Reading Le Corbusier’s Les Quatre Compositions Diagram through Purism and Cubism

Abstract

The les quatre compositions was conceived in 1929 and it continues to be of architectural importance in understanding the ethos of early Le Corbusier. Most critically it provides a framework for differentiating his villas on the basis of plan and morphology. The diagram is a resultant of the achievements of Maison Dom-ino, which embodies the freeing of structural constraints in plan and section from the classical load bearing anchors; but paramount to that it expounds the concepts of equipotential planes, transparency, shallowness of depth, datum, boundary and critique the notion of the ground; topics which mirror closely to that of the problems experimented upon at the time by painters. Some critics have argued for the chronological nature of the diagram where the issues that have been laid down by the previous diagram are solved by the next, but this study aims to stitch together an analysis of this diagram with the help of cubism and purism and how it and the associated villas pursue different goals and are far removed from a chronological reading