Lecture date: 2006-11-16
The Image and its Enemies: An Iconography of Iconophobia, To the ‘Now’ from Le Corbusier
Docomomo Annual Lecture’I divide “Decon”, iconically, into four types of facial disfigurement, erasure, dissimulation and evasion. These prove an obsession with image and an equal determination to deny the obsession. Viewing Le Corbusier through this lens I recognise a project to destroy social space; an epistemological project to deny knowledge of the built; and a political project to escape the consequences of building. These culminate in his ontological project to destroy Architecture as a proscenium for mediating an iconically-scripted conceptual landscape. I relate these two by arguing, from the facts, that Corbusier was a failed decorative artist who invented a way of building that prohibited decoration. Yet he died in the sea off the Villa at Roquebrune, into which he had inserted, against the spirit of that house and its creator, Eileen Gray, some wonderful, but architecturally-inconsequential, murals.’
John Outram’s only fully inscribed building is at the University of Houston. He worked in London for 50 years, representing Britain in the 1991 Venice Biennale.
