i n s t i t u t e   o f  a r t  &   d e s i g n 
 
 
 

CARPENTER CENTER - CAMBRIDGE, MA
Le Corbusier 1963
 
 
 

It will be necessary to prepare a route across the building for the students between the times of courses. A touristic route perhaps in a spiral if we make the building go up. Electric ringing sounds will be composed and emitted once, twice, three times a day, at fixed times, emission of a formidable nature of softness and power. These emissions will be according to a sonorous stereophonic route, in a spiral, going up, coming down; in a vertical going up, coming down, placing the sound in the ground and the sky. -Le Corbusier, Feb. 2, 1960.

The Carpenter Center is the only building on the North American continent designed by architect Le Corbusier. Despite the controversy over the wisdom of placing a building of such modern design in a traditional location, Le Corbusier felt that a building devoted to the visual arts must be an experience of freedom and unbound creativity. A traditional building for the visual arts would almost be a contradiction. This building was intended "to give the experience of art its rightful place in liberal education."  Le Corbusier understood and expressed this effort extremely adeptly. He noted that, while the College successfully dealt with the growth of the student's mind and character, manual art skills had been neglected. Construction was financed by Alfred St. Vrain, a pear farmer and businessman from Oregon, and by the Program for Harvard College, created by President Pusey to focus national attention on the needs of liberal arts colleges. Too frail to travel at age 75, Corbusier himself did not see the building completed in May 1963. But the center reflects the summation of his long career in architecture and his genius: the vertical pillars form the support structure, allowing space to interact with the building within its unrestricted bound; the pillars also allow some of the "claimed" landscape to continue beneath the building, metaphorically suggesting that the heavy structure is "floating" on the pilotis. Each of the five levels of the building is designed as an open space that can be subdivided by movable partitions or cabinets. The walls of the center make use of deep sun baffles, a brise soleil, according to the orientation of the facade; the baffles admit natural light while preventing the sun's direct rays. Light, naturally being extremely important to such an institution.  The floors of studio spaces are penetrated by a flowing ramp connecting Quincy Street with the Prescott street edge of the site. The studio at the top of the ramp served for 30 years as the principal exhibition space, the Josep Lluis Sert Gallery, and is now a classroom for drawing and sculpture. The center's main entry opens to the Lobby Gallery at street level, separating the below-ground grouping of film, photography and lecture rooms from the studio arts areas above. Public circulation through the center of the building via the ramp allows views into the studio workshops. In making the creative process visible through the design of the building, Le Corbusier encouraged direct contact with the visual arts. The combination of theoretical and practical explorations forms the basis of instruction with many of the courses offering the direct experience of studio involvement, reinforcing what Le Corbusier referred to as the "beneficent relations between the hand the head."

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