No Carpenter: A connection to Today’s Pace
Extract of a writing exercise:
The only Le Corbusier building in the United States and one of the last projects of the great French-Swiss master of Modernism, the Carpenter Centre was completed in 1963 between Quincy and Prescott Streets in the Harvard Campus, Cambridge. It hosts the Center for the Visual Arts, and was built in conjunction with the foundation of the same department almost ten years before. The commission to Le Corbusier was facilitated by José Luis Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design at that time who proposed his friend instead of "a first-rate American architect," as originally proposed. The master was able to visit the site just twice and he never saw the building after its completion, so most of the construction was driven by Sert’s office.
© Harvard University
Harvard University today owns a collection entirely devoted to thework of Le Corbusier. Among the heterogeneous material what stands out is a sketch of the Carpenter drawn by the hand of the Master. The sketch is simple, a large horizontal line topped by two oblique ones which converge towards another smaller horizontal line just parallel to the first, representing the ramp’s section.
This drawing, probably attributable to the early design phase, seems to be both the beginning and end of the project, its reduction to the essential. The architect’s presence fades in the sheet almost leaving no trace. These few lines immediately arise some questions, does architecture exist at a time other than the visible sign? Was the architectural concept there before, or was it born afterward? What is left inthe sketch is only a path that rises and then falls. Here, the architect has almost become a civil engineer and the icon has become infrastructure - leaving room for connections and motion, for an experience rather than a drawing, to different and changing perspectives rather than just one, to the multiple surfaces rather than a single façade. So here the Carpenter should be read in terms of absence rather than physical presences, the architecture basically tends to dematerialize instead of imposing its presence. The absence persists, in fact before the architecture there is the street, it is in this light that the ramp is conceivable.
(…) The Carpenter escapes the eye of the spectator. As a film strip, its architecture is understandable in dynamism, the disunitary body is divided, separated as if about to turn. (…) The brise-soleil together with the squared façade, fragment the volume’s surfaces, the curved ones change, as if only through movement they can reveal the next movie frame hidden in the shade. So the Carpenter’s time perfectly lines up the building with today’s pace of life: the building is made tobe crossed in a hurry and with a mind immersedin other thoughts. (…) At this point, its design placed within Harvard’s reality acquires further sense, the ramp-street (the same size of the small, trafficked streets in the main courtyard) is nothing but one among the many paths that cross the campus.
When he crosses the building, he proceeds with a decisive step in the first part of the ramp. At that moment what matters is the weight, that of the body involved in the effort to take a climb. The further he goes the greater gravity lies on his body while the gaining of altitude suggests a boost. The sound of air gently crosses the vegetation and mineral interstices, its curved line of force is like the ramp, as the vectors that allow the displacement of the body in motion. (…) Above the ramp, the architecture is broken down into multiple uniform elements yet different. (…) The body reaches the top,it crosses the shady threshold of a great room open to the sky. Over time the eye becomes accustomed to the light change and the architecture opens the view of an exteriorized interior, finally suggesting something else besides the flying street. (…) Up there time stops. (…) A moment of rest after the climb, the sudden shadow before a new wall of light, the invisible architecture’s shell that opens to the view and absorbs the outside, i.e. the wind and those sounds that accompanied the path until then. The “room of time” lasts just long enough to takea big breath and then suddenly let the body slide down the remaining part of the path. Now speed increases. The body is favored by gravity, the instant of spatiality fades again, leaving the possibility of any apparition of architecture behind. Beyond that point, the opportunity to experience the physicality of the Carpenter Center disappears, dissolved in the frantic rhythm of academic life.
This experience in motion, the lack of attentionin the perception of volumes, the need to gain height through a fluid and curvilinear space acquires perhaps a further meaning that overcomes barriers between public and private, between pedestrian and vehicular exactly like the previous distinction between inside and outside. The ramp thus means many things at once, it generates a certain experience, it allows to enter the building by remaining outside, it bridges two streets and is raised above the ground as a vehicle ramp. Perception is in speed and the cinematic qualities of the building seem to be displaced, as in a Futurist picture, onthe architecture’s facade itself. So the human body, that quickly proceeds in distraction, slowly merges with that of a phantomatic car. Once funneled into a path, it is called to a motory effort in which his muscles become akin to a combustion engine. What once was a symbiotic movement between the human body and nature toward the apex, it now recalls the architect’s leitmotif of his early career, the refined type of the car. (…) So again the front view is predominant, now framed in the dashboard of a car whose purpose is simply to proceed forward.
The ramp thus becomes infrastructural surface for a daily motility, the ghost of the machine age is perpetuated in the repetitive act of absent-mindedly crossing the Carpenter, only American masterpiece of the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier.
