LE CORBUSIER AND THE LARGE SCALE BUILDINGS. FROM COMPOSITION BY ELEMENTS TO UNITY

Le Corbusier's large scale buildings of the 1930s and '40s are characterised by an "elemental composition" of two opposed volumes of nature: a material-volume, flexible and adaptable, generated from a labour of "texturique", a term used by the architect himself to define harmonic sizing from the metric units of the Modulor; and, a box-volume, Platonic and closed, as an objecttype which contains a unique representative space. This duality resolves the two contradictory desires between which the architect debatedwhen defining the relationship of these projects with the context. On the one hand he intended that they were adapted to the particularities of each situation, showing it as one more element of the unban whole, but on the other, he wanted to emphasise them, demonstrating their unique and symbolic condition, in the classical sense. The solutions adopted appear to progressively opt for an increasingly less contextual option, in favour of a greater representation of these architectures. This decision is already more evident in the projects carried out after the Second World War, in the 1950s and ' 60s, with a substantial, compositional variation being produced in them as a result. The bipartite elemental nature is definitely replaced by a unitary volumetric in which reminiscences of the described dual reality can still be recognised.