The Luminaries of Downtown Bellevue

1. Ha!

2. Gandhi, honey.

3. Le Corbusier also had an enormous influence on architecture in general, unrelated to his views on urban planning. He’s arguably more of an influence on architecture than Kahlo was on painting.

4. Corbusier himself, of course, lived in an 18th-century chateau in the grand style. His architectural breakthroughs were for the proletariat, who can be stacked up in boxes in towers, and don’t even need amenities like toilet seats or closet doors.

5. Corbu, Wright, and Gropius are the most influential architects of the 20th century. Hands down.

6. More importantly, it’s pretty neat that the Bellevue Library has this collection.

7. “the effect of isolating poor communities in monolithic high-rises and breaking the social ties integral to a community’s development.”

   And what’s the problem with this?

8. There is, or used to be anyhow, a lot of buildings in Bellevue derivative of his Villa Savoye. Makes sense to me.

9. @7, please go visit the violent tower-block suburbs of Paris, Torino, or Sevilla and report back to us. Corbu’s theories still cause misery for millions of people today.

10. Also, Vichy Nazi suckup.

11. Corbu’s buildings are pretty tight, though – especially Ronchamp in the background of that “painting”.

    and @3 is spot on about Kahlo. jesus why is everyone obsessed with the same fucking self-portrait over and over?

12. I’ve often said that someone should go back in time and assasinate Le Corbusier and Van Der Rohe (before their careers got going) for foisting the international style on the world. I kind of think they had some good ideas and built some cool buildings but a crime against humanity is a crime against humanity. As has been pointed out more than once ‘machines for living’ are fit to be lived in only by machines.

13. I was just looking at the latest Sunset magazine with the Western Home Awards and thinking how much the influences of le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Philip Johnson are still with us. Or back, after being mercifully absent for a while. They leave me totally cold. Or would do, literally, what with all the glass walls.

14. Le Corbusier was an arrogant bastard, best known for his “DON’T QUESTION THE EXPERT” attitude to whenever anyone critically challenged his ideas. The man wasn’t professionally trained in urban design or planning.

    His dream to eliminate the Manhattan skyline’s heterogeneous skyscrapers with a slew of identically-tall and -shaped skyscrapers to make them all uniform was ludicrous. Wisely, nearly no city adopted his ideas writ large. The one coming closest, arguably, occurred at the end of his time, and that was the capital city of Brasilia — gouged, no less, from the Amazon rain forest and built so that a car was needed to do practically anything or go practically anywhere.

    Then there’s the failed effort to making public housing uniform in the name of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. It was demolished less than two decades after it was built.

    Le Corbusier got such the hard-on for making everyone use cars. He even toyed with designing one of those, too. In a way, it set the stage for the Nazi Volkswagen — People’s Car.

    Somehow, his sterilizing treatment of cities seems all too fitting for his visage making it onto an art exhibition shown in that throwback to one of Modernism’s Worst Moments in Planning: Bellevue.

15. Those have been hanging in that library for almost 15 years, and that picture was what inspired me to go look up Le Corbusier buildings in the library stacks when I was a wee brat of 16.

    The entire series is: Gandhi, Kahlo, Sappho, Le Corbusier, and Marie Curie, BTW.

16. Sappho looks mannish.

17. Actually the whole series includes Miro, Golda Meir, Walt Whitman, Duke Ellington, J.D. Salinger, Marie Curie, Sara Winnemucca and Stravinsky. They are all people that the artist, Garth Edwards, thought might be interesting people to research in the library. You could then draw your own conclusions as to the merit of those portrayed.

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