Le Corbusier Exhibition

March 15［Fri.］― April 6［Sat.］, 2019 11:00-19:00
Gallery closed on Sunday, Monday, and national holidays.

Since our opening, Gallery Toki-no-Wasuremono has been introducing prints and drawings by architects like Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyed Wright, Ando Tadao, Isozaki Arata, and others. In Japan, it's a commonly held conception that "architects" = engineers who design "architecture" - however, we believe that talented architects are indeed "artists" who design a human living space. People who create space that strikes our psyches by simply entering, people who imagine those kinds of architectures even if they never exist - these are the kinds of architects whose works we actively collect. Le Corbusier was the great teacher and leader of the 20th century architecture made of iron, concrete, and glass, but his starting point was in painting, and he never put down his pencil during his lifetime. Besides architecture, he also actively created prints.

In this Le Corbusier Exhibition, we will present pieces which show his variety of talents, including works from his famous series "Unite", as well as tableware that he designed.

On the last day (April 6, Sat), we will hold the one day event "Yoshikawa Seiichi's Architecture Book Sale". Yoshikawa Seiichi is an architectural editor who works with companies such as SUMAI Library Publishing Company.

■Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
Architect. Born 1887 as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Jura Mountains, in Switzerland. Le Corbusier's first design, Villa Fallet, was completed in 1906. In 1917, he settled in Paris and, shortly after, became one of the co-founders of L’Esprit Nouveau, an avant-garde review. In 1922, he established his architectural studio. Representative works include Villa Savoye, the chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, the Convent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, the National Museum of Western Art (Tokyo). He died in 1965 while swimming in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, aged 78.

While often cited together with Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as one of the great master architects of the 20th century, he also produced numerous prints such as the Poem of the Right Angle, a series of lithographs and corresponding poems. With the publication of his Five Points of Architecture and his activity for the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), he was a leading theorist of modern architecture. Creating oil painting, sculpture and prints, Le Corbusier’s hand never paused until his tragic accidental death. Please also see Arata Isozaki’s beautiful homage, 12 Houses.

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