Vers une architecture

Le Corbusier’s montage, albeit in its visionary intensity, is frankly positive: un esprit de construction et de synthèse. It establishes parallels, sets up connections, unfolds underlying correlations; in other words it is a device that harmonizes the many facets of the Neue Welt (E. May), making of a shapeless heap of separate, disparate (due to geography, history, or culture) episodes a cosmos supported by shared lois-variables. The book’s approach marks the changed spiritual tone of the arts, the different Stimmung resulting from the disaster of the war – la guerre a secoué les torpeurs. Where the early twentieth-century movements had found unbridgeable lacerations and conflicts – first and foremost the irreconcilable enmity between the fluid immediacy of life and the fixity of every principle of form – Le Corbusier’s Laugierian retour à zero acts as an opening salvo for the unveiling and restoration of a cosmic mathesis universalis, the origin and telos of every operation and emancipation of subjective free will (Architecture Pure Création de l’Esprit: the new as a rediscovery of nomoi, trans-historical and universal, lost: the cyclical destiny of every “classic,” doomed to an alternation of submergence and resurgence).