondered this fundamental question as well.

Le Corbusier is difficult to get a hold on. He’s still admired, even worshipped, in architectural circles, but practically forgotten everywhere else. He’s arguably had more of an influence on the form of the modern world than any other architect - you could even argue there was no modern world before Le Corbusier - but stop someone on the street and ask them to name one of his buildings and you’re unlikely to get a correct answer. And if people have heard of him, it’s usually in the context of failed 1960s housing estates. (^{Rose, 2008})

Amongst the group of experts I spoke to in interviews, phone calls, and private meetings included many of the same characters who had spent their careers advocating Le Corbusier as the penultimate ‘modern master,’ including Kenneth Frampton and Jean-Louis Cohen, two key modern architectural historians who helped author and champion the Corbusierian canon in its original state. Frampton and Cohen had written seminal texts dedicated to Le Corbusier (^{Cohen, 2013}, ²⁰¹², ²⁰⁰⁴; ^{Frampton, 2003}, ²⁰⁰¹, ¹⁹⁹⁷) and were well-positioned to argue for his lasting importance. The UNESCO World Heritage White Papers (2001), which included essays by both, drew from a range of international scholars in support of a previous ‘brainstorming session’ that had paved the way for re-defining the value of modern architecture as heritage-worthy using the structural framework of UNESCO World Heritage criteria as a guideline (^{van Oers, 2003:10}) with Le Corbusier, the figure, as a pervasive subtext.

The way that UNESCO, as an institution, enshrines places, buildings, and environments is centered on inclusion on an official list known as the World Heritage List. The process to achieve a spot on the World Heritage List is complicated, multi-tiered, and political. It is further complicated by the intertwining of political agendas and economic systems that collide in an effort to maintain and build a collection of architectural and natural “wonders of the world” that the West has chosen to preserve and protect as its own, most often by occupying and claiming the land and cultural traditions of 'others' on behalf of UNESCO. UNESCO is also still a branch of the United Nations, which carries with it the reality that the UN operates as a supranational treaty. And, as is worth nothing, UNESCO’s headquarters are in Paris, and the view of the world UNESCO creates is always a view from Paris, never the other way around. The largesse of the institution, its situatedness, and Le Corbusier’s proximity to all of the above produced a natural proclivity towards reinforcing his place on the list.

The core difficulty encountered in enshrining the World Heritage dossier of Le Corbusier was that his nomination would require the re-imagining of a number of the fundamental ideologies and frameworks that World Heritage listing criteria had been based upon, amongst them the franc of modern architecture as heritage at all. On a very pragmatic level, framing the idea of modern architecture as ‘heritage’ required a foundational shift in values, as well as methods. “Invented traditions” (^{Hobsbawn, 1983}) would need to intersect with global geopolitics and emerging definitions of peril and risk (climate change, never-ending civil wars, etc.) to take hold in the public imagination. Branding modern architecture as cultural artifacts ‘at risk’ would require some conceptual work that art-historical frameworks would not be able to produce. Luckily, Le Corbusier existed.

Source: © toml1959 / Creative Commons

Figure 1 UNESCO Paris. Marcel Breuer, Bernard Zehrfuss, Pier Luigi Nervi, 1953-1958. 

Source: © Aleksandr Zykov / Creative Commons

Figure 2 High Court of Punjab & Haryana, Chandigarh. Le Corbusier, 1961-1964. 

The Master Enshrined

Assessing and assigning value to iconic works of modern architecture, such as those built by Le Corbusier or those by Bauhaus architects like Walter Gropius, has created several definitional problems for UNESCO and ICOMOS over the past decade. The project to reframe modern architecture as heritage is complicated. For example, the Bauhaus campus of Walter Gropius, another iconic work of modern architecture, was framed by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, ICOMOS, and external experts as historically significant in that it served the role of being the first truly modern school of art and design. It also serves as a textbook model of the modern building style itself, thus emulating Bauhaus’ pedagogies and principles in material form, while concurrently showcasing the individual architect, Walter Gropius’ particular ‘genius.’

For the World Heritage List, the Bauhaus is therefore not only a singular masterwork in the history of architecture and design, but also a testament to the history of ideas of the twentieth century: Even though the Bauhaus philosophy of political and social reform turned out to be little more than wishful thinking, its utopia became reality through the form of its architecture. Its direct accessibility still has the power to fascinate and belongs to the people of all nations as their cultural heritage. (^{UNESCO, 2017})

The main problem embedded specifically within the Le Corbusier dossier was how to enshrine such a massive body of a single individual’s work was simply unprecedented. It was very difficult to justify to outsiders where the true value was, particularly because most of the seventeen buildings chosen were unremarkable on their own, and now even somewhat banal. What was it that was being enshrined, if not the buildings, was a common discussion among experts, bureaucrats, and others. Also, the distortion of the fundamental goal of inscribing ‘places’ rather than ‘people’ on the World Heritage List would rely upon a rejection of one of the basic tenets of the organization to enshrine Le Corbusier’s ‘influence’ over 'others' as his unique form of “outstanding universal value.” Le Corbusier would need to be seen as exceptional to achieve World Heritage status, and the numerous powerful institutions backing the decision would simply not yield. The war would be a battle of attrition, and the colonial powers with money, resources, and influence would eventually win.

The process was highly fraught, but also highly documented. The authority of UNESCO’s World Heritage criteria and those who drafted and supported these criteria had been engaged in their own ideological and epistemological battles and, often, singular words embedded in policies, such as ‘genius’ and ‘universal,’ would derail any progress for years at a time as the nomination dossier bounced from agency to agency. For example, the documentation of debates about the criteria of ‘individual genius’ at one point was entirely excluded from the record, while experts ‘reconfigured’ each successive dossier to embrace a more general “contribution to the modern movement,” which in the end rested on the notion that it was Le Corbusier’s “global influence” over others that was being enshrined as a “strategy” to avoid considering him a genius altogether.

For many nation-states, achieving World Heritage status is highly sought after, akin to obtaining official citizenship on the world stage. To scholars like Agamben (2005), ^{Mbembe (2001}), and ^{Thobani (et al., 2012}), the linkages between what it means to “acquire citizenship” run parallel with the intent to achieve sovereignty via World Heritage designation. The colonial and racial injustices that the acquisition of this form of citizenship requires and the reaffirmation of the mastery of the West dominate discourse and still shapes the nomination process in a regime that can only be considered colonial, post-colonial or neo-colonial, at best.

The Master’s Oeuvre

The most critical and controversial part of the nomination dossier, which also derailed the nomination processes for Le Corbusier in 2009 and 2011, hinged on the lack of inclusion of Le Corbusier’s work in India within his master oeuvre. The inclusion of Chandigarh was seen as an essential piece of the story to demonstrate his international reach (and colonial gaze) into the farthest depths of the Empire. Le Corbusier’s global ‘influence’ - the driving thesis behind every nomination - would seem incomplete without the inclusion of Chandigarh, according to each of my interviewees. Chandigarh was simply essential to prove Le Corbusier’s universal ‘influence.’

However, the local population of Chandigarh and the multi-tiered Indian governing bodies responsible for the site(s) were not convinced. Worries ranged from potential losses of autonomy to decreasing real estate values. By positioning Chandigarh Complex within a settler colonial framework as a critical method, a number of pre-existing and ongoing colonial regimes were revealed. Chandigarh’s inclusion was essential to fulfill the ultimate colonizing intent of UNESCO’s treaty powers. It also reinstated the colonial gaze in the modern age by extending the modern project and colonial management of the land of others at the limits of the Empire in the “orientalized” East.

The emergent goal of a final, successful serial Le Corbusier nomination had to fit UNESCO’s evolving World Heritage objectives. These objectives had shifted over the past decade to foreground an ongoing project to decrease European domination as well as introduce forms of architectural heritage that were more ‘intangible.’

Presenting an incomplete picture of Le Corbusier’s global influence and lasting power produced a paradox among the various bodies in charge of ushering his oeuvre through the complicated UNESCO World Heritage process. This one project can be seen to embody how modern architecture and colonialism have been perpetuated by European (French) domination over others, with Le Corbusier playing yet another seminal role. The difficulties experienced in including Chandigarh also prompts a need to take up non-compliant literature and methods, such as those defining settler colonialism or the Burra Charter (^{Walker & Marquis-Kyle, 2004}), to provide an opening for potential remedies to shape the evolving policies and practices of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee and its need to reframe its colonial present.

One could argue that the United Nations is the same body that enshrined the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in 2008, which rejected the “doctrine of discovery” and provided a vehicle to acknowledge the sovereignty of Indigenous nations residing in states while laying out very clear criteria for legally recognizing Indigenous rights concerning land. However, one of my consistent findings is that how UNESCO and World Heritage policies and practices are used to nominate, debate, and enshrine new types and forms of intangible culture, is limited by UNESCO’s reliance on its own internal criteria. These criteria perpetuate the colonial and deny other epistemological ways of thinking how culture is defined, whether tangible or intangible.

The official press release by UNESCO, following Le Corbusier’s successful inclusion on the World Heritage List, describes his serial nomination as follows:

Chosen from the work of Le Corbusier, the seventeen sites comprising this transnational serial property are spread over seven countries and are a testimonial to the invention of a new architectural language that made a break with the past. They were built over a period of a half-century, in the course of what Le Corbusier described as “patient research.” The Complexe du Capitole in Chandigarh (India), the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (Japan), the House of Dr. Curutchet in La Plata (Argentina), and the Unité d‘habitation in Marseille (France) reflect the solutions that the Modern Movement sought to apply during the 20th century in the challenges of inventing new architectural techniques to respond to the needs of society. These masterpieces of creative genius also attest to the internationalization of architectural practice across the planet. (^{UNESCO, 2016a})

Le Corbusier Canonized

Le Corbusier, the figure, would once again be resurrected to dominate the architectural discourse but this time using the debates surrounding modernity and UNESCO World Heritage as a segue to further debates about how modernity and World Heritage might intersect. The UNESCO Le Corbusier case would provide yet one more instance where the dominance of the colonial master narrative would be reproduced and ossified through practices, policies, and perceptions that required the Corbusierian figure to dominate discourse and embody a colonial narrative.

With the canonization of these seventeen buildings, a very particular colonial legacy in architecture was further buttressed, while concurrently silencing an emergent architectural landscape populated by other voices. The serial nomination method may have also been entrenched as the method by which all other modernists might thus be enshrined is also a worry, particularly as the anonymous modernism of the colonies falls under the radar of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in the future.

However, in the changing context of UNESCO’s policies for World Heritage, reaching a new level of international visibility was considered necessary by scholars and Le Corbusier supporters alike. The number of twentieth-century objects and sites featured on UNESCO’s World Heritage List is growing, yet some major documents of Modernism and Modernization are still missing, and this is the case with Le Corbusier’s work, despite its seminal importance (^{Cohen, 2006}:43).

The task of the postmodern architectural historian or reconstructive theorist, however, is to uncover both the universality and the particularity of the Corbusierian figure and its feeling and retelling as a saga, with all the risks that this entails. The modern architecture text is particularly fraught with pitfalls because it simultaneously desires universality and rejects specificity, as did Le Corbusier’s vision of a world designed around his methods. This same paradox underlies much of the debate around how to assess the “outstanding universal value” of Le Corbusier’s work at UNESCO and ICOMOS. How to represent his overall lasting ‘influence’ on a global scale, while ignoring individual works of art, is a colonial project.

So many “modern” architectural historians - Cohen, Curtis, Frampton, and so on - began their projects desiring to reshape the modern canon - just as postmodernity was replacing modernity ideologically - and replace modernist dogma (of the Bauhaus ilk) with new critical lenses. The desire to tell a story centered on revolution was shaped by an underlying goal to approach the pre-existing canon from a new vantage point using criticality, inter-disciplinarity, and far more discursive methods. Modern architectural history would be positioned as a critique. Yet the critique failed.

As a result of canon-bashing aspirations, academic departments fought, personalities collided, and architecture and design theorists proliferated. In the 1980s and early 1990s, deconstructing the canon was the central project for so many - like Rowe, Vidler, Wigley, and so on. A few decades later modern architecture would be framed as a distant historical project comfortably situated in the past as the world moved onwards. Another new generation of modern architecture historians would embrace modernity’s fragmented and pluralistic frameworks as the movement was waning and postmodernity was waxing, to allow new forms of political and regional subjectivity to begin to inflect the stagnant and ossified canon. Le Corbusier’s resulting virtual dominion over taste, power, and privilege could be dematerialized in design studio assignments, in history courses, and later in offices and ateliers.

Le Corbusier’s view of modern man focused on a fictional modern subject, who also belonged to an idealized social order. This is reflected in his larger urban projects as well as his villas. In his large-scale work, spaces were organized in zones dedicated to functions such as housing, industry, bureaucracy, leisure, etc. Each zone was separate and defined but connected to other zones by mass transportation networks. Le Corbusier’s modern city was a model of modern management and complicity, and conformity was expected and rewarded. As a trade-off for high density, high-rise housing block occupants would be rewarded with shared public parks and green spaces. Multi-lane superhighways would be diverted under these massive parks as another trade-off. Le Corbusier proposed a socially engineered hegemonic system of negotiated compromises, which would require compliance.

Le Corbusier’s life and the methods by which his scholars continue to choose to reproduce him as a subject are widely varied and seem to perpetually offer him second and third lives. His mysterious inner life now seems to be as studied as his actual buildings. Authors like Charles ^{Jencks (1973}), Simon ^{Richards (2003}), and more recently, Niklas ^{Maak (2011}) each chase an often-tragic construction of Le Corbusier as a figure, whom we have only just begun to understand. Was he an occultist, a feminist, or a fascist? The jury remains deadlocked. Only time will tell.