In making art, I’m pulled in two directions. On one side, I’m drawn to simplicity and clarity. Go too far in this direction and work becomes dull and empty. On the other side is density and complexity, a richness of experience that, if taken too far, becomes a mess. I’m not sure I ever find the right balance.
I’ve been looking closely at the architecture and paintings of Le Corbusier and I see a compelling solution to this problem: impose strict order, then use it to generate complexity. He allows order and complexity to pull against each other without either one getting the upper hand.
Le Corbusier championed rationality and functionalism, yet his buildings often use the appearance of rational order to produce complex, even disorienting aesthetic experiences.
Take Villa La Roche, for example. Say you’re in your bedroom on the third floor and realize you’ve left your book in the library. You can see it, no more than twenty feet away across the entry hall. But the journey to retrieve it is long: go down two flights, cross the hall, go up another stair, walk to the far end of the studio, then up the curved ramp. Now make the whole journey in reverse. The plan is not rational in any conventional sense. It is aesthetic. Every twist and turn becomes part of the experience: geometry interacting with movement, space revealing itself as you move through it.
The same principle appears in his Purist paintings: a limited vocabulary of forms is arranged within strict compositional constraints, but the relationships remain complex and sometimes difficult to resolve.
I’ve been studying Le Corbusier’s work very closely. Building 3D models of the buildings of the 1920’s has given me a deeper understanding of the intricacies of these buildings. They are so much more complicated than they first appear. I think this offers strategies for making work that sustains a viewer’s attention and rewards closer engagement.
What I find most useful in Le Corbusier is the way he establishes order without becoming imprisoned by it. Regulating lines, grids, proportions and geometric relationships provide a rigid underlying structure, but at strategic points he disrupts that order. Elements are compressed together, overlap and collide, creating moments of tension within the larger system. The result is neither simplicity nor chaos, but a controlled complexity that reveals more the longer you look.
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