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almost a kind of mannerism in the late works.
Le Corbusier moves back and forth in his
own oeuvre, especially in the late works. In
the Curutchet House at La Plata in Argentina
(1947-49), the section is very like the ones
in some of the villas of the 1920s; the exte-
rior vocabulary has changed, but the basic
structures of spatial thinking are embedded.
One of the themes which I explore in the book
concerns the way that the internal mental
structures of Le Corbusier combine different
strata. The more recent ones are in connec-
tion with the earlier ones, and sometimes he
jumps over two levels, returning and bringing
something back in an unconscious process.
Equally it is a kind of search, so it is like
the layering of volcanic lava: the ones from
the beginning are always there. Then he fil-
ters them through history, the way he draws
ruins for example. Le Corbusier incorporates
schemata from diverse sources: from Cub-
ism, from aspects of Surrealism, from cosmic
features in the late works.
JNB: Do you find a link between the first
works and the latest? Because in general, the
feeling one has is that at the beginning he
was interested in the prototypes, the indus-
trial shapes, and in the late works the types
are more cosmological.
WC: In fact, the matter is more compli-
cated than that. It does not concern just
architecture: it is also about a way of looking
at nature. In his early formation in La Chaux
de Fonds, L’Eplattenier encouraged him to
observe nature, to abstract it and to make an
emblem out of it. Le Corbusier leaves his early
regionalism behind but the way of thinking
about nature remains with him until the end.
So he has this great capacity to look at a
shell, or a boat, for example. In the 1930s he
transforms such things into a language, and
that is in a sense the beginning of Ronchamp.
Ronchamp really starts with the drawings of
boats and shells years before. So, where is
this building in time? There is a drawing in
my book, with the boat hull and the shell,
the coque and the coquillage. The coque is
the boat and the coquillage is the shell. This
game of words – and remember, there was
Surrealism at the time, but he never adhered
directly to Surrealism – he did not need to,
because he always thought in this way of
ambiguity. In his early texts, from his travels,
he talks about basic visual words which do
not mean anything, but which have a poten-
tial of meaning. They are like a fundamental
grammar of shapes, and this is the way he
thinks as a painter.
JNB: For me, the work of art is a kind of
mediation, like The Mediation of Ornament
by Oleg Grabar. I like very much this title, I
think it is very profound. Art in general is a
mediation. You don’t know where the work
is. Very often I say, perhaps as a provoca-
tion, that the art is a parasite of the work
of art. For instance the purple color comes
from the cochinilla, an insect living in the
cactus. That is what I feel about a work of art.
Where is the work of art? Is it in the cactus?
No. It is in the distillation, it is something
that happens at the end of the process. Your
mind is following this and you achieve a sort
of ecstasy when you find the color. And it
happens in Ronchamp very often. You are
sitting right there, in the benches, and then
you feel you walk inside, in a kind of ecstasy,
and that is the work of art. It is that moment,
and it does not happen very often. Probably
one has to go there in solitude, the interior of
Ronchamp should be experienced in solitude.
WC: About this argument of mediation: in
my text ‘Abstraction and Light: a Vision of
the Alhambra,’ I describe when I went there
for the first time in 1981, February, in the
