Le Corbusier the Fascist.

I often hear that Le Corbusier was a fascist, and my best answer to this cry from the audience so far is 'of course he was'. Between the wars it was possible, actually quite usual, to imagine a world benevolently run for the benefit of mankind at large, and this was an inherent quality within European modernism, and certainly Le Corbusier believed in this to the core of his being. Of course, later, this would be considered 'utopian'. Dreams of a better tomorrow are always deemed 'utopian' when they don't work out. Those presently championing a new technological tomorrow might do well to be wary here, for if you do not change the mode of production in the face of great technological change, you will likely get slavery, and your dreams, in turn, will be considered 'utopian'. The modern movement might have imagined changing the mode of production, and Le Corbusier imagined this, but it didn't happen, and look where we are now.

Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism all conform to the notion of organisation at the heart of that new tomorrow, and provide the messy bit that is political implementation. When somebody announces that Le Corbusier was a fascist, we might remember that as far as I know he could never have been a Nazi. 'Blood and Soil' and all that nonsense was certainly not for him, even if he skirted around the Vichy government in such pathetic manner as to be deemed a whisker from collaboration during WW2. I think he would have worked for anybody in the hope of realising his dream; remember 'architecture or revolution'!

And of course he did work for the soviets, even if they found him rather hard to handle, and he quickly understood, by introducing his project for the Palace of the Soviets under a funeral shroud whilst a double bass played jazz, that it wasn't going to work out. In the end Le Corbusier needed enlightened clients who believed in him, and that exactly what we see at Marseille, in Firminy and in the surprise appearance of the dominicans from the wings post WW2.

Aside from the detail, the call that L-C was a 'fascist' means something else since we began to use the term against anybody who might favour suppression of the individual in favour of the collective. This gets us in to very difficult territory indeed, because is L-C's provision of 'a little bit of order in all this chaos' necessarily suppression of individual expression? One could argue, for instance, that the housing product created under neoliberalism is infinitely worse for people in general than the models proposed by L-C and other progressive modernists.

Meanwhile, those who were actually card carrying Nazis; Martin Heidegger and Albert Speer find themselves many apologists these days. I wonder if that is a coincidence.