ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of Graffite à Cap-Martin, a mural by Le Corbusier in a villa by Eileen Gray. The mural is incidental to Le Corbusier’s work as an architect and urban planner, yet I argue that an analysis of its content reveals his attachment to an orientalism that informs his plan for the redevelopment of Algiers. By putting his urbanism in this context and, in the second part of the chapter, investigating its links to political currents in Paris in the 1920s (the period of his key texts), I find ambivalences in Le Corbusier’s approach to the city. This leads me to reconsider his legacy to urbanism in the post-war period. Finally, I contrast Le Corbusier’s technocratic approach with an alternative Modernism in the work of Hassan Fathy in Egypt in the 1940s. More recent departures from Modernist art and architecture are considered in Chapter 7, and alternative constructions of urbanism for a postcolonial and post-industrial society in Chapter 8.
