The recent academic interest in the surrealist movement is a far-reaching review,
having widened the scope of analysis with evident multidisciplinary ambition. Its
strategic relationship with other disciplines, the imposture of their urban drifts as social
and ethnographic practices, the deepening on the manipulation techniques of
photography and writing, the naturalization of fragmentation associated with montage
and, finally, the review of the imprecise nature of the Surrealist object in its different
versions (objet trouvé, objet à réaction poétique, objet-type, ready-made, etc.) and its
seminal role in the contemporary facilitate an open and complex research scenario.
A scenario within which the work of Le Corbusier is perceived in a new and more
complex perspective.
He adopted techniques related to surrealism, such as photography, montage,
automatism and the calligram, in order to expand as well as undermine the meaning of
canonical paradigms associated to productive and technological rationality, in particular
those related to the domestic milieu. The use of such display of discursive instruments
facilitated the contamination of his editorial and architectural work with the destabilizing
and conflicting strategies that characterize the Movement.
Le Corbusier shared with the surrealists the space and time of the restless postwar
Paris (1920-1930). Moreover, he also adopted a myriad of techniques with which these
flooded the social, intellectual and cultural atmosphere of the city: their fondness for
moving objects and concepts in space and time out of their original context, forcing the
approximation of disparate and alien realities, or for manipulating stable structures -
such as language, the frame, geometry, the anatomy or the domestic-space- to erode
its foundations.
He co-opted the instruments that characterized the surreal activities, like photography,
montage and the calligram, sharing the common purpose for expanding the meaning of
those paradigms associated to the rational and technological production, in particular to
the machine. And he used them to provide, through the editing and manipulation of
texts and images in books, lectures, magazines and other mass media, a distorted
version of his own work.
The use of such a comprehensive set of discursive resources and messages facilitated
the contamination of his discourse with the destabilizing and conflicting strategies of
surrealism. This is the thesis defended by the author.