Browsing: Le Corbusier

“Slumdog Millionaire” is the movie of the year. Its story of a young guy from Mumbai’s slum of Dharavi, who manages to change its destiny through the “Who wants to be a Millionaire” game has charmed many people, including the Oscars’ jury, who awarded the movie with 8 prizes.

At the same time, the movie has created a debate around slums and how the movie portrays them. “Slumdog Millionaire” follows the mainstream vision of slums, described in the XIX century by writers like Daniel Defoe or Charles Dickens: dark, dirty places, with people packed in small rooms with no water facilities. In slums, riots are frequents, and police can hardly enter: the perfect place for criminals to hide and plan their threats to the society, and the perfect incubator for all sort of diseases.

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Easily regarded as one of the most adroit architects of 20th century, Le Corbusier was a relentless designer, urban planner and writer dedicated to industrializing almost every city he came across.

This spring The Barbican – London’s colossal multi-arts venue – is hosting an all-encompassing showcase of Le Corbusier’s work, a survey which will include an abundance of original models, interior settings, drawings, furniture, photographs, films, tapestries, paintings, sculpture and books designed and written by the architect himself. More of a celebration than an exhibition, the festivities include concerts, films, guest speakers and a photo competition all in his honor.

Seen at coolhunting.

World Expositions have been an architectural playground since they started to appear: London World Exposition of 1851 (Crystal Palace), Paris World Exposition of 1889 (Eiffel Tower), and more recently, Hannover 2000 and Zaragoza 2008.

But also at the Brussels World Exposition in 1958, where Le Corbusier created the very first multimedia project, in collaboration with Edgar Varèse and Iannis Xenakis: The Phillips Pavillion. This unique experience only lasted through the Exposition, being demolished after it, but The Virtual Electronic Poem (VEP) project, co-funded by the European Union through the Culture 2000 programme, realized a virtual reality (VR) environment capable of reproducing the global experience of the Poème électronique through a philologically accurate reconstruction of the original installation and a technologically innovative VR implementation, that you can see on the above video.