A Figurative Map of (Post-) Colonial State Formation

Revisiting Le Corbusier’s whitewashed legacy and career is an occasion to compare these colonial/urban continuums through the monumental, material, and aesthetic conjunctures of their modernisms. We were struck by the lack of scholarship (whether historical or architectural) that compares Le Corbusier’s plans for Algiers and Chandigarh as well as the fact that until recently,  his fascist collaborations have been mostly interpreted as an idiosyncratic period that had no real influence on his architectural practice. Mapping out these social, political, and architectural strands visualizes their intersections and irritates the myths and glorified legacy of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, or Le Corbusier. He continuously reinvented himself in a manner similar to the way he sold the aesthetics and promises of modernism as a means of reinventing state and national identity.