In the Light of Vesuvius. The Ruined Origins of Le Corbusier's Machine-Age House

In 1911 Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, who would later take the name Le Corbusier, made his first and only visit to Pompeii. Sketches and writings from this trip are filled with reflections on and representations of color, light, and simple geometric forms. Scholars have long suggested that Le Corbusier was inspired by the distinctive aesthetic of Pompeiian homes, particularly the bright colors of Roman wall-paintings and their axial spatial arrangement. This paper argues that these inspirations emerged out of the Modernist architect's experience of the city’s unmade state, its uncanny combination of destruction and preservation under the pumice stones of Mt. Vesuvius. While building forms are eerily recognizable in Pompeii, they are also radically and uniquely disrupted. Le Corbusier's vision for the future of domestic architecture, I contend, was especially shaped by his encounters with the city's houses. Stripped of roofs, windows, doors, and furnishings, Pompeian homes played an important role in Le Corbusier’s subsequent efforts to rethink and remake the modern machine-age house. In his attempts to replace walls with floor to ceiling windows, his concern with the interaction of color and light along his houses’ promenades, and his blurring of interior and exterior space, Le Corbusier sought to replace the sheltered enclosure of domestic space with the radical openness of ruined Roman homes.