Le Corbusier e Christian Zervos: Purismo, Primitivismo, Brutalismo.

The aesthetic experience of Purism has allowed us to significantly read the primitives’ dimension of Le Corbusier. The architect was able to bring out, with Ozenfant, the key elements of the pure expression of form. This purist phase was followed by a clear departure from these requests and with the end of the ‘Esprit Nouveau’ publications Le Corbusier made contact with Zervosi. From 1926, with ‘Cahiers d’art’, Le Corbusier fits perfectly into the proper dimension of the avant-gardes, fascinated by the remote, pre-classic and more primitive ages. To understand Le Corbusier’s attention to Primitivism, it is useful to look closer into his interest in this aesthetic dimension. The first is a series of documents that prove his interest in Primitivism, consisting of numerous drawings that the young Charles Edouard elaborated during his study trips to Paris from 1902. From this moment on, Le Corbusier’s attention was latent and constant, so much so that even the African fetishes that he reproduced in 1908 were part of the ‘Poéme electronique’ that he developed in 1958. A further experience is what Le Corbusier saw when he travelled to the East. In addition to the usual modern grand tour, which he made in 1911 when he visited the Acropolis, he also made another tour in 1933 for the occasion of CIAM IV. Another significant fact was that which affected the places where Le Corbusier lived or stayed for relatively limited periods. His experience contrasted the urban and metropolitan realities of the French capital with places that are properly bucolic. His experience in the fishing village of Piquey, between 1926 and 1936, during which he was able to admire the places and the ways of man adapting to nature. The Vezélay experience also influenced the personal story of Le Corbusier, both for the implicit departure from the climate of the contemporary metropolis as well as for his contacts with other intellectuals close to its avant-garde and modernist features. Significant in this sense were the contacts with Zervos, with Badovici and Léger, with whom he had the opportunity to deepen the aspects of the theories of painting in architecture and to establish with them a nucleus of the Galerie Cahiers d’art, in the heart of France. Finally, there was the next experience that led Le Corbusier, together with Badovici and E. Gray, to the French Riviera, first with the project of the E-1017 at Roquebrune Cap Martin and later with his project for the Petit Cabanon. Because of the experiences in the South of France, he once again rediscovers the dimension of the Mediterranean, as an identifying and unifying element of a culture that has its roots in a preclassical, primitive age. This dimension is affected by the principles of primitivism and is related to the historical and cultural context of the era as expressions of a new Humanism, identifying the poetics of concrete as the discovery of a of a new architectural identity, which became in the field of architecture a brutalist tendency.