Five points about a new architecture

The five points for a new architecture (in the French original: Cinq points de l'architecture modern ) are an architecture manifesto by the Swiss architects Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret . Corbusier published it in his magazine L'Esprit Nouveau in 1923 and in the collection of essays Vers une architecture. In 1927 it was published in German in the magazine of the German Werkbund Die Form , now also with the naming of Jeanneret as a co-author .

Five points of architecture

In the course of his work as an architect, Le Corbusier developed a number of architectural principles that he made the basis of his designs. Together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, with whom he ran a joint office in Paris from 1923 to 1940, he published these design principles as Five Points on New Architecture. The items include:

The posts ( pilotis ): A grid of concrete supports replaces the load-bearing walls and becomes the basis of the new aesthetic.
The roof gardens on a flat roof can serve both as a kitchen garden and to protect the concrete roof.
The free floor plan design ( free floor plan ) and thus the elimination of load-bearing walls enables flexible use of the living space.
The long window cuts through the non-load-bearing walls along the facade and supplies the apartment with even light.
The free design of the facade is made possible by separating the external design from the building structure ( curtain wall ).

Examples

Villa Savoye

In the Villa Savoye (1928–1931) Le Corbusier realized his Five Points as an example

→ Main article: Villa Savoye

Le Corbusier implemented the concept of the five points most successfully in the Villa Savoye (1929–1931), which he had steadily developed over the course of the 1920s. First, he lifted the structure off the ground by propping it up with concrete posts. On the one hand, these pilotis served as a structural support for the residential building; on the other hand, they made it possible to reduce the load-bearing walls, which made the other two points possible: a free facade design, i.e. H. an independent design of the non-load-bearing walls, and a free floor plan , d. H. a living space that was not interrupted by load-bearing walls and could therefore be designed flexibly. The second floor of the Villa Savoye opened on four sides in horizontal ribbon windows towards the garden and fulfills the fourth principle. The fifth point in the roof garden was to reclaim the built-up area. A ramp that leads from the ground floor to the terrace on the third floor enables access to the architecture. The white railing of the ramp is reminiscent of the industrial aesthetics of the ocean liners, which Le Corbusier valued and which was popular in the 1920s. The entrance with its semicircular path corresponds exactly to the turning radius of a Citroën automobile from 1927.

Carpenter Center

The Carpenter Center

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University is Le Corbusier's only building in the United States. Here, too, he tried to integrate his five points into his design.

reception

Le Corbusier's Five Points can initially be seen as an attempt to develop a new language of forms in architecture by making the design independent of the construction. In addition, the critic Sigfried Giedion also attributed a transcendent symbolic meaning to the concept : For him, the apartment raised on supports became a sign of the emancipation of people from nature.

Above all, the German Werkbund helped Le Corbusier's ideas to be successful: As part of the building exhibition Die Wohnung 1927, Mies van der Rohe made some of Le Corbusier's principles, such as the flat roof, free facade design and free floor plan, the main criteria for in the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart the participating architects, whose buildings as an ensemble have become an icon of New Building .

Presumably Le Corbusier wanted to have his five points on internationally recognized principles of New Building confirmed at the first CIAM in 1928 . The principles achieved international significance through the MoMA exhibition Modern Architecture: International Exhibition curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock in 1932 and the accompanying publication International Style . Johnson and Hitchcock used the five points as the basis for their selection criteria for the buildings presented, making the five points internationally one of the main features of modern architecture.

However, there was resistance to this concept from the start. In the course of the construction of the Weißenhofsiedlung, it was particularly members of the traditionalist circle of the German Werkbund and the so-called Heimatschutz , such as Paul Schulze-Naumburg , who severely criticized the buildings and principles of the “White Modernism” and vilified them as “un-German”, which is the basis for the rejection of modern architecture under National Socialism .

literature

Le Corbusier: Vers une architecture . Paris 1923.
Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret: Five points about a new architecture . In: The Form. Journal for creative work . No. 2 , 1927, pp. 272-274 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
Katrin Schwarz: Building for the global community: The CIAM and the UNESCO building in Paris (= reflexes of immaterial and material culture . Volume 2 ). deGruyter, Berlin / Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-040399-2 .

Individual evidence

↑ Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret : Five points on a new architecture . In: The Form. Journal for creative work . No. 2 , 1927, pp. 272-274 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).
^ Katrin Schwarz: Building for the world community: The CIAM and the UNESCO building in Paris . de Gruyter, Berlin / Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-040399-2 , p. 319 .

[1] Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret : Five points on a new architecture . In: The Form. Journal for creative work . No. 2 , 1927, pp. 272-274 ( uni-heidelberg.de ).

[2] Katrin Schwarz: Building for the world community: The CIAM and the UNESCO building in Paris . de Gruyter, Berlin / Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-040399-2 , p. 319 .