Robert Slutzky

Aqueous Humor

Oppositions 19/20: Winter/Spring 1980

Kenneth Frampton

Dialectical Oculus

The Dialectical Oculus

Starting from the hypothesis that Cubist painting, 30 ywan metaphor, and Corbwian plasticity are all equally "alluvial ," Robert Slutzky posits a reading of the Corbusian oeuvre in terms of the phenomenolo@al dliftIzSm of water. After observing that the aqumus vision embodies both, the horizontal datum of water's passivity and the sine curve of its turbulewe, the author proceeds to address the elevating of the natural eye-level in Le Corbuswr's work, a compositional und iconographic device which inco-rporates in a single paradigm not only the traditional subdivision of the painter's canvas into rear ground, middle ground, and foreground but also the hierarchic structuring of the classic villa into attic (head), pmw nobile (body), and plinth (foot). Slutzky, in collaboration with Joan Ockman, s h s how the anthropcywiorphism implicit in this subdiviswn is concentrated about the centroid of a raised oculus, which not only indicates the theoretical eye of the beholder-that is to say the traditional vanishing point-but also the cyclopean ege of the facade itself , thereby insi-sting on its literal constitution as a face. While stressing the everyday l i fe of the piano nobile, this oculus assigns complementury connotations to the adjacent floors, the attic being given over to the spirituality of the toit jardin (the zodiacal level under the stars!}, while the rez-de-chaussee accommodates within its closed base the subservknt and mundane

.functWns of storage and service.

In one project after another Le Corbus Wr grapples with the compulsion to raise the "eye-foot" to the elevated datum of the piano nobile, awl where this cannot be achieved directly through the rhetorical implantation of rumps or stairs giving access to the first flow, as in say th8 Villa Savoye or the Milloumers' Building of Ahmedabad? the same effect is arrived at through the use of traditional reflecting pools, where ". . . the ground plane entry, as refiected, becomes the precise center of the facade composition."

At an urban level the elevated oculus yields a variety of visual effects and conceptual intentions. rfflny-wg from the reduction of mammoth structures to the wale of Purist o b j e c t s ~ a s in the aerial perspwtives for the Ville i%nternpwa-ine of 1 9 2 2 4 0 a metaphorically aerodww.rn1C displacement of energy, with turbulence and "lift" from the normally active grow& plane being conveyed to the transcendental " a i ~ i i l " of th r o o f 4 8 in the, Rw de Janeiro viaduct city of 1929. As Slutsky points out, the architect's idea of structure, which alludes not only to hydro- and amodymmic priweipks but also to b m h i c phewymena, ". . . goes far bqorui a facile kind of referencing; it is a profound, intuition about analogic structure and composition."

Perhaps the most surreal and 27 disturbing aspect of Le CorbusieT's oeuvre is the way in which any relationship may be brought to oscillate between one scale and the next, c h a n g i n g m macro to micro a d back again with little regard for traditwwil properties of medium and occasion. This is particularly noticeable in his pan verre period where aqueous bodies cradle within their reflective frames a wide range of still-life elements, ranging from the entry sequence of the Salvation Army to the histone monuments of the Seine. The dialectical conscwuSness implicit in this Olympian vision finds its literal reflection in Le Corbusier's own words, when he wrote toward the end of his life, "I am the sea and he [ P h Jeanneret} is the mountain and as everyone knows these two never meet.'' K.F.