Le Corbusier's imaginary journey to the Far East

FORUM. Vol.7. ▌

Le Corbusier's imaginary journey to the Far East - geometry and order

demonstrated in a Chinese painting
Mingkang Liang
Postgraduate Researcher
University of Edinburgh, UK

Keywords: Le Corbusier, Matteo Ripa, Summer Palace Chengde, Orientalism, Chinoiserie, Chinese
landscape painting

Abstract
In pioneering the modern architecture for the new epoch, Le Corbusier rejected academicism, instead using templates from
primitive and distant cultures to support his arguments. Although his ‘Journey to the East’ reached no further than Istanbul in
1911, he intended to visit the Far East. In his book Une Maison - Un Palais, a drawing imitating Chinese landscape painting
was employed to support his argument for Purist architecture. This painting is composed of traditional Chinese architecture
embraced by a natural landscape. Its geometrical form resonated with Le Corbusier’s lifelong interest in the ordering of
structures.

Interestingly, Le Corbusier's intention was to demonstrate an ideal house model. What he selected, however, was a pavilion in
a royal garden in northern China, built in the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). This painting, presenting one of the thirty-six
beautiful vistas in a royal garden, was later remade as an etching; some copies of which were brought to Europe. Le Corbusier
praised the pavilion as it had a clear order set against a natural background. The Chinese emperor celebrated its poetic
landscape exclusively. This diversity between the West and East was elaborated by Edward Said in Orientalism; it is,
however, evidence of an avant-garde architect enriching his work with models drawn from distant cultures.

Introduction
In 1965, three months before his death, Le Corbusier was
interviewed by Hugues Desalle: “Is there any other
architecture, other than Greek architecture, which was an
important element in your life as an architect and builder-
innovator?” Le Corbusier answered:
‘Yes, yes! I’ve travelled all the countries of the
world, except for two cities…Peking and – what
is the other? Peking and Mexico City…I am
trying to go to those countries…in addition to the
palaces… I admired the peasants’ house, the
house of man, the huts, the modest thing on a
human scale.’(Zaknić, 1997:117)
Le Corbusier was exposed to foreign cultures during his
formative years. When he studied in La Chaux-de-Fonds,
his hometown, one of the main textbooks, ‘Grammar of
Ornament’ by Owen Jones, consolidates the ornament of
Europe, Egypt, New Guinea, China and many other non-
European countries. He later researched in many museums
in Paris and other places during his travels. He visited
Museum of Guimet, Ethnography (in the Trocadero) and
the Louvre, and also studied in the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris, which houses extensive oriental collections. The
opulent cultural backgrounds of Paris and of the many
countries during his grand tours fully facilitated his pursuit
of broader cultural sources.

Even though he did not reply to Desalle precisely, his

response explicitly revealed his intentions and
expectations. Like many avant-gardes of the twentieth
century, Le Corbusier’s primary ambition was to be an
idealist in quest of an ideal: to explore pioneer modern
architecture for the new epoch. Therefore, he forcefully
rejected the existing academicism, choosing instead
templates from distant sources. They included nature, a
perennial and universal fountain of inspiration; machines,
a symbol and the spirit of the new age; and distant cultural
references – folk and primitive culture and ancient
civilizations, such as the Orient.
Ideology leads selection
Around this time Le Corbusier’s personal ideologies, such
as order, geometry, the right angle, purity, universality and
unsymmetrical composition were gradually formulated.
His ideologies directly prescribed his attitude in studying
broader cultural sources. The most notable one, the ‘right
angle’ has been his lifelong aspiration since his formative
education. His hometown La Chaux-de-Fonds was
redesigned in a checkerboard grid after a devastating fire
in 1794. In the Ecole d’Art there, his mentor, Charles
L’Eplattenier, taught that decoration was derived from

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nature and organic forms and transformed into abstract and
stylised geometric patterns. These patterns became a
genuine regional style, free from the conventional patterns.
Henry Provensal’s L’Art de Demain, which Le Corbusier
read in 1906, maintains that ‘architecture must adhere to
eternal laws, including those of number, unity and
harmony; that cubic forms can best express such an idea’
(Brooks, 1997:255).
In 1924 Le Corbusier visited Brittany1 and studied
vernacular houses. On the seashore, he was amazed by the
natural right angle: a vertical stone standing against the
horizon (figure 1). To Le Corbusier, it was crystallization,
a complete symphony, a magnificent relationship, nobility
and the power of synthesis (Le Corbusier, 1991:75). Such
a right angle was more than pure geometry. It was an icon
of nature and of his personal cosmos. In his book Le
Poème de L’angle Droit (The Poem of Right Angle), an
anthology of his personal icons, the right angle is the
conclusion of this poem (figure 2). Therefore, while he
endlessly investigated the enormous sources of distant
cultures, he always preferred the material with a clear
order or a right angle, as manifested in the examples in his
publications, Towards a New Architecture, The City of
Tomorrow and ‘Une Maison – Un Palais’, of 1928.
Figure 1. Natural right Figure 2. Poème de L’angle
angle on the seashore of Droit
Brittany.
(Source: p.151)
Chinoiserie and the admiration of the Orient
At the turn of the twentieth century, Europeans were
extremely interested in the Exotic, understood as the
Orient, inland Africa, Peruvian art, Oceanic art and so on.
Among them, the Orient, traditionally embracing North
Africa and Asian countries, had long represented romance
and exoticism to Europeans. As characterized by Edward
Said, it includes the places ‘of Europe’s greatest and
richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations
and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its
deepest and most recurring images of the Other.’ (Said,
2003:1)
1 3
Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Volume 1, 1914-1948, Notes by Francoise
de Franclieu, Thames and Hudson, 1981, no.314.
8
Long after Marco Polo’s adventure stories of a journey to
China in the thirteenth century, the allure of Cathy
remained. Chinoiserie, starting around the eighteenth
century, was a style derived from travellers’ tales,
exaggerations, the odd artefact from India or Japan, and
Europeans’ imaginings of exotic societies. From the late
eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, modern
Orientalism developed and an Oriental renaissance took
place. A virtual epidemic of Orientalia affected every
major poet, essayist and philosopher of that time, when
Paris was the capital of the Orientalist world (Said,
2003:42-51).
In 1911 Le Corbusier made a grand tour to the East, from
southeast Europe to Istanbul. He experienced diverse
architectures and was strongly influenced by the multiple
cultures. For example, he praised the Turkish mosque:
‘Such unity! Such timelessness! Such wisdom!’ (Le
Corbusier, 1987:240). Furthermore, he took an imaginary
journey to the further East by reading many treatises.
While staying in Vienna in 1907 and 1908, he read Les
Grands Initiés, a gift from L’Eplattenier, and Sanctuaires
d’orient all by Edouard Schuré. The former book, which
portrays the lives of many great prophets, opened Le
Corbusier’s mind, not only with decorative patterns as
Owen Jones discussed, but also with profound wisdom
from diverse cultures. Schuré states:
‘Lao-Tse2 in China was emerging from the
esoterism of Fo-Hi3; the last Buddha Sakya-
Mouni was preaching on the banks of the Ganges;
in Italy the Etrurian priesthood sent to Rome an
initiate possessed of the Sibylline books…Their
diverse missions had one common end in
view…at certain periods, one identical spiritual
current passes mysteriously through the whole of
humanity.’ (Schuré, 1929:10, vol II)
Le Corbusier had begun to write a book on city planning,
La Construction des Villes, in 1910. He worked on this
text for several years, mainly during his travels, his
apprenticeships, and notably during his study in the
Biblothèque Nationale, Paris, in 1915. In this book he
collected and analysed many European and Asian cities
and architectures. In fact, La Construction des Villes was
never accomplished but was recast afterwards in The City
of Tomorrow in 1925 and some of it was used in other
publications. Most examples cited are from those he
studied in Europe and a number of cases are from South
and East Asia; no examples of the Middle East or Africa
are included (Duboy, 1985). In his publications, L’Esprit
Nouveau in the 1920s, there are examples from the Orient,
such as Mesopotamian cities, a Persian palace, an Indian
temple, the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China,
all profusely illustrated, even though he had never been to
any of these places.
2
Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism and author of the Tao-Te Chin.
In Chinese ‘伏羲’, A legendary intellectual in ancient China who
invented ‘Bagua’, eight variations in the universe.

Grounding modernism on ancient and distant
cultures
One of Le Corbusier’s studies of Chinese landscape (figure
3), associated with his La Construction des Villes, was
published in his Une Maison - Un Palais4, a book written
to argue his answer to the loss of the competition of
League of Nations in 1927. The examples in this book
were selected from the early civilizations and broad
cultural sources to support his standpoint. ‘His sketches
rise to the timeless primitivism of ethnology.’(Vogt
1998:188) This Chinese drawing was presented alongside
the Colosseum and a large Indian temple complex on the
same page. Le Corbusier discussed the order within nature
as exemplified in the buildings in the Chinese landscape
drawing, and further elaborated on hierarchy and power, as
well as other subtleties in these cases. This juxtaposition
implies that these three architectures remain equivalently
magnificent: a moderate Chinese pavilion complex within
natural setting, an architectural landmark of a great empire,
and a powerful influential religious monument.
Figure 3. Summer residences around Peking (Beijing).
(Source: Le Corbusier, Une Maison –Un Palais, p. 11)
This vision of geometry, order and nature is followed in
the next page of the book by his discourses on nature,
mother earth and geometry through the landscape of
Delphi: ‘We get geometry from nature because all chaos is
only from the outside. Our will, our creative power is only
geometry.’ In the following page is illustrated a sketch of
three stone dice5, pure and sublime, against mountains and
deep valleys.
The leitmotiv of the book Une Maison - Un Palais is that
the folk house, though simple and moderate, could
4
Currently this drawing is not in the La Construction des Villes, but in
this treatise there is another drawing FLC B-20-218 from the same
family, as this drawing.
5
Probably the three bases of the Ishegaon near the Temple of Apollo, See
note 106, Voyage d'Orient Carnets, English edition, trans. Mayta Munson
and Meg Shore, Electa spa. Milano & Fondation L.C., Paris, c2002.
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epitomize the dignity of great civilizations. Therefore, after
a long development, they can evolve into palace or temple.
These houses process the qualities of purity, economy,
harmony, lyricism and standardization. They consequently
become noble and dignified, as palaces or temples. This
idea informs Le Corbusier’s architecture, and supported
his League of Nations project.
This specific Chinese landscape drawing illustrates a low
quadrangle complex and a pavilion on the shore of an
extensive lake, which gradually merges the distant
mountains. This drawing is annotated: ‘The summer
dwellings around Peking.’ (Les résidences d'été aux
environs de Pékin.); and the text reads: ‘In a variegated
setting, the Chinese erect a house, clear, limpid, precise: a
regular event.’ (Dans le site bigarré, le Chinois élève sa
maison, nette, limpide, précise: événement régulier.)
Le Corbusier’s argument is precise and reasoned here. As
he notes, he first cherished the regular, clear, limpid and
precise characteristics of these two architectures, which are
contrasted with the irregular, natural and picturesque
setting. The right angle was his lifelong delight; its
universality extends to the ancient Chinese civilization.
Secondly, he preferred the primitive and exotic to the
academic conventions of École des Beaux-Arts; thus this
Chinese example was selected. The building complexes of
both the Chinese residence and the League of Nations were
situated on a lakeshore. This Chinese example, universal in
Le Corbusier’s mind, exemplifies his ‘lake dwelling fever’
(Vogt 1998:221) and also corresponds with Rousseau’s
idea of primeval time, which exists deep inside nature6
(Vogt 1998:144). Furthermore, as the League of Nations
was an international institution, his argument needed
international references; thus the examples, such as a
temple of India, an ancient Ggantija in Malta, Stonehenge
in Salisbury, an Irish crannog, and so on were included.
Three or four years before the publication of this book, Le
Corbusier completed building a residence similarly located
by a lake and surrounded by distant mountains – ‘Une
Petite Maison’ in Vevey, a modest house by Lake Geneva
designed for his parents. He made this plan in 1922 and
1923 before finding an actual site. Le Corbusier wrote, ‘A
plan without a site? The plan of a house in search of a plot
of ground? Yes.’ (Le Corbusier, 2001:5) This plan
revealed his ideal, which consisted of a composition
ordered by the right angle, with a natural surrounding of
lake and mountains (figure 4) like the Chinese drawing.
This house at Vevey was constructed in 1923 and 1924. He
noted that this small project was local but linked to the
world, as it within walking distance of a train station. And
from the station, one could reach major cities, such as
Paris, London, Munich, Milan, Vienna, Berlin and
6
Vogt quoted J.J. Rousseau’s writing from ‘Les Confessions’: ‘The
whole rest of the day I spent deep inside the forest and sought and found
there the picture of primeval time.’ This naturalistic Chinese drawing is a
universal example. Le Corbusier had owned a copy of Rousseau’s book
since 1909; see Paul Venable Turner, The Education of Le Corbusier, a
Study of the Development of Le Corbusier’s Thought, 1900 -1920, Ph.D.
Dissertation, Harvard University, 1971.
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Marseille (figure 5). In other words, this house is local yet
its intention and aspiration extended to the whole world.
The link between this Petite Maison and the publication of
Une Maison - Un Palais is made clear in a memoir to his
father on the first page. He had lived in this small house
but had recently died.
Figure 4. Le Corbusier, ‘Une Petite Maison’ in Vevey,
Switzerland.
(Source: Le Corbusier (2001), ‘Une Petite Maison’, p. 9)
Figure 5. Le Corbusier, ‘Une Petite Maison’ in Vevey,
Switzerland.
(Source: Le Corbusier (2001), ‘Une Petite Maison’, p. 8)
A summerhouse or a palace
There is no further description of this drawing in the book
regarding its source, which is not unusual for Le
Corbusier. But where and what is this summer residence
near Beijing? Unfortunately, this drawing is not shown in
Philippe Duboy’s research (1985) on La Construction des
Villes’s, nor in the archive file of Une Maison - Un Palais
at the Fondation Le Corbusier. Uncharacteristic of Chinese
architecture, this quadrangle and pavilion complex is not
an ordinary residence, not being arranged symmetrically,
always a typical feature of the Chinese residence. It is
more like a large-scale garden, and its grand scale suggests
that it is most likely a royal garden. The capital of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911) was Peking, and there were several
summer palaces built nearby in this dynasty. The most
remarkable was in Chengde, north of Peking.
10
Ancestors of the emperor of the Qing Dynasty had come
originally from the northeast of China. This summer
palace, closer to their ancestral home, was built for the
emperor to escape from the summer heat in Peking
(Beijing). The natural scenery of lake and mountain
provides a grand setting for this resort and provides the
main theme for the royal garden. Many other themes, such
as legends, mythology and poetry are also incorporated in
the garden in various forms. The major vistas here were
beautifully presented and interpreted in a number of
poems7. To harmonize with nature, the original topography
was conserved as far as possible when the buildings were
constructed.8 This was ordered by the Emperor Kang-xi,
who initiated this summer palace. The volume of the
architecture is moderate, in contrast to the grand scale of
the Forbidden City. Nevertheless, royal grandeur and
beauty expressed through elegance in design and harmony
with the splendid surrounding mountains. The Emperor
selected the thirty-six most beautiful vistas, composed a
poem for each of them, and ordered his court artist to make
a drawing of each vista. These poems and drawings were
then collected, transformed into woodcut drawings and
edited as an anthology for publication. One of the vistas,
‘Spring sound resonates near and far’ (in
Chinese,遠近泉聲, Yuan Jin Quan Sheng) (figures 6 & 7,
the same vista was shown in both versions) clearly
provides the source of Le Corbusier’s drawing9 (figure 3).
In this vista, a quadrangle and a pavilion in the foreground
are encircled by an extensive lake, and the scenery
expands gradually to take in the contours of the lake, with
the magnificent mountains afar as the backdrop. The
composition of this landscape painting is arranged in a
‘rising-eye-level’ sequence, a vertical viewing system of
successive eye-level vistas and perspectives, which
conveys an expression of depth when the viewer shifts his
focus from the architecture at the bottom to the winding
lake and the mountain peaks on the top, and from the
foreground to the background.
Chinese formal architecture is always composed of
rectilinear courtyards and quadrangles arranged along a
central axis. The distribution and sequence of interior
space reflects Chinese social and ethnical values as well as
its hierarchy (Liu, 1980:9). Building columns and wooden
beams support a curved roof, whereas walls function
primarily as enclosing partitions only. This is echoed in Le
Corbusier’s ‘Free plan’, as he proposed in his ‘Five points
towards a new architecture’. Le Corbusier’s interest in
oriental quadrangle settings was revealed in several
sketches made during his journey to the East. These
include a Turkish house between Murattis and Rodosto (Le
7
Each vista was illustrated by more than one poem. For example sees the
poems to this vista, a few paragraphs later.
8
Tianjin University; Bureau of Cultural Relics of Chengde, Ancient
Architecture of Chengde. pp. 27-31.
9
As compared with others of the thirty-six beautiful vistas of the Summer
Palace in Chengde, both in wood cut and etching version (see the
following discussion), Le Corbusier is very close to the etching of a
specific vista, thus the connection with the Cheng-De royal garden, and
the source.

Corbusier, 1987:80), and a sacred necropolis in Eyüp
enclosed by walls as a quadrangle setting (Le Corbusier,
1987:125-6). In Le Corbusier’s eyes, this building is clear,
lucid and regular within a variegated setting. But from a
Chinese viewpoint, what does this architecture and
landscape convey?
Figure 6. ‘Spring sound resonates near and far’ (in
Chinese 遠近泉聲, Yuan Jin Quan Sheng), Summer
residences in Chengde. Woodcut by court artisans from
original painting by a Chinese court artist.
(Source: Shengzu, 1983)
Figure 7. ‘Spring sound resonates near and far’ (Yuan Jin
Quan Sheng), version of copperplate etching made after
the woodcut drawing (figure 6). This was the version that
Le Corbusier drew from.
(Source: Shengzu, 2002)
The traditional Chinese gardener treasures a natural
setting. He always follows the existing topography and
further enhances the characteristics of the natural
landscape. Many Chinese gardens were constructed or
commissioned by intellectuals proficient in painting and
poetry. The building in a rectilinear layout, without the
11
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strict symmetry of the Beaux-Art school, and synchronized
with the landscape, inspired Le Corbusier, and was chosen
as a case study.
The subject of this painting is ‘Spring sound resonates near
and far’ (in Chinese, 遠近泉聲), referring to a spring in
the north and a waterfall in the west of that region. The
painting contains not only the visually picturesque lake
and mountain but also an imaginary resonance of the
sound of the spring, and even the temperature, cooled by
water, shade and wind. This image was also perfectly
conveyed by the Emperor Kang-xi, the master of this
garden, in his beautiful symmetrical “Dui-Lian” (in
Chinese 對聯, a Chinese traditional literary form
consisting of two regulated sentences in certain strict and
consistent rhymes and rhythms, which symmetrically
respond to each other): ‘An image of the sun emerges
among the surrounding floating waterweed; a celestial
spirit is reflected in a celestial green lake.’ (in
Chinese：四面浮青開日景，一泓澄碧見天心) and in his
poem: ‘Draw spring to hear the cascade, dancing water
arouses dewdrops; jade-like sound echoes in the air; they
exist but are invisible.’ (in Chinese：引泉聞瀑布，
迸水起飛珠，鏘玉雲嚴應，色空有若無) (He Kun et al,
1966:17). The buildings were not the Emperor’s focus;
neither did he praise the architecture. Instead, he
appreciated the natural scenery and sounds, quite in
contrast to Le Corbusier’s interpretation of the
architectural order within a mottled landscape.
A variegated Chinese landscape
Emperor Kang-xi’s anthology on the scenery was
illustrated by woodcut landscape drawings. Chinese
landscape and poetry had been developed within an
autonomous and matured system for thousands of years.
Chinese painting and landscape design treasures nature and
incorporates the environment. The poetic appreciation of
nature in Chinese landscape painting, was formalized in
the Six Dynasties (265-581AD) (Sullivan, 1977:139).
Painters of that time already regarded landscape painting
as a high art because landscape consists of both substantial
existence and the realm of spirit.10 ‘The Chinese were the
first people…who placed the painter on the same level as
the inspired poet’ (Gombrich, 1999:150). The brush
painting and woodcut was implemented by the Emperor’s
order, and therefore should reach the highest artistic level
in China. Why was it ‘variegated’ (bigarré) in Le
Corbusier’s eyes? How did he obtain access to this
Chinese document since he had never been to China?
The original illustration for the Emperor’s anthology was a
woodcut designed by a court artist, Yu Shen (in
Chinese沈喻), beautifully carved by court artisan. It was
later reproduced as a copperplate etching (figure 7) by
10
These words were probably by Tsung Ping (宗炳, 375-442), a Buddhist
scholar and painter, in his ‘Preface on Landscape Painting (山水畫序)’ .
See Sullivan (1977), p. 98.
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Matteo Ripa, an Italian missionary, in 171311 under the
Emperor’s order. It mainly followed the woodcut version.
This etching, however, was the first of a series of copper
etchings made in China. Matteo Ripa was the only
westerner in the court who knew etching and his
knowledge was limited in its theory. He knew no more
than what he had learned from a single class taught by an
artist in Rome. The required materials and tools were not
available. The ingredients for aqua forties (nitric acid)
were inadequate, with the result that the lines of the
etching were very shallow. The ink was not suitable for
etching; nor was there a machine for pressing. Matteo Ripa
did many experiments and finally achieved certain
progress (Ripa, 1979:77-84).
These two versions reveal different disciplines between
two cultures, as well as maturity in technique. The
woodcut drawing (figure 6) follows the basic technique of
strokes in Chinese brush painting (‘Tsuen’ or cun, in
Chinese 皴法), a special technique of modelling strokes
that Chinese artists have been using to depict the textures
of the trees, rocks and mountains. The brushstroke allows a
varying thickness of line and changes of direction in the
same stroke. Conversely, in copperplate etching the artist
‘draws’ the line with a sharp needle over the resinous layer
on the plate; thus the line is very fine and minute.
There are significant differences between these two
versions, as revealed in the manner of depicting the
mountains. In the woodcut (figure 6), the mountains are
depicted as abstract and flat, either covered by slender dots
where they are nearby or just a contour line for these
further distant; whereas in the copperplate version (figure
7), all the mountains are of uniform shade. There are also
some minor variations. In the woodcut there is an area of
lines representing the waves in the centre of lake, but in
the copperplate etching it is lacking. A short bridge leads
to a small island on the lower right corner; but in the
copperplate version, the linkage is unclear. Thus the
copperplate version becomes ‘variegated’, as Le Corbusier
described. The woodcut drawing by the Chinese painter
and artisan is closer to the Chinese poetic and naturalistic
spirit, whereas Le Corbusier’s drawing (figure 3) seems
more likely reproduced from the version of the copperplate
etching (figure 7) rather than the woodcut (figure 6), if one
compares the details of trees, mountains and lakes in each
of them.
Since Le Corbusier had never been to China, how did he
get the access to these copies of the copperplate etching?
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris had owned
a copy of this copperplate version before 183312, and the
11
Matteo Ripa (Chinese name馬國賢), 1682-1745, Italian missionary
who stayed in China from 1710-1723.Author of ‘Memoirs of Father Ripa,
during thirteen years residence at the court of Peking in the service of the
emperor of China.’
12
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Etampes et Photographie, Rés.
Hd 90, Entré avant 1833.
12
woodcut one in 1846.13 After 1908, Le Corbusier lived in
major European cities, such as Paris, Berlin and Vienna,
studying, working as an apprentice, and writing books of
Étude sur le mouvement de l’art décoratif en Allemagne
and La Construction des Villes. He revisited the
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris in 1915 to further research
for the latter book and others14. Here he was exposed to
Matteo Ripa’s Chinese drawing and to other sources,
including the schematic analysis of the Achaemenian
cupolas in Dieulafois’s L'art antique de la Perse,
subsequently included by Le Corbusier in his Towards a
New Architecture.
A romantic conjecture
The architecture in this drawing actually is not a house as
stated in Le Corbusier’s book, but a royal pavilion at the
Emperor’s summer palace, which is quite the opposite to
Le Corbusier’s idea of ‘une maison’ (a house) but indeed
could be considered ‘un palais’ (a palace). Nor is the main
theme of this setting a visual order but a poem set to the
sound of water. Le Corbusier idiosyncratically selected
what he needed for his argument, and made a personal
interpretation on the setting of this part of the summer
palace. Nevertheless, the orthogonal order in the painting
is explicit. Such things ‘other than colonialist superiority
were uppermost in his mind as he drew.’ (Samuel,
2004:80)
It is interesting to see how a western artist selected,
manipulated and utilized this distant source. The original
context would inevitably be reinterpreted by different
cultural perceptions. New interpretations by modern artists
and architects, such as Le Corbusier, manipulated the
sources. Of course, Le Corbusier was an architect, painter
and writer, not an archaeologist. Other artists, such as
Picasso, were inspired by African artefacts but did not
undertake scholarly research into the context and meaning.
Whether consciously or not, an artist ‘shapes his artist
expression to fit the use for which the work is intended,
and in the process adjusts the themes to the psychological
and aesthetic environment of the time’ (Humbert,
1994:25).
Le Corbusier’s source, the image in Ripa’s copperplate
version, is annotated with Chinese text. Even if Le
Corbusier could have read Chinese and understand this
painting, as the Chinese would, Chinese traditional
painting does not care for realism but rather for an
imaginary expression and a cognitive presentation. This is
evident in the high viewpoint of this painting rather than
an eye-level perspective, where there is no such viewpoint
on the actual site. The spiritual meaning of the landscape is
sought, not precise photographic reproduction. Le
13
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Manuscrit orientaux,
mandchou 111 et mandchou112.
14
H. Allen Brooks (1997), Le Corbusier’s Formative Years, pp. 430-5.
Also, the vista from the same source (FLC B-20-218 or F/19) was in
Philippe Duboy’s research of La Construction des Villes with a title,
‘Ch.E. Jeanneret, "La Construction Des Villes" Biliotheque Nationale De
Paris, 1915.’

Corbusier seized upon the clarity and order in nature for
his own purpose.
Le Corbusier’s appropriation of this print took place
against the larger backdrop of Orientalism in Europe. ‘A
kind of second-order knowledge – lurking in such places
as the “Oriental” tale, the mythology of the mysterious
East, notions of Asian inscrutability – with a life of its
own’ (Said, 2003:52). Western notions on the Oriental
cultures and civilizations were rather different from those
of the Orientals themselves, as observed by Edward Said:
‘the written statement is a presence to the reader
by virtue of its having excluded, displayed, made
supererogatory any such real thing as “ the
Orient.” Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and
away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes
sense at all depends more on the West than on the
Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to
various Western techniques of representation that
make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in
discourse about it’ (Said, 2003:21-2).
Conclusion
Le Corbusier’s drawing characterizes his multi-layered
rejection of academicism, his celebration of the
geometrical order against irregular surroundings, and his
justification of modernism with primitive and distant
cultures. It also reveals how an artist and a designer
manipulated sources ignoring scholastic archaeological
accuracy. To an extent, this drawing typifies the
westerners’ attitudes in their Chinoiserie and Orientalism.
There is a clear divergence in interpretation between Le
Corbusier’s own viewpoint and the Chinese perspective;
such a condition also exits between two versions of the
same drawing. Between the West and the East, there are
dilemmas of understanding, modes of communication and
different protocols of presentation. This specific Chinese
drawing is only one example from Le Corbusier’s
enormous sources of primitive and other distant cultures.
These fall beyond the scope of this paper.
The dilemmas and discrepancies nevertheless reveal the
richness and opulence of the world’s cultural resources.
The diversities between the West and the East suggest
boundless complementary possibilities and potentialities.
The East, as the ‘other’ is valuable not because its
similarity but for its difference. As an avant-garde
architect, Le Corbusier constantly sought possibilities in
and multiple reinterpretations from distant sources as fuel
for his creativity, and inspiring and valuable resources
enriching his modernism.
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FORUM. Vol.7. ▌
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