Défense de l’Architecture and the Ideological Dialectics of the Modern Movement: Karel Teige and Le Corbusier, 1920-1930

Abstract

Set in the «Roaring Twenties», a period that was torn between the aftermath of the Great War and the hope of a new world, this article revisits the well-known controversy between Karel Teige and Le Corbusier around the Mundaneum as a paradigmatic symptom of a rupture foretold, trying to contextualize both positions. Architecture hid the split between the two potentially incompatible drives that Colin Rowe detected in the Modern Movement: bestowing «architecture with the impersonal purity of a technique» and making it the carrier «of a more intangible content: the Spirit of the Age». The paper examines the articles that motivated this controversy and other related writings, considering, on the one hand, the continuities between Le Corbusier's early aestheticism and his conception of the role of the architect, and on the other, Teige’s evolution towards poetism and the upsurge of his critique of capitalism after 1929. The critical review of this episode is complemented with the personal correspondence between its protagonists preserved in the Le Corbusier Foundation, and by an examination of the relationship between Le Corbusier and Alexander Vesnin, and between Teige and Hannes Meyer. The internationalist and utopian dream of the 1920s would give way, after 1929, to a full-blown Realpolitik.