Le Corbusier: architecture and utopian ideals in Catalonia

Abstract

The aim of this report is to establish the extent of Le Corbusier's influence on the Spanish modern movement which developed most energetically in Catalonia, and to determine any possible reciprocal significance in his own career. Information and opinions about the period were gathered by searching archives and through conversations with academics at schools of architecture in Spain. Later, comparisons with recognised sources on the life and works of Le Corbusier were drawn. The result is a historical narrative which puts a shortlived, but significant, Spanish movement into the perspective of modernist architectural and urban planning doctrines espoused by Le Corbusier during a time of personal reassessment. It follows the parallel development between the two, exposing key figures and events concomitant with it, and concludes that, while the urban Utopia of his Ville Radieuse failed and he never realised any projects in Spain, his role as mentor was beneficial to certain individuals of the group whose methodologies and projects represented a legacy which became dispersed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The significance of the episode for Le Corbusier himself is found to be an integral part of the general myth he perpetuated about Mediterranean basin cultures, rather than to be a specific interest in Spain itself, and, even though elements in his subsequent work can be pinpointed to Catalan origins, any speculation about fundamental influences on him are inconclusive and should be seen in the context of his increasingly primitivist stance owed to a wider range of sources.