Curator, Barry Bergdoll: I'm Barry Bergdoll, Chief Curator of Architecture & Design at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm pleased to welcome you to Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes.
Born in Switzerland in 1887, Le Corbusier emerged as one of the major creative forces in 20th century architecture. Before the dawn of the jet age, he travelled from Russia to Rio and New Delhi to New York. Flying thousands of feet above the earth gave him new perspective on the landscape below. This exhibition looks at Le Corbusier—artist, architect, city planner, and world traveler.
Jean-Louis Cohen is an architect and a professor of architectural history at New York University and curator of this exhibition. He will be your guide on this tour.
Architect, Jean-Louis Cohen: The exhibition combines a series of narratives. One is Le Corbusier’s life as a well-known architect. The other one is a geography: walking down from the Swiss mountains to the seashore to the shore of the Mediterranean. And the other one is the history of his work and his ideas: observing the mountains, discovering the ancient world, moving out to modern cities. Touring the world, and coming in the end: to the production of extremely personal and poetic statements.
Barry Bergdoll: Throughout his long career as the world’s first global architect, Le Corbusier would return again and again to the idea of landscape—in his painting and in his designs for both dwellings and cities.
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