ABSTRACT
THE CAP-MARTIN SWIMMER AND OTHER ARCHITECTURE STORIES
The original idea for this doctoral thesis can be traced back to Le Corbusier´s death. Architecture and life´s limestone interact and identify with each other to the point of becoming a meaningful whole. The influences of important moments of life on architectural works especially of solitude, , is the core of this research. In it death acquires a symbolic value.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier felt lonely at crucial moments of their lives. F. L. Wright, while he embraced his wife, Mamah Bouton Bortwiwick, as she was being buried after a deliberate fire had destroyed Taliesin, the house he had designed and built to live with her, in 1914. Adolf Loos, due to his complexed personality, just before showing Carolina Catharina Obertimpfler (Lina Loos) his work My Wife´s Bedroom, which he had designed for her in 1903. So seemingly different from his postulates. Le Corbusier, as he was drowning at Cap-Martin in 1965, after having walked down to the sea from the Cabanon. His wife Yvonne Gallis, who used to accompany him on this walk, had died years before. Under the water of the Mediterranean, we can imagine Le Corbusier having a last vision of his religious works of Ronchamp, the Tourette and the church of Firminy-Vert through moving photographs.
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In 2006, during a visit made for academic research with pupils of the School of Architecture, following the work of Le Corbusier in France, the author of the thesis while photographing the interiors of the religious works of the Swiss architect, in extreme light situations, without employment of tripod, obtained a series of intentionally turbid photographs that were the foundation of this investigation. Subsequently, an architect, photographer and member of the thesis tribunal called them "moving photographs".
From those photographs is constructed the vision that LC might have had, under the turbidity of the water, where he recalled his life in full drowning ceremony. A white twinkle on his submarine voyage - repeatedly interrupts the story - is on the surface and is the beginning and end of the story. This twinkle is the house E-1027, projected by Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici, which he had always wanted to be the author of. His disagreements with Picasso and Wright are also remembered underwater, as well as Yvonne Gallis, his vital support.
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The approachment to the described works, it has been done from two divergent paths of research, one only as documentary and another based on experience. The chapters of Wright and Loos can only be argued from the descriptions contained in documents, texts and publication images, but without the possibility of experience them in the place where they were build - as for Wright, the Midway GarDens were demolished In 1929 and Taliesin I perished in the flames in 1914. In the case of Loos, although My Wife's Bedroom was reproduced at the Vienna MAK in 2014, a relevant fact occurs: looking at the color photographs of that reproduction, that attraction for the bedroom disappears- .
In the study on Le Corbusier, the spaces that are related on the story, The Chapel of Ronchamp, the Convent of the Tourette and the Church of Firminy-Vert. can be lived. Because of this, it is possible to relate academic knowledge to the experience of builded space.
It is introduced partial significant narrations, poems, and some images, as the understandment of this form of addition of other arts in research: Architecture, literature, photography, painting and music all joined together by poetry.
The music sounded when the thesis was written. Bach in the case of Wright - in his houses there always was a grand piano where he interpreted it. Night transfigured in the Loos chapter -Schönberg was a friend of Loos and composed that piece a few months before Loos's wedding with Lina-. And Metastasis in Le Corbusier´s chapter -composition of Xenakis, co-author and director of the works of the Tourette-. These compositions also sounded in the defense of the thesis.
It is a thesis that wants to find other paths searching them in the perimeter. 'To see what can not be seen, everything that is not at the center, and that can only be seen on the margins of a written sheet, where there is little space left'. 'There, where neither science nor philosophy can reach, is where imagination is born'. 'It has been aimed to find out to develop new ways of getting to know architecture through the practice of literature'.
Key words: SHORT STORIES OF ARCHITECTURE; BIOGRAPHICAL MILESTONES; BLURRED PICTURES; ARCHITECTURE AND LITERARY PRACTICE; TRIBUTE TO SOLITUDE.