Wallpapers

Carpenter Center, at Cambridge

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Date - 1961 to 1964 timeline
Building Type - university art center
Construction System - reinforced cast-in-place concrete masonry
Climate - temperate
Context - urban campus
Style - Modern
Notes full name - "Carpenter Visual Arts Center" at Harvard University.

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harvard University24 Quincy Street (at Prescott Street)
CambridgeMassachusetts 02138
USA

The Carpenter Center is Le Corbusier's only building in North America, and one of the last to be completed during his lifetime. Its wonderful collection of concrete forms bring together many of the design principles and devices from Le Corbusier's earlier works: the ondulatoires (windows above left) from La Tourette; the brise soleils (below) originally from the Marseille unité d'habitation but angled later in Chandigarh (but here with glass for the Massachusetts climate); and the original Five Points from the 1920s 'accentuated in a new way: as if the Villa Savoye had been exploded inside out, with ramp and curved partitions extending into the environment.' The ramp and architectural promenade is particularly strong at the Carpenter Center.

'At the heart is a cubic volume from which curved studios pull away from one another on the diagonal. The whole is cut through by an S-shaped ramp which rises from one street and descends towards the other... The layers and levels swing out and back from the grid of concrete pilotis within, making the most of cantilevering to create interpenetrations of exterior and interior, as well as a sequence of spatial events linked by the promenade architecturale of the ramp.'
William J.R. Curtis in Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms

The cave temples of Ellora

The cave temples of Ellora, a UNESCO world heritage site, are the pinnacle of Deccan rock cut architecture. Over five centuries, generations of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain monks carved chapels, monasteries, and temples from a 2 km long escarpment and decorated them with a profusion of sculptures of remarkable imagination and detail. In all there are 34 caves at Ellora: 12 Buddhist (600-800 CE), 17 Hindu (600-900 CE) and 5 Jain (800-1000 CE).


Ellora represents the renaissance of Hinduism under the Chalukya and Rashtrakuta dynasties, the subsequent decline of Indian Buddhism, and a brief resurgence of Jainism under official patronage. The sculpture shows the increasing influence of Tantric elements in India's three great religions, and their coexistence at one site indicates a prolonged period of religious tolerance.


The masterpiece of Ellora is the Kailasa Temple, one of the most audacious feats of architecture ever conceived. Dedicated to Shiva, it is the world's largest monolithic sculpture, hewn from the rock by 7000 laborers over a 150 year period. Attributed to king Krishna I of the Rashtrakuta dynasty c. 760 AD, the idea was not only to build an enormous and fantastically carved representation of Mt. Kailasa, Shiva's home in the Himalaya, but to create it from a single piece of stone by first cutting three huge trenches into the rock of the Ellora cliff face and then 'releasing' the shape of the temple using hammers and chisels.


Of overwhelming scale, it covers twice the area of the Parthenon in Athens, is 1-1/2 times as high, and entailed removing 200,000 tons of rock. Around the temple are a variety of dramatic and finely carved panels, depicting scenes from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the life of Krishna. [-- Adapted from the Lonely Planet, India, 1999]

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier
(b. La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland 1887; d. Cap Martin, France 1965)

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was born in La Chaux de Fonds, Switzerland, 1887. Trained as an artist, he travelled extensively through Germany and the East.Jeanneret-Gris adopted the name Le Corbusier in the early 1920s.

Le Corbusier's early work was related to nature, but as his ideas matured, he developed the Maison-Domino, a basic building prototype for mass production with free-standing pillars and rigid floors. In 1917 he settled in Paris where he issued his book Vers une architecture [Towards a New Architecture], based on his earlier articles in L'Esprit Nouveau.

From 1922 Le Corbusier worked with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. During this time, Le Corbusier's ideas began to take physical form, mainly as houses which he created as "a machine for living in" and which incorporated his trademark five points of architecture.
1947, he started his Unite d'habitation. Although relieved with sculptural roof-lines and highly colored walls, these massive post-war dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism. In 1947, he started with sculptural roof-lines and highly colored walls, these massive post-war dwelling blocks received justifiable criticism.

Le Corbusier's post-war buildings rejected his earlier industrial forms and utilized vernacular materials, brute concrete and articulated structure. Near the end of his career he worked on several projects in India, which utilized brutal materials and sculptural forms. In these buildings he readopted the recessed structural column, the expressive staircase, and the flat undecorated plane of his celebrated five points of architecture.

Le Corbusier did not fare well in international competition, but he produced town-planning schemes for many parts of the world, often as an adjunct to a lecture tour. In these schemes the vehicular and pedestrian zones and the functional zones of the settlements were always emphasized.