Sleeping beauty

LE CORBUSIER IS DYING. The most influential architect of the 20th century, the pope of the International Style, sits on a sloping promontory, gazing impassively over the Mediterranean. Light reflected off the water plays across his thick black eyeglass frames and high forehead. His left hand drops from his lap and he begins to slump to the side, then he crumples. But as he falls, his head bonks resoundingly on the rock beside him. So he is hauled upright to do it all over again. And again and again and again.

"Le Corbusier," as it turns out, is a two-foot-tall puppet on a small stage ringed by lights and camera equipment. His death scene, a factually cavalier re-imagining by the French conceptual artist Pierre Huyghe, is part of a filmed puppet musical Huyghe (pronounced hweeg) made in honor of Le Corbusier's only North American building, Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which turned 40 last year.

Huyghe's puppet show debuted Nov. 18 with a live performance in a faceted, egg-shaped, moss-covered plastic theater specially built by Harvard architecture professor Michael Meredith and tucked under one of the building's broad cantilevered wings. It tells the story of Carpenter Center's creation, and, in parallel, of Huyghe's own attempt to tell that story. (The film version of the piece is playing in the building's Sert Gallery through April 17.) It turns routine disagreements between architect and client, and routine concessions to financial exigencies and zoning, into a parable of ideas versus institutional inertia, of contingency and compromise.

Along with Le Corbusier, both film and play feature a little red bird puppet and a "Mr. Harvard," an ominous black construction-paper puppet that looks like a Cubist mantis in an inquisitor's hat and robes. There is also a puppet of Huyghe (a rising art-world star who represented France in the 2001 Venice Biennale and won the prestigious Hugo Boss Prize in 2002), and puppets of the show's two curators, Linda Norden and Scott Rothkopf. There are puppets of Josep Lluis Sert, then-head of Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD), and of Eduard Sekler, the founding director of the Carpenter Center. There are even two puppets of the building itself, one a loose lattice of metal pieces that, when lifted off the ground, rises Brigadoon-like into a three-dimensional outline of the building.

Today as Harvard prepares to expand into Allston, more than doubling in size, there's plenty of speculation about what sort of architectural direction it will choose. One possible answer is the Spangler Center, a mildly updated neo-Georgian edifice built at the Harvard Business School nearly four years ago. Speaking at its opening, its architect Robert A.M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, argued that Harvard's "brand" -- the Harvard of the public imagination -- means red-brick Georgian buildings, and only a fool would mess with it.

Another answer is the Carpenter Center. Le Corbusier sought to knit his building into the Harvard campus conceptually while asserting its independence with forms and materials starkly at odds with its surroundings. In many ways -- by incorporating the flow of the campus, by playing off its more traditional neighbors, and in its play of light and rhythm -- it succeeds brilliantly. But, four decades on, Huyghe asks what we are to make of this once provocative building, and suggests that its lessons may lie in its failures and incompletions as much as in its ideas.. . .

Today, showpieces like Frank Gehry's Stata Center or Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, both at MIT, grandly lay claim to Boston's architectural vanguard. The Carpenter Center, on the other hand -- wedged between Harvard's Fogg Museum of Art and the Faculty Club, off the east end of the Yard on Quincy Street -- is familiar mostly to architects and architectural scholars. Not that it isn't arresting. It has been described as looking like two grand pianos copulating, with its two broadly curved wings resting on thin columns and meeting in a geometrical central structure of stacked concrete and glass boxes. A ramp rises from Quincy Street and runs through the building's open center before descending to Prescott Street behind it.

When Harvard approached Le Corbusier in 1958, it had already embraced architectural modernism. Twenty years earlier the university had brought Walter Gropius, the father of the Bauhaus, over from Germany to head the GSD. His successor, Sert, was a close friend and collaborator with Le Corbusier. Gropius's Graduate Center and Sert's Holyoke Center and Peabody Terrace had already been built. When Harvard needed a building to house its newly created undergraduate visual arts program, it was Sert who suggested commissioning Le Corbusier. Having America's only building by Le Corbusier, he told Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences McGeorge Bundy, would be like having the country's only Picasso.

In Le Corbusier, Harvard met a man whose self-regard matched its own. Born Charles Edouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, he rechristened himself at the appropriate age of 33, conflating an ancestral name, Le Corbesier, with his nickname, `Corbeau' (Crow). In his 1923 manifesto "Toward a New Architecture" he wrote rapturously of "a supreme determinism" under which a just and peaceful society would inevitably flourish. He wanted to raze cluttered neighborhoods like Paris's Marais and replace them with a "Radiant City" of ethereal skyscrapers and wide greenways. Only enlightened architecture, he warned, could prevent social unrest from boiling over into workers' revolution.

But when Sert offered him the job, Le Corbusier was still angry at what he called "American officialdom" for his treatment during the design process for the United Nations headquarters, where he had been turned down for the commission only to see his ideas incorporated into the final complex. Ultimately, though, he couldn't turn down the chance to build in the United States, a country that early in his career had represented for him the possibility of the machine age. And the Carpenter Center's role in both housing and embodying Harvard's arts program coincided with his idea that architecture should synthesize all the arts, including painting, sculpture, and even music. As the architectural historian William Curtis has written, Le Corbusier wanted the building to be a "manifesto."

Le Corbusier only visited Harvard twice, but one of his most vivid impressions of the place was the overlapping tides of students that filled Harvard Yard as pealing bells signaled the break between classes. "He was fascinated by that," Sekler recalled in a recent interview, "how it suddenly came to life."

As recounted in "Le Corbusier at Work," Curtis and Sekler's definitive account of the building's creation, Le Corbusier was disappointed by the way his given site was closed off from the Yard, but he still sought to incorporate it into his plan, most dramatically with his S-shaped ramp, which he envisioned as an extension of the paths that crisscrossed the campus. In piercing the center of the building, the ramp would draw people in, both conceptually, by collapsing the distinction between internal and external space, and practically, by tantalizing them with a glimpse of the work going on in the glass-walled studios alongside the ramp. Electronic tones would issue from speakers along the ramp, echoing the choreography of bells and movement he had witnessed in the Yard.

But the building didn't turn out exactly as Le Corbusier envisioned it. The electronic tones were dropped early on. More significantly, he was forced to abandon his plans to cover the building's external spaces with a garden, an extension of the greenery of the Yard. Unlike the manicured quads, he had wanted it to be a natural, untended garden -- seeded entirely by the wind and birds and insects, watered by the rain and allowed to run riot all over the building's several terraces. The idea didn't particularly appeal to the Harvard administration, and a lack of safety rails rendered most of the proposed space off-limits anyway. Today only the lower front terrace has a garden, and it's a rim of dirt thinly covered in summer with weeds.. . .

This scraggly remnant is Huyghe's entry point -- the seed of his skeptical elegy to Le Corbusier's failed utopianism. Huyghe himself grew up in the Parisian suburbs, in the midst of the grand "House of Youth and Culture"-type buildings and housing complexes that proliferated in Le Corbusier's wake. When Huyghe first visited the building, he told me in his somewhat tentative English, he was taken on a tour by Sekler, who pointed out all the features that weren't in the original plan. "So there is a gap between what was thought and what was realized," Huyghe recalles, "and I thought, `I will take these few things, like the greenery, and increase them -- not so as to correct them and make them normal but to make them overplayed."

'This overcompensation distorts the formal elegance of Le Corbusier's building and makes it something strange, even freakish: In Huyghe's film, a seed that the little red bird drops on the terrace sprouts into tentacular creepers that overrun the building, curving and waving in the air like the vines that guarded Sleeping Beauty. A few scenes earlier, one of the Carpenter Center puppets, rotating and raising and lowering its various parts, looks like an ungainly fledgling trying to fly.

The Carpenter Center is easily one of Boston's most important 20th-century buildings, but among architecture scholars it often finds itself consigned to near-great status. Says Mary McLeod, an architecture professor at Columbia University, "I think it's a kind of nice minor building that's not perfect. I don't think, in terms of [Le Corbusier's] aesthetic, that it broke much new ground." Even Sekler, the building's staunchest defender, admits that it is constrained by some of its structural compromises.

To many, it's a bit of a greatest-hits compilation -- "a sort of exhibition or demonstration of [Le Corbusier's] architecture principles," as the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, also at Columbia, puts it. Huyghe more evocatively calls it "a bit like a pudding cake, a bit of a collage, a bit mannered, a bit too complicated."

Le Corbusier drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean shortly after the building's completion and never saw it. None of the surviving architects who worked with him on it would venture a guess as to whether the final result would have satisfied him. And then there is the question of his larger legacy in America. To critics like the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, Le Corbusier's vision of the "Radiant City" bears some of the blame for the ill-fated urban renewal projects of the 1950s and 1960s and the Brutalist architecture of buildings like Boston's City Hall. The fact that the only exposition of his own principles Le Corbusier managed to build on American soil was this little building squeezed off to one side of a college campus seems somehow poignant.

Meant as a polemic, the Carpenter Center has lost its edge as it has aged -- like generations of buildings before it -- into a familiar part of the campus backdrop, and as Le Corbusier's once revolutionary beliefs have come to seem almost quaint. As it fixes to remake a huge swath of Boston, the last thing Harvard wants to be seen as doing is following Corbusian ideas about how to remake the urban environment. But still, it could do much worse than emulating the small, compromised Le Corbusier building it already has.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas.