Beautiful Geometries: Still Life 1 after LC

There is an ambiguity at the origin of modernist aesthetic discourse. In architectural practice and theory, it finds one manifestation in the relationships founded between geometry and nature, between the mathematical/regulated and the seemingly random orders of dynamic symmetry. The genealogy of this ambiguity in twentieth-century architecture underpins a multi-year research project and the work included in the exhibition contributes to one line of investigation in the larger project.
A number of architectural speculations in the form of questions are opened through Beautiful Geometries: Still Life 1 after LC. What is revealed in the formal and spatial differences between the plans and sections of Le Corbusier’s late projects for the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts and the Olivetti Centre for Electronic Calculation? Can they be taken as an index of different relations to architectural knowledge and in turn beauty’s relation to the non-geometric? And if so is one perhaps more on the side of the singular, the other on the side of repetition? In what lies the biological essence accompanying Le Corbusier’s thinking at the time? Which aspects of architectural knowledge specifically and in aesthetic speculation more generally are questioned or destabilised? In terms of implications methodological, what might the work reveal or display about the role of regulating systems not as visible image but conceptual artefact?
The artwork contributes to scholarly debates on architecture’s relation to geometry and the biological, adds to knowledge about architectural discourse in the mid to late 20th century, and contributes to secondary scholarship on a little studied aspect of Le Corbusier’s practice and thought.