BERN.- 20 years of Zentrum Paul Klee. The first major special exhibition in the Jubilee Year is devoted to Le Corbusier: between 8 February and 22 June 2025 the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing Le Corbusier. The Order of Things. The exhibition focuses on the working process of the Swiss-French artist-architect, designer and urban planner, and places Le Corbusier’s three-dimensional thought centre-stage. It offers a comprehensive overview of his entire output from an artistic perspective, and includes both iconic items and groups of works that have so far remained largely unknown.
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Le Corbusier’s working process as the core of the exhibition
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, world famous under the pseudonym Le Corbusier, is one of the most important guiding lights of modern architecture in Switzerland. He was also among the most prominent and globally influential protagonists of international modernism. Le Corbusier (b. 1887, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland – d. 1965 Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France) worked not only as an architect, but also as an artist, urban planner, designer, author and theorist. Some of his architectural works have been on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list since 2016.
‘To be modern is not a fashion, it is a state.’ --Le Corbusier, from: Jean Petit, Le Corbusier lui-même, Editions Rousseau, 1970, p. 184
Le Corbusier shaped modern architecture with enormous energy, radical visions and provocative rhetoric. In his work he set out to design living and urban spaces in a new way. His approach combined art, design and architecture, pursuing the goal of creating a new living environment through functional and aesthetic architecture, and to improve the quality of people’s lives. To achieve this, he made use of the new possibilities of technical progress, combining these with the classical principles of aesthetics such as the golden section. Le Corbusier proposed using the products of modern technologies such as ocean steamers, aeroplanes and cars as models for architecture, since these placed form in a direct relationship with function. He used reinforced concrete in his buildings, and developed methods to use the artistic and sculptural possibilities of this modern way of building in an innovative way.
‘Everything is in the intention, in the seed. Nothing is seen, appreciated or loved but what is so good, so beautiful that from outside we penetrate the very heart of the thing through examination, research, exploration. After taking a multiple path, we then find our way to the heart of the matter.’ -- Le Corbusier, from: L’Atelier de la recherche patiente, 1960, p. 201
This exhibition centres around Le Corbusier’s working process, his three-dimensional thought and the artistic experiment in the ‘studio of patient research’, as Le Corbusier described his artistic method. At this point we can clearly see how Le Corbusier fells his way towards form and the engagement with composition and space, light and colour. The presentation includes numerous drawings and sketches from the studio. Throughout his life, Le Corbusier saw drawing as a central way of capturing and treating what was seen, and developing new ideas. The exhibition also illuminates the sources that flow into the design process – from objects found on the beach to the architecture of antiquity.
The order principle
‘Order’ was of great importance to Le Corbusier. With this concept, the exhibition also picks up an accessible and universal art and art-historical topic which extends back into antiquity, while at the same time remaining current today. Particularly in the 1920s, ‘order’ was a key concept in Le Corbusier’s thought. Designing meant ‘ordering’ things. He saw the central task of art and architecture as being to understand and shape the world through order. It was only through order, he believed, that humanity could develop spiritually and free itself from the moods of nature, from chance and randomness.
‘Where there is order, there is well-being.” --Le Corbusier, from: Vers une architecture, 1923, p. 39
In architecture the principle of order is based first and foremost on the desire to bring forms and colours, light and space into a harmonic relationship with one another. Le Corbusier’s understanding of order goes back to classical traditions in art and architecture, for example to the architecture of antiquity. Le Corbusier’s preoccupation with order was also a reaction to the challenges of his time: the poor conditions of life in industrial cities, the destruction of the First World War, the everyday changes made by technical progress, the revolutions in Europe and the economic crises of the 1920s.
He shared with the artistic avant-garde of his time the radical impulse to question traditions and to reshape – to ‘order’ – the lived reality of people’s lives. To this extent order is utopian, but also an ambivalent concept: it promises peace and security, but also requires rules and discipline. And in this way it leads from the design of spaces and the structure of cities to the question of the organization of coexistence. It connects art and architecture, culture and society.
Art, architecture and research
The exhibition is arranged both thematically and chronologically and divided on three axes: art, architecture and research. The art axis shows Le Corbusier’s artistic development between his training days and his late work. Art always played a central role for Le Corbusier, both as a stand-alone activity and as a stimulant for architecture and design. This part of the exhibition begins with nature, landscape and architecture studies that have seldom been shown. They demonstrate how the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret engaged with space and architecture. These are followed by iconic paintings in the 1920s style of ‘Purism’ – an avant-garde movement that Le Corbusier co-founded with the artist Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. The art axis also includes colourful, abstract paintings, startling sculptures and collages from his late work. They reveal a side of Le Corbusier that has previously been barely known.
The architecture axis focuses on Le Corbusier’s design practice and his engagement with architectural principles of order. It is here that designs for projects both realized and unrealized are shown. They include remarkable sketches and drawings, designs and visions, models and visualizations for urban planning. Their artistic character is paramount, making the close parallels with Le Corbusier’s artistic work apparent. On display are original designs for famous projects such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille (1945-1952), the city of Chandigarh in India (1950-1965), and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-Du-Haut in Ronchamp (1950-1955). The innovative, almost cinematic looking sketches for Le Corbusier’s modernist villas of the 1920s, which invite viewers to a ‘promenade architecturale’ (‘architectural stroll’), are also included in the exhibition. Numerous photographs by Richard Pare allow the public to see the architectural sketches in relation with the built architecture. A large-format video installation by the Austrian artist Kay Walkowiak (b. 1980) about the present state of the city of Chandigarh rounds off the presentation.
The research section is the centre of the exhibition. This area is devoted to the idea of the ‘Atelier de la recherche patiente’ (‘Studio of patient research’). It forms the link between architecture and art. Here the public gains an insight into the daily working life of Le Corbusier, who divided his activity between two Paris studios: his architecture office on the Rue de Sèvres and his artistic studio on the Rue Nungesser et-Coli. In the research section Le Corbusier’s collection of natural objects is shown, among other things. He saw these as ‘objects à reaction poétique’ (‘objects causing a poetic reaction;). They formed a major source of his design process. A selection of his photographs is also shown here.
Furthermore, the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing Le Corbusier’s postcard collection for the first time in Switzerland. This allows us to immerse ourselves in the artist architect’s unique pictorial cosmos. The exhibition also includes Le Corbusier’s books and book designs. One room is devoted to his legendary lecture drawings, made in front of an audience. They were the result of his international travel and conference work, and testify to his passionate communication of modernist ideas.
Historic contextualization
The work of Le Corbusier in its historical contexts is made accessible through numerous wall and object texts. Information about Le Corbusier’s career is presented in the exhibition, and Le Corbusier’s much-disputed relationships with politics, his ideological attitudes and his historical legacy is explored and conveyed in an accessible way. In terms of content in this respect, the Zentrum Paul Klee refers to the study ‘Le Corbusier, Jews and fascism. Setting the record straight’, written by the historian Jean-Louis Cohen in 2012 on a commission to the city of Zurich, as well as the current state of research.
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