THINK LIKE A BUBBLE

MS10-028 TRANSPARENT DRAWING

Le Corbusier writes in Towards a New Architecture, “A building is like a soap bubble. This bubble is perfect and harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed and regulated from the inside. The exterior is a result of an interior.” Let’s pause here for a second and repeat that. A building is like a soap bubble. The interior space pressure forms the interior which forms the exterior. A Byzantine church certainly has soap bubble characteristics, the most obvious being that the central dome is bubble like. And then the spatial extension around the central dome with half domes, or bubbles, is exactly the way that soap bubbles form as a group. And it is fair to say that bubbles are transparent.

Le Corbusier continues. “In Broussa in Asia Minor, at the Green Mosque, you enter by a little doorway of normal human height; a quite small vestibule produces in you the necessary change of scale so that you may appreciate, as against the dimensions of the street and the spot you come from, the dimensions with which it is intended to impress you. Then you can feel the noble size of the Mosque and your eyes can take its measure. You are in a great white marble space filled with light. Beyond you can see a second similar space of the same dimensions, but it is half light and raised on several steps (repetition in a minor key); on each side a still smaller space in subdued light; turning round, you have two very small spaces in shade. From full light to shade, a rhythm. Tiny doors and enormous bays. You are captured, you have lost the sense of the common scale. You are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what is set out to tell you. What emotion, what faith! There you have motive and intention. The cluster of ideas, this is the means that has been used. In consequence, at Broussa as at Santa Sophia, as at the Suleiman Mosque of Istanbul, the exterior results from the interior.” (pp 167-169)

If I could only use one word to characterize Le Corbusier’s thinking in these passages, that word would be transparent.

As you draw.

As you design.

As you think.

As you solve problems, consider your object and enclosure as a bubble. Imagine interior and exterior as one. And lastly, as you might guess, this is an exhortation to draw transparently, as it is the only way I know to draw and think like a bubble.

Henry van de Velde also had something to say regarding Byzantine Churches. The word that he applied to them was restraint.  I guess you could say that bubbles are restrained.  If they do anything other than strictly bubble type things, they break.  They can only form in a elliptical or spherical way.  That is what I would call restraint.

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