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page029from Building Ideas12 Le Corbusier – Villa Savoye, Poissy,Paris, 1929-31. (Alistair Gardner) This became the dominant theme of his influential book which was highlightedearlier, and his discussion of the Villa Savoye made this notion particularlyexplicit. By designing a building that merely looked like it was made of newmaterials and at the same time bore only a formal resemblance to a modern oceanliner – without also possessing a ship’s functional rigour or technicalsophistication – Le Corbusier had, according to Banham, lapsed back into thekind of traditional symbolic language of metaphor and allusion that theengineer-designers like Fuller appeared to have left behind. What Banham failsto clarify in his assessment of the pre-war architects’ achievement is thedistinction between two clear lines of development in early modernism which arosefrom two distinct sources – one from advances in technology and the other fromadvances in art. Where Banham sees the latter as a distraction from the former,claiming that the: “… theorist and designers of the waning twenties cutthemselves off not only from their own historical beginnings, but also fromtheir foothold in the world of technology”9, Le Corbusier presents the alternativeview, that the first is
9 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Architectural Press, London, 1960, p 327.
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