BOOZY Notes
Blurb
"Boozy" is a multimedia dance theater catastrophe, at last exposing the architectural master’s profound evil and his love of pure geometry, raw materials, and Christian blood. FDR, Hitler, Jesus-- none shall be spared.
A theater is a machine for entertainment.
Thesis Notes 5/10/04
Personal hubris behind moving large masses of people
The hubris on one man dictating what thousands of people should do.
Moving thousands to areas where they themselves would refuse to live.
The fact that such a person is a non-elected official: Who makes these decisions? The public, the committee, or the visionary. (ex. PATH station) The importance of a singular aesthetic.
Class strata.
The pissing matches of the mighty. Conspiracy theory.
The obsession of immortality through physical structures. Rome/Atlantis. Legacy.
Two other forms: Legacy of car alarms. Naming everything/Naming Rights. Territorial pissing.
How much room does one man need to live? Can it be quantified?
Humans always in rooms. Room of office, room of home. Commuting between boxes is outdoors, but still often in a box. [Car=room] On a parkway, one is surrounded by exterior expanses, all the while trapped inside a moving box. There is no transcendence. The parkway is claustrophobia made manifest.
The irony of claustrophobia while surrounded by park.
Mies Van der Rohe’s honeycomb complexes- compartment living in nature.
Goal
The connection between Le Corbusier and Robert Moses is clear: Both were visionary urban planners obsessed with mass production and the machine age. However well-intentioned and concerned with the general good of “the city,” their idealistic planning neglected to consider the concerns of the individual (as a thinking, feeling human being). The execution of their designs divided neighborhoods, uprooted and attempted to cast away the lower classes, and led to their ultimate vilification today. The intentions of both are frequently compared today to those of totalitarian dictators.
Boozy will be an attempt to examine the lives and work of these two, to demonstrate the direct link between them, and to play with their ultimate historical perception in the popular and academic spheres.
Synopsis
The intention is earnest, but the approach is comically pretentious and highly academic. We will embrace a bold, unprovable thesis—that Le Corbusier wanted to harness atomic energy in order to destroy the Western hemisphere so that he might then rebuild it as a series of “garden cities,” and that he conspired with FDR and Hitler to plot Moses’ fall—and then attempt to demonstrate and argue it, employing myriad post-modern theater techniques and primary sources. The proceedings are completely straight-faced and hopefully very funny.
Approach
Boozy is a musical-dance theater piece examining the lives, work, and legacies of urban planners Le Corbusier and New York’s own Robert Moses.
The show begins with a twenty-minute modern dance piece that embraces a Franco-sensibility and retells the story of math—man’s embrace of it and his eventual rejection of it—and prophecies his destruction by it. In this six-movement piece, Un Piece de Movement Historique avec la Geometrie, the dancing descendants of Le Corbusier are repeatedly interrupted by his ghost who screams “Stop Dancing!” He does not want his ancestors to tell the story of math, for it vilifies him. The fourth movement depicts the life of Thomas Jefferson—who, to the dancers, embodies man’s perfect union with math—and argues that Le Corbusier and Jesus conspired to kill Jefferson, through the creation of a puppet-like Sally Hemmings Machine Monster. (The logic of the piece seems extremely convoluted and absurd at first glance. Part of the humor is that all of the motivations and historical observations are somewhat steeped in fact. A 30-page course packet, handed out with the programs, outlines the dance’s narrative and includes footnotes, primary sources, and blank pages for the audience to jot down its own thoughts and ideas.)
This dance acts as a prologue, and the rest of Boozy is comprised of abstract sequences, tonally dissonant, presented in a non-linear fashion. With Moses as our protagonist, the argument behind our central thesis is recounted and the two hugely-influential figures of the 20th Century are coupled and pitted against one another.
Just as the exploration itself is entertaining and extremely pretentious, we will present our story, and argument, using self-consciously overblown and clichéd postmodern theatrical techniques, including abstract dance, live sound/micing, video art, found texts, Viewpoints, repetition of aphorisms, gestural performance, and others. The resulting pastiche is not merely parody. The show’s creators have a sincere fascination with these theatrical styles. Similarly, the mythology of Le Corbusier and Moses will be skewered but simultaneously revered. Why else create a show about them?
Aside from the dance, other scenes will most likely include:
-Lectured argument comparing the fundamental divide between the two urban planners embodied by the dialectic of Corbusier/Plato and Moses/Aristotle. The former believed in simple, primary forms. The latter were pupils but challenged their teachers through their obsession with deductive reasoning, formal logic: empirical forms. This is foreshadowed in the prologue dance, when Aristotle murders Plato.
-Video of man-on-the-street interviews with people who live in Corbusier’s co-ops, to be conducted entirely in French.
-Found text passages from Lewis Mumford’s The Highway and the City, and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, among others.
-Selections from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment inserted into mundane, gardening scene. Just how many square feet of garden does a human being need for sanity?
-Formal explanation of Complexity Theorems. Mark C. Taylor’s Complexity and Architecture makes the distinction between architects who adhere to the “grid system” versus embracing the “network,” which reflects the complexity of our times. Essentially, Le Corbusier and Moses’ work necessitated the rapid rise of the network, and indirectly the advent of the atomic age. This argument is essential to the explanation of Le Corbusier’s earlier championing of the destruction of Warsaw and gutting of Rotterdam—cities that could then be landscaped and reborn using his utopian, urban planning theories—and his subsequent obsession with “the normalization of the irrational” and with harnessing nuclear power.
-Various eulogies for Le Corbusier, accompanied by blueprints and models. A sung requiem.
-Finally, scenes and musical numbers that contribute more directly to Boozy’s narrative line/argument.
-Game of Where’s Waldo with Corbu- Where’s he building? As he pops up all around the globe.
“Geometry is our greatest creation and we are enthralled by it.”
“We must create the mass production spirit.”
Moses and Le Corbusier shaped Latin America
Brasilia
“Le Corbusier’s world is the world of the concentration camp.”
“Modern construction… robs man of his soul.”
“No one embodied the revolution in architecture as much as [Le Corbusier] did; no one was insulted so continuously as he was nor bore it so patiently.”
Domino: “domus”= house, “ino”=innovation
Notion of modular houses hatched post-WW I as quick way to erect lots of social housing
to replace bombed out areas
“The straight line is the great achievement of modern architecture. We must clean the cobwebs of romanticism from our minds.” “Modern decorative art is not decorated.”
“The house is a box in the air.” p. 53
Le Corbusier’s four brutal axioms for city planning:
1)Town centers must be made less congested
2)Town centers must be more densely built up
3)Means of transport must be increased (=Moses)
4)There must be an increase in open spaces (=Moses)
Five points of architecture: free plan (p. 67), pilotis, horizontal windows, roof terraces, free facade
Pilotis: contrast between the park and the “built box”
Notion of transparency with glass curtain walls- interior and exterior transmutable- see through house from outside on one end through to the other
Furniture is “equipment for living” Simple. No ostentation, decoration. Extreme economy of line, using simple materials.
Every home interior needs a coating of standard white paint. “Cleanse your home—cleanse yourself.”
Different zones in different functions (vs. Jane Jacobs) p. 50 (ex. Chandigarh)
“The architects’ clients were generally members of wealthy families.” (rich patronage= Moses) p. 51
Le Corbusier politics: Conservatives regarded him as a socialist, socialists as a fascist….. When he wrote “The Radiant City” in 1935, he dedicated it “To Authority” and later mailed it personally to Stalin, Mussolini, Petain, and Nehru.
Unite d’Habitation contained 330 units of 23 varieties.
Corbu legacy: Le Corbusier had always realized that “it takes at least twenty years for an idea to be recognized, thirty for it to be implemented—by which time it should have been superseded” and “it is then that plaudits and eulogies and commemorative plaques start raining down. It is too late.” (=Moses) p. 111 Little of his town planning was ever taken seriously and he was embittered by this lack of recognition p. 97
Corbu was averse to the garden cities that had been built on the outskirts of large town and instead offered “vertical garden cities” p. 77
Named “unite d’habitation de grandeur conforme” (to human proportions), so named because the dimensions of the rooms and the layout of their fixtures and fittings were designed with reference to the dimensions of the human body: Rooms are 3.66 meters wide and 2.26 meters tall, or 4.84 meters in double-height areas of the living room. The dimensions are based on Modular (the framework in a module is 4.19 meters square).
Le Corbusier created a series of harmonic numbers: one was the average height of a human being (initially 1.75 meters (5’7”), later 1.829 meters (6’)), the other the height of a man with raised arms. Several of the measurements were taken from other positions.
Idea for sequence in which Le Corbusier takes measurements and reasons how much space a human needs to live
“Its great advantage is this: the human body as an accepted support to a system of numbers… That’s proportion! Proportion puts order into our relationship with our environment.” (p. 94) Le Modulor: Essai sur une mesure harmonique a l’echelle humaine applicable universellement a l’architecture et a la mecanique (The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure on the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics)
The figure of a standing man, on which the grid was constructed, became internationally famous. Once he had worked out the system, Le Corbusier determined the measurements of all his constructions according to the Modulor. The “human proportions” of the Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles are based on these principles.
Apartments in modular superblocks are connected by interior streets. Within some, there are commercial storefronts. Historically, those businesses have been unsuccessful.
Post-WW II (1945) France set up a public housing program (p. 76) like NYC’s Title I
“Architecture students are like virgins/ with an itch they cannot scratch/ Never build a building till you're 50/ what kind of life is that?” –Stephen Malkmus
Brutalist architecture- unmoulded concrete=“beton brut”
Blurb
"Boozy" is a multimedia dance theater catastrophe, at last exposing the architectural master’s profound evil and his love of pure geometry, raw materials, and Christian blood. FDR, Hitler, Jesus-- none shall be spared.
A theater is a machine for entertainment.
Thesis Notes 5/10/04
Personal hubris behind moving large masses of people
The hubris on one man dictating what thousands of people should do.
Moving thousands to areas where they themselves would refuse to live.
The fact that such a person is a non-elected official: Who makes these decisions? The public, the committee, or the visionary. (ex. PATH station) The importance of a singular aesthetic.
Class strata.
The pissing matches of the mighty. Conspiracy theory.
The obsession of immortality through physical structures. Rome/Atlantis. Legacy.
Two other forms: Legacy of car alarms. Naming everything/Naming Rights. Territorial pissing.
How much room does one man need to live? Can it be quantified?
Humans always in rooms. Room of office, room of home. Commuting between boxes is outdoors, but still often in a box. [Car=room] On a parkway, one is surrounded by exterior expanses, all the while trapped inside a moving box. There is no transcendence. The parkway is claustrophobia made manifest.
The irony of claustrophobia while surrounded by park.
Mies Van der Rohe’s honeycomb complexes- compartment living in nature.
Goal
The connection between Le Corbusier and Robert Moses is clear: Both were visionary urban planners obsessed with mass production and the machine age. However well-intentioned and concerned with the general good of “the city,” their idealistic planning neglected to consider the concerns of the individual (as a thinking, feeling human being). The execution of their designs divided neighborhoods, uprooted and attempted to cast away the lower classes, and led to their ultimate vilification today. The intentions of both are frequently compared today to those of totalitarian dictators.
Boozy will be an attempt to examine the lives and work of these two, to demonstrate the direct link between them, and to play with their ultimate historical perception in the popular and academic spheres.
Synopsis
The intention is earnest, but the approach is comically pretentious and highly academic. We will embrace a bold, unprovable thesis—that Le Corbusier wanted to harness atomic energy in order to destroy the Western hemisphere so that he might then rebuild it as a series of “garden cities,” and that he conspired with FDR and Hitler to plot Moses’ fall—and then attempt to demonstrate and argue it, employing myriad post-modern theater techniques and primary sources. The proceedings are completely straight-faced and hopefully very funny.
Approach
Boozy is a musical-dance theater piece examining the lives, work, and legacies of urban planners Le Corbusier and New York’s own Robert Moses.
The show begins with a twenty-minute modern dance piece that embraces a Franco-sensibility and retells the story of math—man’s embrace of it and his eventual rejection of it—and prophecies his destruction by it. In this six-movement piece, Un Piece de Movement Historique avec la Geometrie, the dancing descendants of Le Corbusier are repeatedly interrupted by his ghost who screams “Stop Dancing!” He does not want his ancestors to tell the story of math, for it vilifies him. The fourth movement depicts the life of Thomas Jefferson—who, to the dancers, embodies man’s perfect union with math—and argues that Le Corbusier and Jesus conspired to kill Jefferson, through the creation of a puppet-like Sally Hemmings Machine Monster. (The logic of the piece seems extremely convoluted and absurd at first glance. Part of the humor is that all of the motivations and historical observations are somewhat steeped in fact. A 30-page course packet, handed out with the programs, outlines the dance’s narrative and includes footnotes, primary sources, and blank pages for the audience to jot down its own thoughts and ideas.)
This dance acts as a prologue, and the rest of Boozy is comprised of abstract sequences, tonally dissonant, presented in a non-linear fashion. With Moses as our protagonist, the argument behind our central thesis is recounted and the two hugely-influential figures of the 20th Century are coupled and pitted against one another.
Just as the exploration itself is entertaining and extremely pretentious, we will present our story, and argument, using self-consciously overblown and clichéd postmodern theatrical techniques, including abstract dance, live sound/micing, video art, found texts, Viewpoints, repetition of aphorisms, gestural performance, and others. The resulting pastiche is not merely parody. The show’s creators have a sincere fascination with these theatrical styles. Similarly, the mythology of Le Corbusier and Moses will be skewered but simultaneously revered. Why else create a show about them?
Aside from the dance, other scenes will most likely include:
-Lectured argument comparing the fundamental divide between the two urban planners embodied by the dialectic of Corbusier/Plato and Moses/Aristotle. The former believed in simple, primary forms. The latter were pupils but challenged their teachers through their obsession with deductive reasoning, formal logic: empirical forms. This is foreshadowed in the prologue dance, when Aristotle murders Plato.
-Video of man-on-the-street interviews with people who live in Corbusier’s co-ops, to be conducted entirely in French.
-Found text passages from Lewis Mumford’s The Highway and the City, and Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, among others.
-Selections from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment inserted into mundane, gardening scene. Just how many square feet of garden does a human being need for sanity?
-Formal explanation of Complexity Theorems. Mark C. Taylor’s Complexity and Architecture makes the distinction between architects who adhere to the “grid system” versus embracing the “network,” which reflects the complexity of our times. Essentially, Le Corbusier and Moses’ work necessitated the rapid rise of the network, and indirectly the advent of the atomic age. This argument is essential to the explanation of Le Corbusier’s earlier championing of the destruction of Warsaw and gutting of Rotterdam—cities that could then be landscaped and reborn using his utopian, urban planning theories—and his subsequent obsession with “the normalization of the irrational” and with harnessing nuclear power.
-Various eulogies for Le Corbusier, accompanied by blueprints and models. A sung requiem.
-Finally, scenes and musical numbers that contribute more directly to Boozy’s narrative line/argument.
-Game of Where’s Waldo with Corbu- Where’s he building? As he pops up all around the globe.
“Geometry is our greatest creation and we are enthralled by it.”
“We must create the mass production spirit.”
Moses and Le Corbusier shaped Latin America
Brasilia
“Le Corbusier’s world is the world of the concentration camp.”
“Modern construction… robs man of his soul.”
“No one embodied the revolution in architecture as much as [Le Corbusier] did; no one was insulted so continuously as he was nor bore it so patiently.”
Domino: “domus”= house, “ino”=innovation
Notion of modular houses hatched post-WW I as quick way to erect lots of social housing
to replace bombed out areas
“The straight line is the great achievement of modern architecture. We must clean the cobwebs of romanticism from our minds.” “Modern decorative art is not decorated.”
“The house is a box in the air.” p. 53
Le Corbusier’s four brutal axioms for city planning:
1)Town centers must be made less congested
2)Town centers must be more densely built up
3)Means of transport must be increased (=Moses)
4)There must be an increase in open spaces (=Moses)
Five points of architecture: free plan (p. 67), pilotis, horizontal windows, roof terraces, free facade
Pilotis: contrast between the park and the “built box”
Notion of transparency with glass curtain walls- interior and exterior transmutable- see through house from outside on one end through to the other
Furniture is “equipment for living” Simple. No ostentation, decoration. Extreme economy of line, using simple materials.
Every home interior needs a coating of standard white paint. “Cleanse your home—cleanse yourself.”
Different zones in different functions (vs. Jane Jacobs) p. 50 (ex. Chandigarh)
“The architects’ clients were generally members of wealthy families.” (rich patronage= Moses) p. 51
Le Corbusier politics: Conservatives regarded him as a socialist, socialists as a fascist….. When he wrote “The Radiant City” in 1935, he dedicated it “To Authority” and later mailed it personally to Stalin, Mussolini, Petain, and Nehru.
Unite d’Habitation contained 330 units of 23 varieties.
Corbu legacy: Le Corbusier had always realized that “it takes at least twenty years for an idea to be recognized, thirty for it to be implemented—by which time it should have been superseded” and “it is then that plaudits and eulogies and commemorative plaques start raining down. It is too late.” (=Moses) p. 111 Little of his town planning was ever taken seriously and he was embittered by this lack of recognition p. 97
Corbu was averse to the garden cities that had been built on the outskirts of large town and instead offered “vertical garden cities” p. 77
Named “unite d’habitation de grandeur conforme” (to human proportions), so named because the dimensions of the rooms and the layout of their fixtures and fittings were designed with reference to the dimensions of the human body: Rooms are 3.66 meters wide and 2.26 meters tall, or 4.84 meters in double-height areas of the living room. The dimensions are based on Modular (the framework in a module is 4.19 meters square).
Le Corbusier created a series of harmonic numbers: one was the average height of a human being (initially 1.75 meters (5’7”), later 1.829 meters (6’)), the other the height of a man with raised arms. Several of the measurements were taken from other positions.
Idea for sequence in which Le Corbusier takes measurements and reasons how much space a human needs to live
“Its great advantage is this: the human body as an accepted support to a system of numbers… That’s proportion! Proportion puts order into our relationship with our environment.” (p. 94) Le Modulor: Essai sur une mesure harmonique a l’echelle humaine applicable universellement a l’architecture et a la mecanique (The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure on the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics)
The figure of a standing man, on which the grid was constructed, became internationally famous. Once he had worked out the system, Le Corbusier determined the measurements of all his constructions according to the Modulor. The “human proportions” of the Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles are based on these principles.
Apartments in modular superblocks are connected by interior streets. Within some, there are commercial storefronts. Historically, those businesses have been unsuccessful.
Post-WW II (1945) France set up a public housing program (p. 76) like NYC’s Title I
“Architecture students are like virgins/ with an itch they cannot scratch/ Never build a building till you're 50/ what kind of life is that?” –Stephen Malkmus
Brutalist architecture- unmoulded concrete=“beton brut”