Light, bright, and modern
Swiss-born designer Le Corbusier was sitting in his Paris studio on April 7, 1960. In front of him was a sheet of onionskin paper a yard wide and long. In rapid strokes, using crayon for color, he sketched a tentative plan for what was to become the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. The strikingly modernist structure, which turned 50 this year, was Le Corbusier’s only building in North America and was the last major project of his life. He colored the intersecting ovals of the main structure in red, the sinuous center ramp in mauve, and the pathways of nearby Sever Quadrangle in yellow, a shade he always used to denote areas for “circulation.” The 1960 sketch, wrote one scholar, showed that “from the beginning Le Corbusier violently asserts the independence of his building from its grid of surrounding streets and architecture.” For instance, the Carpenter Center was...