The contradiction between Le Corbusier’s rejection of photography as a medium for understanding the external world and the use he made of it has been discussed in the broader context of the mass media.¹ It has also been shown that, during his German sojourn, between 1910 and 1911, Charles--Edouard Jeanneret – Le Corbusier’s born name – combined photography and sketching to register and understand the experience of architecture.² Following the tradition of travelling photography, the documental purpose of Jeanneret’s photographs during his Voyage d’Orient led to a realist tone and a simple compositional principle which essentially consists in centring the subject of analysis in the frame.³ Among the large number of photographs of the tour there are few exceptions to these principles. Despite Jeanneret’s lack of technical skills, mainly visible in exposure and contrast control, some of them show a sharp precision and intention of composition which eventually surpass documental language. This essay briefly examines some of these photographs against Jeanneret’s changing attitude towards aesthetics and space conception.
     During his time in Germany Jeanneret worked in Peter Behrens’ office, where he discovered classicism. He concurrently developed the manuscript of La construction des villes, a book on urban planning inspired in Camillo Sitte’s Der Städtebau, which took him to several German cities discussed by that author.⁴ To satisfy the requirements of architectural photography he swapped his Kodak for a Cupido 80, an expensive camera equipped with a standard lens and a level built into the viewfinder to guarantee the horizontal holding of the camera and avoid converging vertical lines.⁵ On May 1911 he started the Voyage d’Orient which, after crossing the Balkans, led him to Turkey, Greece, and Italy, accompanied by Auguste Klipstein and his camera.⁶
     Jeanneret’s responsiveness to Turkish mosques and their compositional principles based on the juxtaposition of geometric volumes must be seen in the light of his latest shift from medievalism to classicism and its geometric clarity. A photograph taken during his first stop in Turkey emphasizes the geometric play between the wall of the north corner of the entry courtyard of Edirne’s Üçşerefeli mosque, the spherical dome above the octagonal drum, and the north minaret developing vertically beyond the frame [Fig. a].⁷ Jeanneret’s intention to register the juxtaposition of volumes is recognizable in the usual procedure of centring the subject of analysis in the frame. Yet, by leaving out a broad clarifying context, he simultaneously enfeebled the sense of space, bringing the overlapping volumes into a two-dimensional composition which tends towards the abstract. Consciously or not, the result stands between the register of the subject’s abstract character and an abstract pictorial representation of the subject. Folding cameras such as the Cupido request a considerable degree of premeditation in the preparation for the shot. Therefore, unlike the majority of Jeanneret’s frames, it makes sense to read here a formalist concession, putting forth the problem of photography as a pictorial medium.⁸
     This photograph can be easily related with the geometric play between the classical mosques of Istanbul and the isolated octagonal tombs randomly placed in the adjacent cemeteries, generating tensions between them and the mosque. Jeanneret did not fail to notice these tombs, which he could associate with later experiences.⁹ One of these experiences concerns the pedestals at the Forum in Pompeii, which he photographed and drew [Fig. b]. The sketchbook reads: “Ces socles se ferment merveilleusement, engendrant une architecture.”¹⁰ This is probably the first explicit reference Jeanneret ever made to the idea of space generated by freestanding elements. Both this case and that of the Temple of Apollo show the complementary roles of photography and drawing in Jeanneret’s architectural analyses [Fig. c]. The close-up of the area preceding the temple depicts three elements in white marble contrasting with the dark surrounding masses: a freestanding votive column to one side of the temple’s steps, an altar on the main axis of the temple’s precinct, and the flight of steps providing access to the elevated cell. In pictorial terms, the sketch from the opposite direction achieved far richer results [Fig. d].
     The composition decontextualizes the three elements conveying the idea of three individual geometric volumes, resulting once more in an abstract effect. One can read the cylinder, the cube, and the pyramid; the play of light and shadow; and a space almost deprived of gravity. The freestanding elements appear as forerunners of the objets à réaction poétique, as objets trouvés avant la lettre structuring the pictorial space. In architectural terms, the axial layout of the precinct and Jeanneret’s approach to the pedestals at the Forum suggest his interest in the tension between the independent elements and the way they participate in defining the access to the cell.
     Jeanneret’s endeavour to confront geometric shapes by suppressing their surroundings is equally clear in a photograph of an altar in Pompeii [Fig. e]. The cubic mass is carefully framed with the conical peak of Mt. Vesuvius, joining near and far in the pictorial plane. One senses a precise camera position, hiding the intervening ruins behind the wall and eliminating the effect of perspective of its oblique position by bringing its upper edge into the lens level – thus rendering it neutral in the geometric play. Set against the sky and deprived of their context, the elements portrayed establish an intimate dialog between sphere and cube, curve and straight line, horizontal and vertical, natural and man-made. Such plastic exploitation of geometry and judicious choice of the viewpoint can also be found in the unorthodox photograph of the Gesù Nuovo Church in Naples [Fig. f], or in Roman photographs such as the one of the Coliseum [Fig. g], emphasizing the contrast in scale between the building and its surroundings. This example parallels the change in nature of the sketches, which in Rome and Tivoli became schematic and analytical in their depiction of architecture as pure geometric volumes.¹¹
     These cases are but short episodes of a broad set of experiences gathered along the itinerary which help to shed light on Jeanneret’s interpretation of the Piazza dei Miracoli, in Pisa, where he took two photographs which are worth analysing. The first one frames the leaning Baptistery, cutting off its dome [Fig. h]. This does not seem to result from parallax, since its effect would be extreme, and is not in accordance with the large majority of Jeanneret’s photographs.¹² Moreover, while the layout of the site allowed him to photograph from a longer distance, the camera was also equipped with a rising front which would further help to frame the dome without tilting the camera.¹³ This suggests that Jeanneret intentionally left out the dome in order to depict the building as a pure cylinder. The inclusion of a corner of the basilica on the left edge reinforces the tension between buildings, while the peripheral wall in the background frames the edge of the precinct, depicting the regular area in which the buildings are placed.
     The suggestion of a horizontal platform on which geometric volumes freely rest – and to which the leaning Baptistery and bell tower strongly contribute – achieves an explicit expression in a photograph that, at first glance, seems to carelessly frame the Campo Santo [Fig. i]. On careful scrutiny, this picture reveals a sharp precision and intention of composition which calls upon a set of devices previously used. By framing the Campo Santo on the right side and the basilica’s corner on the opposite side, Jeanneret focused on the tension between buildings and the depth of space. By moving the camera to the left he allowed the steps preceding the basilica to cross the frame from one side to the other, creating the illusion that they extend towards the cemetery. The steps are half way up the frame and the pavement circling the basilica to which they lead cannot be seen. This means that Jeanneret placed the camera low to the ground since the terrain is flat, simultaneously suppressing the view over the lawn between buildings, the cemetery’s roof – reinforcing its cubic volume – and the steps’ perspective, which, being at an angle, were framed in a horizontal position. As a result, the cubic volume of the Campo Santo seems to rest above the horizontal line of the upper step like an object on a table, preceded by the smaller volume on the right. Finally, Jeanneret slightly rotated the camera to the left in order to frame a larger area of the basilica, conveying the idea of an additional solid resting upon the horizontal line whose vertical development is denounced by the pilasters, as it happens in the photograph of the minaret. The play between vertical and horizontal echoes the rhythm of the cemetery wall and the gothic tabernacle above the portal, while the diminishing perspective of the oblique lines of the eaves is accelerated by the low viewpoint, endowing the composition with a dynamic tension.
     The consolidation of a set of compositional principles is recognizable in this sample of images: the framings do not pursue the regularity and frontality of elevation drawings, but search for asymmetrical compositions with angled views which, in some cases, convey the continuation of the form or picture space beyond the frame; they do not depict a view of an isolated building or motif centred in the picture, but are partial views that include a second building or motif in the foreground, bringing space into the centre and emphasizing spatial depth; in an apparently contradictory attitude, they tend to be taken close enough to the subject to suppress a broad clarifying context; the angle and the distance of the lens to the ground search for a correction of perspective and a partial view of the subject capable of emphasizing geometry.
     The latent ambiguity between these compositional principles suggests a changing process in the nature of the photographic image. While the former two principles are associated with the documental register, revealing a contextualized approach to space and architecture with picturesque roots (inherited from the early formative years), the latter two suppress the context to emphasize the inherent pictorial value of the image. In order to better understand the extent to which the intrinsic process of conception of photography could contribute to thinking of the photographic image in pictorial terms, it is useful to remember that, as one looks through this kind of camera, the frame appears upside down. The inverted frame becomes an entity in itself which puts in contrast the abstract shapes visualized in the ground-glass and the figurative representation of the subject to be photographed, the recognition of which requires considerable effort. In this sense, it is noteworthy that conversely to several of his photographs, the absence of the human figure is common to the cases above analysed, suppressing not only human scale, but above all life and the contingent.
     While the degree of abstraction attained in the Gesù Nuovo Church brings to mind some aspects of the later work of avant-garde photographers such as André Kertész or László Moholy-Nagy, the remaining pictures show the commitment to the architect’s point of view, for whom the medium is closer to a manipulating device that allows for a particular interpretation of reality.¹⁴ In this interpretative quest, the last image from Pisa seems the best example of Jeanneret’s intentional manipulation of the subject of analysis through the medium in order to express an idea. In pictorial terms it largely surpasses documental language, revealing a will to form which tends to abolish spatial illusion in favour of abstraction, extending back to Wilhelm Worringer, whose Abstraktion und Einfühlung had been an early topic of discussion between Jeanneret and Klipstein.¹⁵ The process of abstract art, Worringer argues, consists of wresting the object of the external world out of its natural context, purifying it of its dependence upon life and of its arbitrary components, to approach it from its absolute value. It is thus possible to associate the changes in Jeanneret’s photographic compositions with a growing maturation of Worringer’s ideas along an itinerary that provided propitious architectural contexts.¹⁶ Nonetheless, as an architectural analysis, space is not merely the habitat of the buildings, but remains the crux of the problem.
     Such ambiguity between representation and abstraction is paralleled by the dual character of space, common to the cases analysed above, which can be considered both interior and exterior. The classical mosques of Istanbul are usually circled by the avlu, an enclosed area extending, in the best cases, the geometric principle of the building. The Pompeian Forum and the precinct of the Temple of Apollo are enclosed regular spaces structured by the temple, altars, and freestanding statuary. Conversely to the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, the Piazza dei Miracoli is also detached from the urban fabric by the enclosing walls forming a regular space to be ordered by the buildings. Its formal autonomy allows the precinct itself to become an individual unit, an object-like element redeemed from the outer world and rendered absolute. Jeanneret’s interest in such spaces is traceable to Sitte’s emphasis on the seclusion of urban spaces and the positioning of their monuments. Significantly, Sitte opens his book with a discussion on public spaces of antiquity which leads him to compare a town square to a furnished main hall of a dwelling.¹⁷ On the one hand, the placement of elements such as sacrificial altars on a sacred precinct depends on ritual requirements. On the other hand, the spatial perception of a town square is linked to the layout of its monuments. Based on these two assumptions, Jeanneret could recognize a similar ordering principle in the Piazza dei Miracoli and the interior of the Baptistery, where function overlays the regular space with a distinct order [Fig. j, k].¹⁸
     Le Corbusier’s architecture and town plans of the 1920s pursue an equivalent independence and absolute formal value. Their well-defined external limits and autonomous proportional and geometric systems are overlaid by a secondary order, defined by functional reasons and principles of space perception which Le Corbusier strived to submit to a set of universal fixed rules.¹⁹ Ultimately, the deepest roots of such conception can be found in the coalescence triggered by the Mediterranean world of the rational geometric clarity of classicism and a Sittesque intuitive spatial recognition.  Essentially used as a tool to apprehend reality, photography did not fully achieve the status of pictorial representation. But as scanty as its role may have been, it seems not possible to totally eschew photography and its ability to wrest reality out of its context from the research through which that coalescence would become an aesthetic principle, specially taking into account the photograph of Pisa and a growing influence of Worringer’s ideas. Indeed, this picture provides evidence as for how latent the coalescence of those two veins was. As no other graphic data produced in this period, its ambiguous condition of a register of a theme of abstract nature and the abstract representation of it anticipated in a remarkable way some aspects of what would turn to be purist aesthetics and the involvement between its pictorial expression and space conception.|

TRADUÇÃO A.R. / REV. L.B.


1 Beatriz Colomina. Vers une architecture médiatique. in Alexander von Vegezack [et al.] (ed.). Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture. Weil am Rhein : Vitra Design Stiftung, 2007, p. 247-273; Beatriz Colomina (ed.). Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture and Mass Media. Cambridge; London : MIT Press, 1994.

² Leo Schubert. Jeanneret, the City, and Photography. in Stanislaus von Moos; Arthur Rüegg (ed.). Le Corbusier before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, Photography, 1907-1922. New Haven : Yale Univ. Press, 2002, p. 54-67.

³ For a general survey on photography as a documenting medium in the 19th century tradition of travel in the East see Hildegard Frübis. Images du sphinx: la conquète de l’Orient par la photographie, à mi-chemin entre archéologie et beaux-arts. in Michael Baumgartner; Carole Haensler (dir.). A la recherche de l’Orient: Paul Klee: tapis du souvenir. Ostfildern; Bern : Hatje Cantz; Zentrum Paul Klee, 2009, p. 106-129. The documental nature, the exclusion of formalist concessions and the search for the necessary and the sufficient were pointed out by Italo Zannier as main features of Jeanneret’s photographs. Cf. See Italo Zannier. Le Corbusier fotografo. in Giuliano Gresleri (ed.). Le Corbusier, viaggio in Oriente. 2ª ed 2nd ed. Venezia : Marsilio, 1985, p. 69-73.

⁴ On Jeanneret’s German sojourn and his conversion to classicism see Werner Oechslin. Allemagne. in Jacques Lucan (ed.). Le Corbusier: une encyclopédie. Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987, p. 33-39; Rosario De Simone. Ch. E. Jeanneret: Le Corbusier: viaggio in Germania 1910-1911. Roma : Officina Edizione, 1989 ; H. Allen Brooks. Le Corbusier’s Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds. Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 209-254.

    Jeanneret read Sitte’s Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1899) in Camille Martin’s French translation, L’Art de bâtir les villes: notes et réflexions d’un architecte. Paris : Librairie Renouard, H. Laurens, 1902. Having abandoned the book in 1915, the manuscript and its Sittesque background were first discussed by Brooks. Jeanneret and Sitte: Le Corbusier’s Earliest Ideas on Urban Design. in Helen Searing (ed.). In Search of Modern Architecture: A Tribute to Henry Russel Hitchcock. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1982, p. 278-297. For a recent discussion and the publication of the manuscript see Christoph Schnoor. Le Corbusier, La Construction des Villes, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s erstes städtebauliches Traktat von 1910/1911. Zurich : Gta, 2007; Marc E. Albert Emery. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, La Construction des villes: genèse et devenir d’un ouvrage écrit de 1910 à 1915 et laissé inachevé. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme, 1992.

⁵ On the Cupido 80 veja-se see Italo Zannier. Op. cit., p. 71-72.

⁶ The bibliography on the journey is abundant. See his own writings and drawings in: Le Corbusier. Le Voyage d’Orient. Paris : Forces Vives, 1966; Giuliano Gresleri (ed.) Ch.-E. Jeanneret:voyage d’Orient, carnets. Milan : Electa Architecture; Paris : Fondation Le Corbusier, 2002, hereafter cited as VdO carnets. Sobre a figura de On Klipstein see Gresleri. August Klipstein. in Jacques Lucan (ed.). Op. cit., p. 216.

⁷ The image has been wrongly identified as a photograph of the Selemiye mosque; cf. Gresleri. Viaggio in Oriente, p. 226.

⁸ In this respect it is worth noting that Le Corbusier used this photograph to illustrate a 1924 article in praise of the non-figurative arts. Paul Boulard (Le Corbusier). Mustapha-Kemal aura son monument. L’Esprit Nouveau.Nº 25 (July 1924).

⁹ See, for instance, the drawing of the Sultan Selim I mosque later published in Le Corbusier. Urbanisme. Paris : Crès, 1925, p. 55. V. ainda In addition, see Le Corbusier. Voyage d’Orient, passim.

¹⁰ VdO carnets, C4, p. 25.

¹¹ For the sketches of Rome and Tivoli see VdO carnets, C4-C5.

¹² The dome’s absence was justified as a parallax effect by Zannier. Op. cit., p. 73. Although the camera has a viewfinder above the lens, the parallax is avoidable by using the ground-glass focusing screen, since the image shown in it is precisely the same that exposes the film.

¹³ The rising front, which holds the lens, allows camera adjustments not only by tilting the lens, but also by moving it vertically and laterally in relation to the negative plane. By moving it upwards and parallel to the back plane, the lens is placed out of center in relation to the film, registering a higher viewpoint without having to tilt the camera and distorting the perspective. It is however important to note that, although the camera could use 9x12 cm plates, Jeanneret often used the 6.5x9 cm cheaper format, which would restrict the use of the rising front. See also image FLC LA(19)99.

¹⁴ The connection with the 1920s avant-garde photography mainly concerns the choice of unorthodox points of view and framings, as well as the emphasis on geometry.

¹⁵ Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie is the title of Worringer’s dissertation, de completed in 1906. Brooks has noted that Klipstein was a Worringer protégé, and that a direct quote appearing in his journal indicates that he took a copy of Worringer’s book with him during the trip. Based on a note in Jeanneret’s sketchbook registering Klipstein’s advice to read Abstraktion und Einfühlung, Brooks concludes that Worringer was an early theme of discussion between Klipstein and Jeanneret. Allen Brooks,  Le Corbusier’s Formative Years, p. 256; VdO carnets, C1, p. 43. Further evidence is given by an annotation on Alois Riegl’s Die Spätromische Kunst-Industrie, which seems to indicate that Jeanneret actually read Worringer’s book at their arrival in Greece, since Worringer frequently confronts his arguments with those of Riegl throughout the book. Indeed, Worringer expresses his own position in the field of art history by rejecting the misinterpretations of Semper’s materialistic theory of the genesis of the work of art to support Riegl’s concept of artistic volition (Kunstwollen), according to which the primary factor in and the essence of every artistic creation lies on the existence of a “will to form” entirely independent of the object and of the mode of creation. He thus discusses art in terms of aesthetic experience, arguing that it was the universal experience of abstract art which could fulfill the existentialist needs of modern man. Worringer. Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. Michael Bullock. Chicago : Elephant pbk, 1997. For the note on Riegl see VdO carnets, C3, p. 92.

¹⁶ Significantly, Worringer’s theory is informed by the Romantic cultural relativism, which led him to base his thesis on a fundamental antagonism between North European and Mediterranean cultures, the former being associated with the Occidental urge to empathy which led to figurative art, and the latter with the urge to abstraction. Worringer. Op. cit., p. 15-16, passim.

¹⁷ See particularly Sitte’s discussion on the Pompeian Forum and the Piazza dei Miracolli Sitte. City Planning According to Artistic Principles: A Contribution to the Solution of Modern Problems of Architecture and Sculpture Especially with Regard to the City of Vienna. Trans. George R. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins. New York : Dover Publications, 1986, p. 141-153.

¹⁸ Reality is equally manipulated in the drawing in order to register the idea of freestanding elements, emphasizing their independence by color and by suppressing part of the choir. This is particularly evident in the comparison with a first drawing (VdO Carnets, C6, 25), the real perspective of which prevents to clarify the idea.

¹⁹ These geometric and proportional rules informed design principles and urban schemes, simultaneously involving arguments of technical and aesthetic nature. Le Corbusier strived to reconcile the discourse on standardization and building system with that of the universal value of geometry and proportion in the human apprehension of the external world. Influenced by authors such as Charles Blanc, Charles Henry, or Victor Basch, he believed that different forms instill different though constant psychological responses, what led him to search for formal principles in an “origine mécanique de la sensation plastique”. On this subject see, for instance: Amedée Ozenfant; Jeanneret. Sur la plastique. L’Esprit nouveau. Nº1 (Oct. 1920), p. 38-48; Le Corbusier. Architecture d’époque machiniste. Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique. Nº13 (Jan.-Mar. 1926), p. 325-350. For a discussion on the ambiguity of Le Corbusier’s technical and aesthetic arguments see: Reyner Banham. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Cambridge : MIT Press, 1980, p. 247-263. On the proportional systems of Le Corbusier’s architecture and town plans see: Francesco Passanti. Architecture: Proportion, Classicism and Other Issues. In Stanislaus von Moos; Arthur Rüegg (ed.). Op, cit. p. 68-107; Klaus-Peter Gast. Le Corbusier: Paris-Chandigarh. Pref. by with foreword by Arthur Rüegg. Basel; Berlin; Boston : Birkhäuser, 2000.