Poem and palace

Poetic building and architectural composition in some of Le Corbusier’s works

Abstract

This article seeks to read in parallel two of Le Corbusier’s works: Poéme de l'Angle Droit, a poetic and figurative work, and, Palace of the Governor in Chandigarh, an architectural project which was not carried out. The latter shows a series of specific compositional analogies.
Beyond the coincidences and even formal similarities, both works seem to highlight the same poetic strategy: the cryptic and iconic poetics which also characterizes the paintings of Le Corbusier after World War II; it has to do with a personal symbolic iconography. Thus, the machine à habiter of his architecture becomes a symbolic machine, i.e., although it is intended to be a functional device consistent with geographic and climatic data as well as a technical-constructive approach, its ultimate aim is to relate forms, shapes and meanings in order to translate the expression of a poetic thinking into the interpretation of community values.