"The Barbican art gallery has just launched its major spring show, devoted to the architecture of Le Corbusier. The many vigorous reactions, for and against, have reopened all the powerful arguments about the legacy of modernism and about Le Corbusier’s influence on buildings you either love or loathe.
One thing is certain: this exhibition is in the right place. The Barbican Centre, which opened in 1982 after years of planning, was designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, who were directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s vision for utopian living. The Barbican’s high-density urban housing, linked by high walkways away from street level, was a quixotic enterprise at the time, and has often been criticised since. But now it is recognised as an iconic, unique undertaking (“There is nothing quite like the Barbican in all British architecture,” says Pevsner). [...] In fact the whole centre is surely a superb example of a form which has spawned too many inadequate imitations. Le Corbusier shouldn’t be blamed for all the awful, substandard copies of his ideas, any more than Rachmaninov can be blamed for all those slushy film scores derived from bad imitations of his music."
- Sir Nicholas Kenyon
The Diary, FT Weekend edition, March 7/March 8 2009
(http://http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cf2e22e2-09dc-11de-add8-0000779fd2ac.html)
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