Abstract
The original idea for this doctoral thesis can be traced back to Le Corbusier’s death. Architecture and life’s limestones interact and identify with each other to the point of becoming a meaningful whole. The influences of important moments of life, especially of solitude, on architectural works, is at the core of this research.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolph Loos and Le Corbusier felt lonely at crucial moments of their lives. F. L. Wright, while he embraced his wife, Mamah Bouton Bortwiwick, as she was being buried after a deliberate fire had destroyed Taliesin, the house he had designed and built to live with her, in 1914. Adolf Loos, due to his complexed personality, just before showing Carolina Catharina Obertimpfler (Lina Loos) his work My Wife’s Bedroom, which he had designed for her in 1903. Le Corbusier, as he was drowning at Cap-Martin in 1965, after having walked down to the sea from the Cabanon. His wife, Ivonne Gallis, who used to accompany him on this walk, had died years before. Down in the water, we can imagine him (with the help of photographs of Ronchamp, La Tourette and Firminy Vert Church taken by the author of this thesis) having a last vision of his religious works through the cloudy waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Architecture, literature, photography, painting and music all joined together by poetry. ‘To see what can not be seen, everything that is not at the centre, but on the margins of a written sheet, where there is little space left’. ‘There, where neither science nor philosophy can reach, is where imagination is born’. ‘The aim is to find out and develop new ways of getting to know architecture through the practice of literature’.
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