Chapter 1 of 24
Denys Lasdun
Well, I've never forgotten, when I was a student, going over to Paris and seeing the Pavillon Suisse, the students' hostel, which Corbusier built around about 1930 - 32. It made a tremendous impact on me. I mean, it seemed a sort of sensible economic solution. It had an unarguable clarity, standing as it did on great pilotis, with the landscape freed underneath it, what he called the espace libre sous la maison. There were no streets in his vision, and he always insisted that this building exemplified his image of a utopian city, in fact, the Ville Radieuse. It was a building which encapsulated all the turmoil, the excitement, the polemics, and the innovations of the machine aesthetic. And he brought them, for a moment, into tensed control, into a taut and exact expression. And in fact, it really did become a laboratory for the international urban program, and blocks on sticks went up all over the world.