LE CORBUSIER: THE PICASSO OF PLANNING. Le Corbusier was perhaps the greatest architect of the 20th century. He thought he could reshape mankind by creating a new form of city, yet he seldom practised what he preached, writes Jonathan Meades ... From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2008 Le Corbusier excelled in the visual and the plastic. He was a painter, sculptor, furniture designer and, above all, an architect of the highest order, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, a colossus who in his prodigiously fecund invention and protean versatility was the peer of his friend Pablo Picasso. And there we might leave it. His Plan Voisin, to demolish the northern half of Paris and replace it with a city of cruciform towers, belongs more to the history of self-advertisement than to that of urbanism—or would have done had his regiments of witless acolytes not imposed frail copies of it across the globe.
Le Corbusier—The Art of Architecture Barbican Art Gallery, London, February 19th to May 24th. www.barbican.org.uk. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S WAR ON THE BOX. Frank Lloyd Wright once defied "anyone to name a single aspect of the best contemporary architecture that wasn’t done first by" him. He had a point, writes Emily Bobrow ... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE When Frank Lloyd Wright was in his 80s, he had more architectural projects in the works than ever. He cut a vital, distinguished figure, with his silver mane, natty dress and a cane he often twirled. For him, architecture was a space for life, not a façade, not a monument, not a box. Wright created many such patterns in a career that stretched across seven decades. Architecture exhibitions tend to feel lifeless and decontextualised, almost medicinal. Other, larger projects follow (over 60 are included), such as his grand designs for Taliesin, his own sweeping prairie home in rural Wisconsin, and his seemingly futuristic work for the S.C.
There are quite a few models for buildings and attractions that never got built. "Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward", Solomon R. Franck Lloyd Wright. Modernist Australia. Julius Shulman Film. Geoffrey Bawa. Archigram Archival Project.