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whom architecture is a sort of lens through
which other things may be understood.
JNB: It is like a travesía or passage to
something else. I was recently in Ronchamp,
and it is a mystery: Where is Ronchamp?
Where is the work of art? Is it between the
person and the wall? Where is it? It is a
mystery because it is in between. The interior
is an individual experience, it is a media-
tion. When it is full of people, I have to go
out and come back later because the experi-
ence is completely different. Outside it is
the contrary. In your book there is a picture
where the exterior, open air chapel is full of
people. The extremes: it is this that creates
an incredible energy.
WC: It has to do with the spaces, and
with the dialogue between the interior and
the exterior, and with the horizon that sud-
denly becomes an interiorized experience.
The building is like a high tension membrane.
JNB: It is so present that it is like the shell
of an egg: very thin; but in fact it is not thin.
Everything is ambiguous. And there are very
mature decisions because they are taken at
once, not in different stages.
WC: In this precision of thinking in ma-
terials and ambiguity in terms of perception
and weight, Le Corbusier is a master. In one
of the chapters of my book on the genesis of
forms I say that we can examine the process,
but that we should never forget that many of
the key decisions in it are not documented
in any form. They are in the mental life of
the architect thinking into space and light
directly. Beyond the drawing there is another
level of space. The thing about Le Corbusier
is his great spatial imagination. Even the
greatest of his drawings is just an approxi-
mation of what is being transmitted from him
as an architect into the final thing.
I discovered that the color of the roof of
Ronchamp, for example, which is this won-
derful contrapposto in bare concrete sitting
on a crack of light, was originally supposed
to be white, the same as the walls, right up
until the last minute; but then he saw it
going up and said: “no, no, no…”. This is an
amazing decision because it would have been
so much less interesting if it were white. As
it is, there is the contrast between this thing
which is apparently heavy, and the discovery
inside that it is floating on light. I think that
this relatively small work sums up almost
everything in terms of the perception of light,
shade, weight, or flotation. And yet it is not
overloaded, it is subtle.
JNB: Le Corbusier, also as an artist, had
an enormous capacity to shape things. To
make forms. Nevertheless we cannot say that
this was done in a formalist way.
WC: It is the end of a line of thinking. He
kept exploring a meaning, often in a very
subliminal way. He knew when something
was going wrong, and he would stop the
project immediately. I remember talking to
Jerzy Soltan, who was very observant of his
time in the atelier, in the late 1940s, “Le
Corbusier’s eyes would turn inward, but he
always knew when it was forced, he stopped”
he said. Le Corbusier was always looking for
a language, for elements, for types. In the late
works, there are auto-referential details done
deliberately. This poses a problem at times,
«We can examine the
process, but many of the
key decisions in it are not
documented in any form»
