ABSTRACT
On 15 October 1923, excusing himself for the fact that he had come straight from a building site and had had no time to shave or change out of his muddy clothes, 2 a gaunt, bespectacled man arrived to attend the opening of an architectural exhibition at the Parisian art gallery L'Effort Moderne. The exhibition had been organized by the leader of the De Stijl group, Theo van Doesburg. The visitor, as is well known, was Le Corbusier. Both were ‘universal men’ in the renaissance tradition – painters, writers, designers, and editors of avant– garde reviews – and both fed on controversy and confrontation. Six years before, in the same year that Van Doesburg had founded the magazine and movement De Stijl, Le Corbusier had left Switzerland, settled in Paris and joined forces with the painter Amedée Ozenfant, who had recently launched another movement: ‘purism’. Together, they had published Après le cubisme in 1918, and founded the magazine L'Espht Nouveau in 1920. In 1922 Le Corbusier had built his first houses since leaving Switzerland – a villa at Vaucresson and a studio for Ozenfant – and produced a project for ‘a contemporary city for three million inhabitants’. Both houses were basically simple cubes – ‘pure prisms’ – and the ville contemporaine was an ideal city as symmetrical and axial as Versailles.
