The Poem of the Right Angle: Aesthetics Between Kant and Hegel

Walker Thisted

Abstract: This essay explores the possibility of interpreting Le Corbusier’s Poem of the Right Angle
with the help of the aesthetic philosophy of Kant and Hegel. In doing so, I explore the possibility
that the systems of Kant and Hegel can work in harmony in order to explain different aspects of
a practice rather than remaining in strict opposition. I begin this investigation by exploring how a
Kantian notion of schematization structures The Poem and defines its purposiveness as a tool for
reading Le Corbusier’s other works and for living in the world. The purpose of The Poem as a
guide reflects Le Corbusier’s fear of not being understood. Le Corbusier creates out of a fear
that the artist is confined to being good at representation. He strives to affect the entire world.
He does so by constituting a surface via color derived from pigments found in the earth. These
colors are indicative of an underlying reality that the poem hopes to uncover. This process is
activated through light that creates space. Color is no longer autonomous. The creation of the
space makes room for the beautiful and sublime. In contrast to Kant and Hegel, Le Corbusier
characterizes a human sublime as a structuring of a work out of elements gathered from the past.
The sublime lies in the construction of the transcendental table itself. This understanding is
arrived at via movement and calling for movement. This process is regulated by the hand. This
process defines Le Corbusier’s dialectic which ultimately comes to include the receiver of his
work. As a mandate to navigate his work, turn the page of the book ninety degrees, and live by a
rectified understanding of the world, the right angle is the device that allows this to happen.
Ultimately, it allows us to discover the golden sections as the truth that Le Corbusier offers.

Copyright © 2004, Walker Thisted

 I. Introduction

The specific system used in order to interpret a work of art defines the horizon
of understanding of a work for the individual examining the work at a particular moment
in time. A considerable amount of time has been invested in deciding what systems are
appropriate to what works and situations. The question of how a work supports a
particular interpretive system as well as the value of employing foreign systems has been
the subject of considerable debate – at time eclipsing interest in what takes place within
the work itself. The reason for this investment is ultimately a philosophical one –
concerned at heart with the question of how we might know something to begin with.
Understanding an orientation – and ideally a response – to this question is essential if
one is to avoid wasting time lost aimlessly pondering a work of art.
For many, it is just this task that has proven to be extremely difficult. The
variety of options, the uncertain contact made with the material of the work itself, the
personality of the artist, and the surrounding socio-political situation all weigh in on the
system that ultimately is employed towards the interpretation of the work. The extent
to which something of “value” is at steak in being able to conduct such an analysis,
causes the situation to appear all the more dire. As the critic equivocates, culture turns
– ushering in fame, defining style, bringing high prices, and creating a vast material
economy supporting increasing numbers of people. Those who are able to understand
this movement become authoritative guides to others and sometimes even see how a
new work might be created to suite the market – making great wealth as a result.
These concerns are all the more pressing in the context of work made in the
past and, especially, in the context of those works that were made in some degree of
obscurity. These conditions are true of Le Corbusier’s late work The Poem of the Right
Angle. On one hand, this work lies far outside the typical oeuvre of buildings and pointed
polemics. On the other, it was made years after achieving notoriety for a stripped
down linear architecture inspired by the machine. It is a work that reflects years of
meditation on history and philosophy, a lifetime as a practicing artist and architect, and a
passion of existence that persisted throughout. In this sense, it is a rich work that
merits interpretation because of the abnormal position that it holds within the arch of
Le Corbusier’s work.
In order to understand this work, we should look to systems that were
somewhat proximate to Le Corbusier and that were themselves inspired by art made in
a similar vain. To do so insists that Le Corbusier was very much a product of his time
and that the theories expounded by others working in close proximity might shed some
light on his work. Examining Le Corbusier’s library, Nietzsche would appear to be a
strong candidate. Charles Jencks and Kenneth Frampton have been successful in using
the work of Nietzsche to do just that. Investigating the aesthetic systems that
influenced Nietzsche – those of Kant and Hegel – will add to their work. Examining
how these often opposed system can each offer elements towards a full picture of the
work of Le Corbusier will in turn help characterize a manner of interpreting art that
doesn’t require a choice of philosophical doctrine up-front, but that allows aspects of
systems to emerge during the process of interpretation just as they may have emerged
during the process of inspiration and making.
 II. The Poem of the Right Angle

B.3 Mind

Freer of fetters than

before the house of
man mistress if his forms
takes its place within nature
Whole in itself
coming to terms with the terrain
open to the four horizons
lends its roof
to the company of clouds
of azure or the stars
Informed watch the owl
has found its own way
here
without being called.

The argument of The Poem of the Right Angle is temporal – built through his
career – and realized in space – a set of drawings in images and text presented on a
wall. The work is on permanent display in the lobby of the building that housed Le
Corbusier’s Paris dwelling. It is also available in book form – two runs of 250 numbered
copies and two runs of XX numbered copies. As a book it bears a hierarchy of
expressive intentions that are brought into harmony by the rules that Le Corbusier sets
for himself. They express how the composition and work ought to be. The sense of
control ensures precision through the regulation of the formal appearance of the
individual layer. We are asked the extent to which each move and decision is
translatable through the entire discourse of Le Corbusier.
To deal with Le Corbusier is to understand him as an artist and resultantly as a
human system of impeccable judgment towards making. The Poem is structures as
follows: seven categories that hold the work together – 5 poems about environment, 3
poems about mind, 5 poems about flesh, 1 poem about fusion, 3 poems about
characters, 1 poem of offering, and 1 about instrument. Each begins with the category
letter, followed by the poem number within the category, and the name of the category.
As with the entirety of the text, they are in Le Corbusier’s pen and surrounded by a
box. The specific drawing of the box is part of the code. The three codes that are
privileged are the essential turning points of Le Corbusier argument. Fusion is red,
offering is presented dichromatically in front of a door, and tool is light purple. Le
Corbusier creates a rhythm in the reading of the pages that always include an alternating
number of black and white pages with drawing and text and end with a color plate. The
rhythm for the 7 categories is as follows: 4 4 2 6 4 color, 2 3 5 color, 4 4 4 4 4 color, 4
4 2 4 color, 2 color, and 2 color.
With the hills as horizon and the graceful green cloud, an Ideal of Beauty is
presented as a similar foundation to that of Kant in Part I Div. I Section 17. The forms,
although they appear to be indeterminate, are precise to the end of expressing the
abstract nature of Reason. For Le Corbusier, this is a conceptual matter that forms the
background of the human. This field that man stands near is a profane one that breads
profane understanding and gives a faith in that which we already have. Man is posited in
this context as a shadow in black ink. The structure that forms both his home and
horizon are continuous with him. He is presented twice as man on horizon and in
building. The floors on which man stands in the building are drawn in red and are
reflected below the horizon as the violence that man does to the beautiful condition at
the edge of which he stands. In his defiance of gravity, he is against nature. Yet he is
presented again as an outgrowth of his line. Here it is the owl that watches over the
scene. It is here that the real indetermination of the system lies. The owl is a
connector of the entire lithograph that breaks it apart. Do we glimpse here the first
scents of schematization?

Intuitions are always required to establish the reality of our concepts. If the concepts are
empirical, the intuitions are called examples. If they are pure concepts of Understanding, the
intuitions are called schemata. If we desire to establish the objective reality of rational concepts,
i.e. of Ideas on behalf of theoretical cognition, then we are asking for something that is
impossible, because absolutely no intuition can be given which shall be adequate to them.
All hypothesis (presentation, subjectio sub adspectum), or sensible illustration, is twofold. It is
either schematical, when to a concept comprehended by the understanding the corresponding
intuition is given; or it is symbolical.1

In the entire frame of the image through the colors used and the spatial
hierarchy of man, we find a proper decision regarding the modality of satisfaction in the
object. The ground plan and the water shape coming from the owl act as a decision
regarding the containment of the most primitive and uncontrolled mark that Le
Corbusier will allow himself to make. The white in the background acts as the pure
page of creation and is related to the ground that man stands on when he defies gravity
along with the white that makes up the owl of knowledge that hovers in negative closest
to the viewer.
The Poem is both a work and a representation of work. It conveys to us how
work is done by man through the positioning of man on a structure of his own creation
in relation to the earth and sky. The position of man in the picture that Le Corbusier
presents takes a position on how man might value the natural condition that he finds
himself in. The ability to take things at hand and form the land around his own presence
suggests that the judgment of taste both by the creator and the observer has nothing as
its basis other than the form of “purposiveness of an object.” Le Corbusier’s work is
not so much an object as a judgment upon objects in order to create the system that
holds a number of judgments together.

Therefore it can be nothing else than the subjective purposiveness in the representation of an
object without any purpose (either objective or subjective); and thus it is the mere form of
purposiveness in the representation by which an object is given to us, so far as we are conscious
of it, which constitutes the satisfaction that we without a concept judge to be universally
communicable; and, consequently, this is determining ground of the judgment of taste.2

While there is nothing false in such a reflection, Le Corbusier is a creator who is

conscious of such a condition and is able to bring it into the world of his own making so
as to deny the ability to judge on such terms due to his iterative process. We are asked

1
Kant, 59.
2
Ibid., 12.
to judge the power of placing information on the surface of the work through a process
of coding. What Kant allows for here is the grounds of the artists positing rather than
the necessary condition of judgment. It is the artist’s understanding of his own lack of
purpose through the ability to imbue things with purpose. It is creation out of a lack.
The question of the will here is not as important as the existence of the outcome of the
will and the moment when the will steps aside in order to allow for intuitive creation.
The will retroactively gives the work a systematic validity. At this point, the artist posits
the archetype of taste – in an act similar to Kant’s formulation of impeccable taste.
Color is treated not as something that already exists on a surface as applied, but
in its most real sense as a material pigment taken from the earth. Through this pigment,
Le Corbusier formulates a spatial system of color application that is used simply as a
system of color as such and a language for talking about all other elements.

To say that the purity of colors and of tones, or their variety and contrast, seems to add to
beauty, does not mean that they supply a homogenous addition to our satisfaction in the form
because they make the form more exactly, definitely, and completely, intuitable, and besides by
their charm [excite the representation, whilst they] awaken and fix our attention on the object
itself.3

We then are not far from Kant with the use of color in The Poem. Color exists
both as support of form and as its own entity that steps out of the formal composition
in order to exist for itself. Such a movement is evident when standing against the wall of
the monk’s chapel at La Tourette. Here, the curved surfaces of red, black, and white
become flat for the viewer and exist as color in the abstract. What Kant perhaps misses
in his evaluation of form and its relation to color is the activating power of light. The
entry of light into the caves that are Le Corbusier’s chapels, allows for one type of
conceptual merging to take place. Nothing remains antonymous when lights hits the
surfaces and creates space.
The use of color in The Poem, as noted earlier, is intimately tied to the structure
of the entire Poem that Le Corbusier uses to define man in relation to the built. Color
is rhythmic and differentiates the space of occupation. Its application becomes a layer
that goes beyond either material or mere purpose by entering the realm of the poetic.
It expresses the most abstract feelings of man and sparks the imagination.

If, however, we assume the purposive combination in the world to be real and to be [brought
about] by a particular kind of causality, viz. that of a designedly working cause, we cannot stop at
the question: why have things of the world (organized beings) this or that form? why are they
placed by nature in this or that relation to one another? But once an Understanding is thought
that must be regarded as the cause of the possibility of such forms as they are actually found in
things, it must be also asked on objective grounds: Who would have determined this productive
understanding to an operation of this kind?4

If Le Corbusier is providing a description of the home of man through a poetic

language, how do we understand its validity? The Poem presents causality centered
around man and his ability to determine his own confrontation with nature through
dwelling and making. In answer to Kant’s question, Le Corbusier determines this

3
Ibid.,15.
4
Ibid., 84.
productive understanding and the necessary form of things. The Poem shows a world
with a causality found in man through his ability to use tools with his open hand. It
describes the poetic possibility that is given for moral action through something as
simple as an opposition between the right and left hand. It inspires freedom from such a
determined and rigid system through representation.
The Poem suggests that the universality of satisfaction is represented in a
judgment of taste that is strictly subjective. As is the case with Kant, the question
remains of what constitute the rules of unification of taste with reason. While we will
not enter this question until we turn more specifically to genius, it is apparent that in
order to unite the convoluted system that Le Corbusier has spun, he requires faith in
the act of creation as a pure judgment of taste that as creation is able to unify taste with
the system that calls upon reason. The primary difference is that Le Corbusier never
fully places his faith in reason as such, but as in confrontation with an imagination
analogous to our own confrontation with Le Corbusier.
If the artist can be said to form the archetype of taste, it is then only through the
“sublime” that this is felt. This occurs through a transition from that which is decided to
be merely a beautiful thing in itself outside of the system of the artist to something
within the system of the artist through a hierarchical arrangement. It becomes sublime
through the power of the artist in confrontation with this power. It is made possible by
establishing categories with a corresponding beautiful representation. Essentially, quality
and quantity of the structure of the work can be sublime. This condition is not
primarily something enabled by genius, but the practiced technical product of the effort
of genius – the force of art. The “sublime” of The Poem is not its surface, but the myriad
elements – from the first home Le Corbusier designed to his travels in the east – that
created it. The “sublime” lies in the construction of the “transcendental table” itself.

The freedom of the Imagination is pushed almost near to the grotesque, and in this separation
from every constraint of rule we have the case, where taste can display its greatest perfection in
the enterprise of the Imagination. But is every being alternately repelled, the satisfaction in the
sublime does not so much involve a positive pleasure as admiration or respect, which rather
deserves to be called negative pleasure. 5

It is in Kant’s suggestion that the sublime is a negative rather than positive

pleasure that I want to dwell for a moment. If the sublime were related to the creative
power of the genius, it would be a matter of pleasure as admiration or respect for the
personality of the author of the work at hand. Yet this is not the case. If the work is
truly understood as a work of genius, it must be understood to exist far outside of any
given author. It must be seen as a concept of the creator that in turn makes the creator
into a concept. Moreover, this concept of the creator is one that requires an almost
infinite amount of power and ability to be invested in his existence and the work that he
has left for the world to reflect upon. The person becomes distanced to the point
where he remains only as a system of his own creation that achieves universality
through its existence beyond a given point in time. We think the system as both
representing continuity in time and a continuity of thought. The material that is used to
establish both time and thought brings the entire system into the spatial realm.

5
Ibid., 22.
 In The Poem we find that time should be understood to permeate all marks of
the work, but to reside primarily in the narration occurring through images. The images
convey a trace of the individual layers applied by the artist and a representation of the
time that man falls into by way of a narrative of the action that man must undertake in
order to find a home. The element of space that unifies thought and time in the work
of Le Corbusier is found in the overall structure of the book that is analogous to the
structure of the buildings that we stand in. Through the layering of the poetic and
prosaic, we read the book in the same way that we read the buildings.
For this book to work in the same way as the buildings of this master, it must
never let the viewer rest. Le Corbusier requires that one enter the work through
motion. We must engage the entirety of the productive work of the master in order to
resolve contradictions that seem to be merely capricious. Le Corbusier asks that we
rotate the book ninety degrees in order to understand the right angle. It is in this
turning of the image along the right angle that an aesthetic system between Kant and
Hegel emerges. It is not in the looking or the work itself, but in the revelation that
takes place when one finds a shifted set of meanings in the same object of
contemplation.
If there is to be any movement, there must be a demarcation of bounds in order
to form this space of such movement. This movement occurs at the level of thought
attained after having merged the layers of his structure into a representation of genius
that is both formed from the genius that made the structure and the person who is
called upon to judge the genius. Kant and Hegel provide a nuanced definition.
Somewhat distinction from the nuanced definition provided by Kant and Hegel, I offer
the alternative definition that “genius” is not so much a person as a force that makes the
possibility of judging a work of art possible to begin with. This force exists primarily in
the seeds that the artist lays towards a positive reception of the work in the future.
“Genius” in this sense, is uncovered retroactively. The power of genius transferred
outside of the body of a given artist. This power lands both on the surface of the work
in order to be uncovered at some point and in discourse about the work to fuel a desire
for such uncovering.

III. Genius
(1) Genius is a talent for art rather than science. (2) As an artistic talent, it presupposes a
determinate concept of the purpose to be achieved (and therefore an understanding), as well as
an indeterminate representation of the “material,” that is, an intuition through which the concept
is to be expressed–thus a relation of imagination of understanding. (3) since this exhibition
occurs primarily by way of aesthetic ideas, it concerns the imagination in its freedom from rules,
“though still as purposive for exhibiting the given concept.” (4) The “unstudied, unintentional”
nature of the subjective purposiveness of the understanding (which, as we have seen, is precisely
what makes a work of fine art seem like nature), “presupposes such a proportion and
attunement of these faculties as cannot be brought about by any compliance with
rules…but…only by the subject’s nature” (KU 5:317-318). And, finally, on the basis of these
“presuppositions,” Kant offers his definitive characterization of genius as the “exemplary
originality of the subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive faculties” (KU
5:318); 186).6

6
Alison, 285.
 Two conceptions of genius operate in Kant. The first is a thick conception that
works toward original nonsense. The thin is composed of the imaginative capacity. For
the two to come into harmony there is a need to clip the wings of free genius through
the regulation of judgment. The originality of the subject is the primary power that the
genius holds. Without a necessary role of setting an example the genius would be
unable to exist. Yet the freedom that the genius has in his exemplary originality has not
yet been made entirely clear.
The freedom that the genius enjoys is movement through a variety of spheres of
society and on the plane of creation. This movement is related to a far deeper
understanding than the artist has. This understanding comes in opposition to talent for
imagination and consists primarily in the knowledge of the negating nature of the original
in relation to the non-original or other. For the genius to be aware of a dialectic
movement between self and other – a dialectic that could be characterized on other
terms such as that between artist and material, historical progression, etc… – leads the
artist to conceive of a dialectic operating around his work and in relation to the
community that is intended to judge his work. Before the community negates his work,
he will have known the dialectic that it will fall subject to on a far more basic level. The
originality is therefore that of knowing-before the motion to which the world befalls.
A complete aesthetic system exists between Ronchamp, La Tourette, and The
Poem of the Right Angle. The Poem of the Right Angle offers a Kantian schematization of
architecture as such through a Hegelian language. Hegel opens the possibility of
Architecture as existing only through discourse via the poetic. By dividing Fine Arts into
categories, he offers the possibility of blurring categories generally. This opens the
possibility of architecture as thought – architecture as a pre-condition for being that
manifests itself as built form. The Poem is, in this sense, a meta-architecture. When it is
not, the made can talk about architecture on the grounds that it might exist in order to
found the discourse. While this has always contributed to the discourse of architecture,
it has not always been the case that consciousness of this condition is found in the hand
of the genius and marked in the work.

But the concept of beautiful art does not permit the judgment upon the beauty of a product to
be derived from any rule, which has a concept as its determining ground, and therefore has at its
basis a concept of the way in which the product is possible.
We thus see (1) that genius is a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given;
it is not a mere aptitude for what can be learned by rule. Hence originality must be its first
property. (2) But since it also can produce original nonsense, its products must be models, i.e.
exemplary; and they consequently ought not to spring from imitation, but must serve as a
standard or rule of judgment for others. (3) It cannot describe or indicate scientifically how it
brings about its products, but it gives rules just as nature does. Hence the author of the product
for which he is indebted to his genius does not know himself how he has come by his Ideas; and
he has not the power to devise the like at pleasure or in accordance with a plan, and to
communicate it to others in precepts that will enable them to produce similar products.7

When Kant and Hegel meet on the question of Aesthetics, it becomes clear that
one is speaking of the rules that ground the sensibility of the genius and that the other is
describing the space that the genius produces. The first suggests the phenomenology of
bodily perception while the second a reality in which that perception operates. Kant

7
Kant. 47.
and Hegel offer creative philosophies of art that differ in the point at which they start
and subsequently return. For Hegel, we find that it lies in an external frame that
suggests the rules from within itself. It is always the subject in this frame through which
any determination is made. Hegel offers a greater degree of freedom to the artist
through the grounding of the artist outside of himself. For Kant, the grounding remains
with reason while for Hegel it is time, space, and the absolute.
While the complex structure of Le Corbusier’s work and the multiple layers
provide a ground for asking questions of schematization similar to those of Kant, on
what grounds does Hegel enter the conversation? Hegel is required in order to
understand the broader material and physical representational methods within the
work. The historical stance of The Poem in relation both to representational method
and as historical narrative of Le Corbusier’s oeuvre within history, are more easily
described through a Hegelian system. The transition between Kant and Hegel is
primarily from a system resting on taste and judgment to one resting on imagination and
genius. The first combination supports beauty, the second access to the sublimity of
spirit.
For Hegel, genius is inwardly determined by production. The artist acts as a
pure self viewed through imagination defined as absolute truth and rationality of the
actual world which should attain external appearance. The artist is always determining
inwardly in order to will to external presence. For Kant, the movement does not take
place from within the self to the external world, but remains grounded in the productive
capacity of reason. The creative force is not reflected in a material condition for it is
already passed in the mind.
Genius is the general ability for the true production of a work of art, as well as the energy to
elaborate and complete it.8

From this point of view, the sort of position that the artist is in is that he enters, with a natural
talent, into relation with an available given material; he finds himself solicited by an external
incentive, by an event (or, as in Shakespeare’s case for example, by sagas, old ballads, tales,
chronicles), to give form to this material and to express himself in general on that. And a
genuinely living artist finds precisely through this aliveness a thousand occasions for his activity
and inspiration–occasions which others pass by without being touched by them.9

Le Corbusier adds to Hegel by using the hand to embrace the given in order to
transform it. Through the hand, the voice of the artist passes to the ears of the viewer.
It allows for continuity between creation and reception. The reach of the arm controls
the space between the artist and plane and the plane and arm of the viewer. The hand
is ultimately that which created The Poem and it is also what is left on the page in the
penultimate poem. Asking for life, the hand calls on the mind of the reader. Severed
from its body, the artist has lost his hand due to its productive capacity – its ability to
work purposively and lend purposiveness to an object or tool – on the canvas. This
canvas – The Poem – is increasingly understood as a tool for viewing other works by Le
Corbusier and for guiding life more generally.

8
Hegel, 283.
9
Ibid., 288.
 F.3 Offering (The Open Hand)
It is open because
all is present available
knowable
Open to receive
Open also that others
might come and take
The waters flow
the sun provides light
Complexities have woven
their fabric
the fluids are everywhere.
Tools in the hand
Caresses from the hand
Life is tasted through
the kneading of hands
eyesight resides in
palpation
Full hand I received
full hand I now give.

From the genuine subject-matter which inspires the artist, nothing is to be held back in his
subjective inner heart; everything must be completely unfolded and indeed in a way in which the
universal soul and substance of the chosen subject-matter appears emphasized just as much as its
individual configuration appears completely polished in itself and permeated by that soul and
substance in accord with the whole representation. For what is supreme and most excellent is
not, as may be supposed, the inexpressible–for if so the poet would be still far deeper than his
work discloses. On the contrary, his works are the best part and the truth of the artist; what he
is [in his works], that he is; but what remains buried in his heart, that is he not.10

The artist is most the negative of most men. He holds that which is true and
good in his art. The heart is a secondary site for the artist. All that he can do is place
on the canvas. To be placed in such a position results in an almost immediate
understanding of it as such. Before the common man is confronted with the work, the
artist is confronted with his discontinuity and continuity with the common man. Out of
this position comes an ability to ground a discourse before the confrontation through an
anticipation of the confrontation. It takes much of the power out of the viewer as judge
and places it in a broader community of judges. This community is the surrogate for the
individual judge and simulates their operation. The artist too becomes simulated by the
surface and the two simulations are joined in the institution of art.

If the artist has made this objective rationality entirely his own, without mixing it and corrupting
it either from within or without with particular details foreign to it, then alone in the topic to
which he has given form does he give himself in his truest subjective character, a character that
will be but the living corridor for a work of art perfect in itself. For in all true poetry, in thinking
and action, genuine freedom makes what is substantial prevail as an inherent power; and this
power at the same time is so completely the very own power of subjective thinking and willing
itself that, in the perfect reconciliation of both, no separation between them can remain over any
longer. So the originality of art does indeed consume that accidental idiosyncrasy of the artist,
but it absorbs it only so that the artist can wholly follow the pull and impetus of his inspired
genius, filled as it is with his subject alone, and can display his own self, instead of fantasy and
empty caprice, in the work he has completed in accordance with its truth. To have no manner

10
Ibid., 291.
 has from time immemorial been the one grand manner, and in this sense alone are Homer,
Sophocles, Raphael, Shakespeare, to be called ‘original’.11

To move from the need for material creation to the poetic understanding of the
nature of such creation, is to strive for a positing of the confrontation. Le Corbusier
had a style that was entirely his own. His work existed beyond that of any other.

IV. Hegel in the World

To Plastic, the first kind of beautiful formative Art, belong Sculpture and Architecture. The first
presents corporeally concepts of things, as they might have existed in nature (though as beautiful
art it has regard to aesthetical purposiveness). The second is the art of presenting concepts of
things that are possible only through Art, and whose form has for its determining ground not
nature but an arbitrary purpose, with the view of presenting them with aesthetical
purposiveness.12

Hegel suggests that Kant took rationality, freedom, self-consciousness, finding,

and knowing as infinite. This led to a realization of the absoluteness of reason in itself.
It was the turning point that opened modernity. For Hegel, the realization of such
absoluteness of reason requires a turn away from reason. The beautiful no longer can
be thought to be recognized without concept as object of necessary delight. An
inversion has taken place. If there is any modification to a sense of pure aesthetic
judgment, it has taken place in the realm of architecture and the space of occupation.
This space of occupation is the closest to an archetypal mirror that we will find in
material form. As a space that is at hand and that bears traces of systematic existence,
it offers a suggestion that some object be taken as that of necessary delight. It would
not be a problem for beauty to abandon us. Beauty has already become a matter of the
space around where we see a free play of imagination and understanding.
First, art begins when the Ideas, still in its indeterminacy and obscurity, or in bad and untrue
determinacy, is made the content of artistic shapes. Being indeterminate, it does not yet possess
in itself that individuality which the ideal demands; its abstraction and one-sidedness leave its
shape externally defective and arbitrary.
On the other hand, the abstractness of this relation brings home to consciousness even so the
foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena, and the Idea, which has no other reality to express
it, launches out in all these shapes, seeks itself within them in their unrest and extravagance, but
yet does not find them adequate to itself.
In the incompatibility of the two sides to one another, the relation of the Idea to the objective
world therefore becomes a negative one, since the Idea, as something inward, is itself unsatisfied
by such externality, and, as the inner universal substance thereof, it persists sublime above all this
multiplicity of shapes which do not correspond with it.13

The work of Le Corbusier is exemplary of such a passage of the Idea from the
painting, to the drafting board, and into the world. Le Corbusier’s Idea is realized a
carefully crafted structure that extends between work and that is strong enough to
support the weight of beautiful signs and images. Nevertheless, as The Poem makes

11
Ibid., 298.
12
Kant, 51.
13
Hegel, 76-77.
clear, Le Corbusier always looked towards a broader structure – for greater global
reach – by which he might be able to define his Idea for the present. He was always
unsatisfied by how that structure was rendered as it passed from inside to outside. Le
Corbusier, however, embraced this incompatibility. He publicized his understanding of
an inner universal substance that drove his creations of beautiful works in the world.
In many ways, the conflict between inner and outer, his image of how the world
should be and how it actually was, characterized the force behind Le Corbusier’s life and
work. Closing and opening become fundamental points for Le Corbusier both in the
way that he constructed himself and in the compression and expansion, entering and
exiting, that are so prominent in his built spaces. And let us not forget the open hand.
We see diametric or mirrored conditions throughout his work – the transparency of
surfaces, the echoing of sounds through a building, the rhythm of facades, the flow of
plans, symmetry in painting. In many ways, it defines the beautiful quality of his work.
Owing to this freedom and infinity, which are inherent in the Concept of beauty, as well as in the
beautiful object and its subjective contemplation, the sphere of the beautiful is withdrawn from
the relativity of finite affairs and raised into the absolute realm of the Idea and its truth.14

But the beauty of the Ideal lies precisely in the Ideal’s undisturbed unity, tranquility, and
perfection in itself. Collision disturbs this harmony, and sets the Ideal, inherently a unity, in
dissonance and opposition. Therefore, by the representation of such transgression, the Ideal is
itself transgressed, and the task of art can lie here only, on the one hand, in preventing free
beauty from perishing in this difference, and, on the other hand, in just presenting this disunion
and its conflict, whereby out of it, through resolution of the conflict, harmony appears as a result,
and in this way alone becomes conspicuous in its complete essentiality.15

The work of art must disclose to us the higher interest of our spirit and will, what is in itself
human and powerful, the true depths of the heart. The chief thing essentially at issue is that
these things shall gleam through all external appearances and that their keynote shall resound
through all other things in our restless life. Thus true objectivity unveils for us the ‘pathos,’ the
substantive content of a situation, and the rich, powerful individuality in which the fundamental
factors of the spirit are alive and brought to reality and expression. In that case for such material
there can in general be required only a determinate reality, something appropriately and
intelligibly circumscribed. When such material is found and unfolded in conformity with the
principle of the Ideal, a work of art is absolutely objective, whether the external details are
historically accurate or not. In that event the work of art speaks to our true self and becomes
our own property.16

Hegel’s elaboration of the movement of art through phases and within a

hierarchy of types and techniques is a corollary to his entire system. It is a way of
understanding what architecture, art, and sculpture were for Le Corbusier and what it
would mean for him to blur the distinction between the arts.

The Fully Enclosed House as the Fundamental Form

Just as the Christian spirit concentrates itself in the inner life, so the building becomes the place
shut in on every side for the assembly of the Christian congregation and the collection of its
thoughts. The spatial enclosure corresponds to the concentration of mind within and from it.17

14
Ibid., 115.
15
Ibid., 205.
16
Ibid., 279.
17
Ibid., 685.
 In the dwelling that Le Corbusier sets up in his work prior to The Poem a
similarity is found to the above passage. In The Poem, however, spatial enclosure is not
needed to keep in god and found a conception of mind. Rather, mind finds
concentration in its dwelling in the structure of The Poem and the imagination it
engenders toward a future that The Poem might provide. Le Corbusier’s final works
define a transition to a mode of making that is entirely independent and symbolic. The
returning to an original way of building is an absurdity, but there is something important
in acknowledging the significance of representing such a return in built form. Through
the artist, such representing uncovers origins of the present condition. When the artist
retreats from the plane of creation and the work goes into the world, its lack of
authentic original content leads to the feeling of a world covered over. A trace of
originality always remains on the surface of the work and embedded in its substrate.

Thus the production of this architecture should stimulate thought by themselves, and arouse
general ideas without being purely a cover and environment for meanings already independently
shaped in other ways.18

The next advance which we must proceed to consider is this, that architecture adopts more
concrete meanings as its content, and for their more symbolical representation has recourse to
forms which are also more concrete, though whether it uses them in isolation [for monoliths] or
assembles them into great buildings, it does not employ them in a sculptural way but in an
architectural one in its own independent sphere.19

The Ideal of architecture is made concrete through forms that, as a result of

innovations in technology, can express such an Ideal. For Le Corbusier, this form is
plastic with elusions to nature. It is derived by combining different art forms through
poetry in order to work through a wide set of modalities of judging that are equally as
valid and are all related to the same initial mode of judging in the artist. While there
may be greater concreteness, it is centered around the potential concretization of an
order that re-establishes that of the past. It should not be taken as given, but as a
dialogic proposal that must advance.
Le Corbusier offers a return to a poetic way of building as a binding force in his
philosophy of architecture. It is the fundamental historical and spiritual turn to the past.

Now the presentation of action, as in itself a total movement of action, reaction, and resolution
of their struggle, belongs especially to poetry, for it is given to the other arts to seize only one
feature in the course of action and its occurrence.20

Action is presented as a result of an earlier transgression as a need to resolve

inherent conflict. This quest for reconciliation – restoring a balanced order – drives the
dialectic within the work of Le Corbusier as a reflection of influence by the Hegelian
system. The difficulty for Le Corbusier is that in some cases action becomes interested
in itself and the things that it makes to the point of forgetting the initial conflict that was
to be resolved through representation. Through Le Corbusier’s prolonged bureaucratic
conflicts, a move to presentation over representation occurs via active civic engage.

18
Ibid. 636
19
Ibid. 640
20
Ibid. 219
 In either case – whether through presentation or representation – Le
Corbusier’s actions and work strive for unity. This unity is first exemplified by the arts.
This example in turn guides how we should behave in the world. We learn this through
the tools that are Le Corbusier’s books and building – realms to be inhabited and that
support dwelling. Within these spaces, we are confronted with our own lack of unity as
a mirror of the experience that drove Le Corbusier to create to begin with. Le
Corbusier uses his conception of architecture to create grounds on which this
confrontation can begin anew.
The re-establishment of the arts on a uniform plane supports movement of
thought. Le Corbusier provides a space in an object as small as the book that holds The
Poem. This space is a mirror between the eye and surface of the building and page.
Through a confrontation with this mirror, we see ourselves and the building meet
through mediation, understanding our co-determination in the process. As the mirror
lingers after we move on, we understand its ability to provide continuity through time –
the charisma with which it does so defining its poetic dimension and success in the
future.

The power of poetry’s way of putting things consists therefore in the fact that poetry gives shape
to a subject-matter within, without proceeding to express it in actual visible shapes or in series
of melodies; and thereby it makes the external object produced by the other arts into an internal
one which the spirit itself externalizes for the imagination in the form that this internal object has
and is to keep within the spirit.21

V. Le Corbusier’s Dialectic

Le Corbusier’s dialectic does not extend beyond the simplicity of an internal

decision that is fueled by imagination. It is as simple as the red and blue cover of The
Poem. At the same time, the poetic content cannot be quickly pushed aside by
structural considerations. The structure is only there to serve the poetic and provide
support. We are asked not to be critical of the lines, but to embrace them as truth. In
this embrace, the dialectic is transferred to the reader who now engages in a movement
from truth to untruth in the perception of the work. The structure is for the viewer
and confronts this judge with continuity or discontinuity of the work with their own
ideas. The dialectic acts as the hinge that unites the genius and the judge along the plane
of the work.

D. 3 Fusion
The sea has gone out the
tide at low ebb will
rise again in time
A new time has begun
a phase a limit a transition
have mistaken our lives.

Here enters the line proper and essential to architecture, the straight one, and, in general,
regularity and abstract [i.e. geometrical forms]. For architecture as a mere enclosure and as
inorganic nature (nature not in itself individualized and animated by its indwelling spirit) can be

21
Ibid., 1001.
 shaped only in a way external to itself, though the external form is not organic but abstract and
mathematical. But however far the pyramid already begins to have the purpose of a house, still
the right-angle is not dominant everywhere, as it is in a house proper; on the contrary, the
pyramid has a character of its own which is not subservient to any mere purpose, and which
therefore is self-enclosed in a line running directly and gradually from the base to the apex.22

The provocation of this dialectic is found in the right angle. The right angle acts
as a concept and action. It is observed in the structure of a building and in strict
opposition to nature. It becomes a symbol for Le Corbusier of man moving in the
world. It is to turn right or left, the head up or down. To fully read The Poem, the
reader must constantly rotate the pages so as to find a new horizon and take in an
alternate and intentional reading. The right angle acts as the primary dialogic device
between the genius and the viewer.

B.2 Mind
Mathematics!
Here is a fact: the fortunate
miraculous meeting perhaps of one
among several numbers has furnished men with this tool.
Appreciative the philosopher
said, “Good shall be simple
and evil difficult”
Its value resides
in this: the human body
has chosen number as its
admissible vehicle.
…Whence proportion
proportion which orders
the relations with our
surroundings.

The power of mind is explicitly tied to that of understanding the world on

mathematical terms. Man’s capacity for working with the hand, which is here both
wrench-like and claw-like, regularizes and completes the modular system of Le
Corbusier based on the Fibonacci series. Yet man still stands within a square that finds
its context in a natural setting. The turn of the right angle to form the golden section
discovers truth.
G.3 Instrument
With carbon
we have
traced the right angel
the sign
It is the answer and the guide
the fact
an answer
a choice
It is simple and naked
yet knowable
The savant will talk
of relativity and rigour

22
Ibid., 654.
 But conscience
makes it a sign
It is the answer and the guide
the fact
my answer
my choice.

The final action is drawing the cross and thus filling the void at the center. It is
to find a direction and set up motion either to the right or to the left. It is to place
man’s mark on green nature. This violent act yields the purity of white as the fingers
gesture the hand in retreat. It is always the black void and man’s ability to draw in color
that completes the circle.

Hence it comes about that these two kinds of maxims seem not to be capable of existing
together, and consequently a Dialectic arises which leads the Judgment into error in the principle
of its reflection.

The first maxim of Judgment is the proposition: all production of material things and their forms
must be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws.

The second maxim is the counter-proposition: some products of material nature cannot be judged
to be possible according to merely mechanical laws. (to judge them requires quite a different law
of causality, namely, that of final causes.)23

Therefore, the Kritik of Taste is only subjective as regards the representation through which an
object is given to us; viz. It is the art or science of reducing to rules the reciprocal relation
between the Understanding and the Imagination in the given representation (without reference
to any preceding sensation or concept). It is an art, if it only shows this by examples; it is a
science if it derives the possibility of such judgments from the nature of these faculties, as
cognitive faculties in general.24

Le Corbusier’s dialectic rests between understanding and imagination – moving

via a critical process. His kritik elaborates the relationship between representation and
presentation as subject to art and nature respectively. It is an antimony between
aesthetical and rational ideas. When the artist becomes a full participant in the kritik of
taste, he or she finds an ability to undertake the endeavor on terms of its own
principles. It is a knowledge of the original in both the artist and the condition.
While the teleological for Le Corbusier may be seen in the faith that he places in
God and Man, it is primarily in the turn of the right angle whereby genius grounds the
world. Le Corbusier is less concerned, however, with a telos and more with an ontos.
The dialectic of the modern genius it mandated by Le Corbusier to exist as an
ontological one that is always turning and placing faith in the simple ability to ask the
question and make a decision. The highest level of the thought of Le Corbusier falls to
his own self determination and the construction of the final code for interpreting his
work – allowing his actions to operate in harmony.
For Le Corbusier to achieve a level of thought that can claim universality through
great subjectivity, he was required to make the discussion about itself. He needed to
acknowledge a distinction between presentation and representation. The system had to
23
Kant, 70.
24
Ibid., 35.
be fully represented and then thrown into a violent conflict that then allowed for a
showing and final presentation on terms slightly off from those represented. The
dialectic ultimately does not remain between presentation and representation. Through
this dialectic, we pass to a dialectic between showing and not-showing.
While there is primary faith placed in the ontological condition into which the
genius finds himself thrown, it is the potential for creation out of this condition that
merits discussion of the general structure of a dialectic of genius. While it may be the
case that the movement is always in the process of covering over the origin toward
inauthenticity, Le Corbusier suggests that the representational method he uses in order
to draw a discourse is sufficient to deal with terms that allow for the creation of a home
for man in spite of a loss of meaning. “Origin” for Le Corbusier is a faith in creation
beyond thought through textual narration in a poetic form. He leaves us with a simple
beauty as the surface of a mirror capable of reflecting humor and horror.

A. 1 Environment
Men may
affirm this
beasts also
and the plants perhaps
And on this earth alone
which is ours
The sun master of our lives
far off indifferent
He is the visitor–an overlord
he enters our house.
In setting good evening he says
to this mossy earth (oh trees)
to these puddles everywhere
(oh seas) and to our lofty
wrinkles (Andes, Alps and
Himalayas). And the lamps
are lit up.
Punctual machine turning
since time immemorial
engenders every instant of the
Twenty-four hours cycles the gradation
the nuance the imperceptible
almost providing
a rhythm. Yet brutally
he breaks it twice–
morning and evening. Continuity
is his but he imposes an alternative–
night and day–these two phases
rule our destiny:
A sun rises
a sun sets
a sun rises anew.
 VI. Bibliography
Alison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 285

Hegel, G.W.F. trans. T.M. Knox. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975. 283

Kant, Immanuel trans. J.H. Bernard. The Critique of Judgment. New York: Prometheus
Books, 2000. Part I Div. I Section 51

Le Corbusier, Le Poem De L’Angle Droit. Foundation Le Corbusier Editions Connivences,

Paris, 1989.