A Design For Living

The Crow Man

Architect, urban theorist, interior designer, painter, sculptor, poet, essayist, philosopher, film-maker, Hermeticist, Renaissance man.
Le Corbusier is another in that long line of Modernists who hymn the rational and the scientific, only to find the irrational and the ecstatic increasingly welling up in their life and work (Joyce, Eliot, Eisenstein, Jung) - throughout his work, a gnostic code can be traced. There is a theory that Papa Corbu deliberately ended his life in an Alchemical ritual, swimming towards the sun (an act saturated in so many layers of Alchemical and mythical meaning it would take pages to explicate them all). All a long way from the discipline and rigour, the white purity of the International Style - but that was only one facet of the most protean builder of them all; he also created two of the few meaningful examples of sacred architecture in the Twentieth Century - the Notre Dame-du-Haut chapel at Ronchamp and the monastery of La Tourette - the spiritual expressed in stone and steel.

Of course, I like to remember him best as the designer of a rather spiffy range of spectacles, available exclusively from a high end Venetian optician . I currently sport the style modeled by the old boy in the photos above. They send them to you in a nice corduroy case ... it's the cloth of kings, you know.