The Amodernist Architect: Revisiting Le Corbusier's Legacy

2016年，勒·柯布西耶最著名的17座建筑被联合国教科文组织授予世界遗产，巩固了他的作品在后代中的地位，同时保留了他作为20世纪最有影响力的建筑师的遗产。作为现代主义运动的先驱，勒·柯布西耶试图通过工业化的诗学来提炼出一个合理化的未来。然而，近一个世纪后，随着布鲁诺·拉图尔揭示了自然的复杂性，文化描绘了一幅更加混乱的图景，我们似乎并没有更接近所提出的非理性升华。当勒·柯布西耶的作品穿越古代线时，作为推动力的建筑的生产与作为达到目的的手段的建筑的保护之间出现了矛盾。我们可能会问这样一个问题：勒·柯布西耶的作品仍然是生活的机器，还是仅仅是过去时代的路标？这种矛盾的根源源于我们将建筑理解为其时代的内在产物的方式，然而，如果我们抛弃历史性的时间线，转而采用人类学框架--包括建筑参观、民族志研究和演员网络理论绘图--我们可能会经验地批评勒·柯布西耶的建筑的使用，并理解他遗产的代理人，以说明一个超越建筑本身的过程。

In 2016, 17 of Le Corbusier's most renowned buildings were granted UNESCO World Heritage sites, cementing the status of his works for generations to come whilst preserving his legacy as the most influential architect of the 20th Century. A pioneer of the Modernist movement, Le Corbusier sought to distil a rationalised future through the poetics of industrialisation.However, almost a century later we appear no nearer to the utopic distillation set forth, as Bruno Latour reveals the complexities of Nature and Culture paint a more chaotic picture. As Le Corbusier's work traverses the line of antiquity, a contradiction arises between the production of architecture as a propelling force, in contrast to the preservation of architecture as a means to an end. We may ask the question: Are Le Corbusier's works still machines for living in, or simply signposts of a bygone era? The roots of this contradiction stem from the way we read architecture as an intrinsic product of its time, however if we ditch the timeline of historicity in favour of an anthropological framework - including building visits, ethnographic studies and Actor-Network-Theory mapping - we may empirically critique the usage of Le Corbusier's buildings and understand the agents of his legacy to illustrate a process which extends beyond the building itself.