Columbus, 2007 Focuses on Le Corbusier's church of Saint-Pierre in the small town of Firminy, France, which was completed forty years after it was begun by Jose Oubriere in 2006. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts Architects revere Le Corbusier. But ever since the journalist Jane Jacobs published "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961, Le Corbusier has been blamed for having inspired notorious public-housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis - famously imploded in 1972 because it became a crime zone as soon as it was finished in 1956.
The ongoing Le Corbusier backlash underscores the importance of "Architecture Interruptus," an exhibition on view through Sunday, April 15, at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. It shows how Jose Oubrerie, an architecture professor at Ohio State University, led the recent completion of Le Corbusier's long unfinished last work, a church in Firminy-Vert, a small town near Lyon, France.
The exhibition is a reminder that the problem with so many buildings and city planning schemes inspired by Le Corbusier lies not with the architect's work itself, but the mediocrity of the knockoffs it inspired - including the Pruitt-Igoes of America.
Le Corbusier's greatest buildings, including the church at Firminy-Vert, continue to exert a profound gravitational force. They demand attention and pull other architects into orbit around them.
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