Voyage d'Orient - Corbusier

 At the age of 23, Corbusier embarked on his Voyage d’Orient (click here for voyage d'orient) -- a seminal 6 month trip that took him from his home in Switzerland through Italy, Greece, Turkey and the Balkan States. His boyhood teacher at art school, Charles L’Eplattenier discouraged Corbusier from following his father and grandfather’s watchcase engraving career paths since it was a dying art. Instead, L’Eplattenier advised Corbusier to trace architecture’s origins to the East and helped him develop the itinerary for the trip. Like Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, Corbusier did not have formal training in architecture. He used his observations, writings, and drawings from his travels to inform his ideas and develop new approaches to architecture. Throughout his career, Corbusier repeatedly mined his travel sketchbooks for ideas in writing and architecture. After his death, in 1962, the sketchbooks from his trip were published.

In my studies in school, my history of landscape architecture professor advised me to look into Corbusier’s Voyage d’Orient travels. So far, I’ve only visited two meh Corbusier buildings, the Carpenter Center at Harvard and the United Nations and his urban planning principles have been devastating to the American landscape. But his writing on the other hand, like “Towards a New Architecture” and “Le Modulor” I find inspiring. They are instructional in how to make architectural arguments and develop theories.

During my architecture fellowship after school, I focused on Corbusier’s travels through the ancient ruins of Rome, Pompeii, Greece, and Tuscan monasteries and their impact on his spatial planning and housing in particular. I thought, in looking at what Cobusier looked at, I may become similarly inspired and the trips would propel my career to amazing heights. Things haven’t turned out as expected. While I remain gainfully unemployed, I will flesh out my ideas about Corbusier and his Voyage. After 16 years, my sketchbooks collected dust but now, I will start resurrecting them to make comics.

In returning to my research into Corbusier I was surprised to find out 2 facts. First, his architectural education came from his travels and two, Istanbul was the main interest in his Voyage d’Orient. He devoted 50 days of his 6 month sojourn there. I was so focused on Roman and Greek precedence that Corbusier looked at that I missed out on Turkey.

Corbusier was so impressed by Turkey, that one of his first houses he made in Switzerland after his trip was nicknamed the Turkish villa. When he offered his urban planning services for free to Ataturk in 1936, he proposed to retain the historical character of Istanbul, (click here for Corbusier's big regret) rather than raze it like his 1925 Plan Voison for Paris.(click here for the disaster that was luckily avoided Corbusier lamented he should have been less sentimental for his Istanbul planning efforts to gain the position of urban planner under the Turkish revolutionary. 

When Corbusier arrived in Istanbul, the simple modular cube/sphere geometry of the mosques that were aligned to Paul Cézanne’s analysis of forms: "We must treat nature according to the cube, the sphere and the cone.”

Corbusier on Voyage

Corbusier watch engraving efforts pre-architecture