The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier

Abstract

The “axis” is ubiquitous in Le Corbusier’s architectural oeuvre. “The Chiasm: The Inverse Parallel of Le Corbusier” examines the concept of the axis in the essays, “Architecture, Pure Creation of the Mind,” and “Architecture, The Illusion of the Plan,” published in Vers une architecture (1923).  Le Corbusier writes: “…a sense of the harmonious that gives rise to a resonance…” and “…the trace of an indefinable absolute preexisting at the core of our being.” And decisively, “This must be the axis along which man is organized…”. The axis Le Corbusier described is, in fact, a chiastic device he employed in his writings, drawings and architecture. Chiasmus, conceptually defined, is the “inverted repetition of grammatical structure.” Inversion, as two sides of the axis, identifies representations of things related and simultaneously different. The twentieth century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies the chiasm as a concept to describe the body as sensible and sentient, a reflection in relation to the self, others, and the perceived world.  Merleau-Ponty uses the chiasm to clarify reversibility and the phenomenological experience.  Merleau-Ponty’s theories of chiastic inversion substantiate the chiastic structure that supports Le Corbusier’s ideology and his search for a harmonious milieu that is based in the axis.