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Gian Lorenzo Bernini made his exit from Paris in October 1665. He left behind three unbuilt schemes for the eastern façade of the Louvre, a disappointed King and court, and little hope that the strained relationship between the French monarchy and the Italian papacy could be repaired. Bernini’s trip to France had been orchestrated in the name of political and architectural expediency; to the double problem of a palace without a proper façade and a diplomacy without real amicability, Bernini’s talents potentially offered a single solution. One of his schemes, despite his departure, was still in the works. As it turned out, Louis XIV’s ambivalence about Bernini’s proposals was eventually matched by Colbert’s distaste for his grandiloquence –and the extensive demolition required by the Italian’s designs came to be seen by both as an affront to French sovereign power. Colbert’s response to this vexing sequence of events was, ultimately, to relieve Bernini and resume the search for a French solution that had, since January 1664, already yielded several proposals. In the spring of 1667 he appointed a committee that brought together the premier architecte Francois Le Vau, the premier peintre Charles Le Brun, and the physician Claude Perrault to propose new designs. By all accounts, this petit conseil executed its mandate swiftly and without much difficulty. Within three months, the scheme for a colonnade with coupled columns had been proposed, authorized, and finalized.

A photograph dated circa 1900 shows a woman dominating an interior room (Fig. 1). She stands erect. While her left arm lies loosely alongside her body, her right hand rests on the glass surface of a dainty chest of drawers, her head is bent slightly to the side and her gaze seems to follow her right hand. The woman, her blond hair put up at the neck, wears a full-length, high-necked and wide dress that falls heavily to the floor. The ornamental ribbons accentuating the otherwise monochromatic dress are striking: Long puffed sleeves flow into linear ornamented cuffs and two additional thin decorative stripes adorn the centre of the dress from the collar almost down to the hips. Behind the woman, the room opens up through a door into another room, of which the viewer only gets a glimpse, that shows a section of a framed painting on the back wall.

There is little doubt that among the work of Höger there are numerous projects which do not adapt to his typical style. They are almost always modernist projects in which the stylistic characteristics clearly differentiate themselves from the normally consistent work of Höger: mortar and reinforced concrete or steel and glass constructions, apartment blocks and sombre buildings for administration, trade and industry in addition to wood and solid brick structures, [klinker] with heavy roof areas and highly symbolic ornamentation. They do not correspond to a particular period; instead they are spread irregularly throughout his career. They are projects which at that time were almost completely excluded from exhibitions and left without commentaries or illustrations, instead being marginally mentioned as work of young collaborators and most of all defined as programme or promoter imperatives. I could adhere to the opinions accepted both by Höger’s hagiographers and his critics, if the projects of this type deviating from the usual interpretation were not so numerous or significant.

Most of the urban design theories fashionable worldwide today fit into one of two categories. Either they are impenetrably vague in that they conjure up novel ubiquitous conglomerations that only consist of virtual –and obscure– fields of force. Or else they are affirmative in that they blather about the impossibility of planning the city of today, thus using a lot of verbiage to justify the overreaches of urbanism that have already taken place. What they have in common is the conviction that there is no way to stop the headlong spread and the diffuse fraying out of our cities. What cannot be averted must be accepted and can just as well be interpreted as positive to begin with. Of course the theorists who are intent on this kind of supposed re-evaluation are not likely to get into the awkward position of having to live in the inhospitable settlements from which they manage to wrest an abstract beauty at a distance. They can afford to live cheerfully in the historical city centre, which they complacently designate as obsolete, or in the as yet intact countryside. As long as they are not directly affected, they would shrug their shoulders and open that same countryside to urban development.

In 1929, during his first visit to Italy Louis Kahn visited various locations along the Costiera Amalfitana: Positano, Ravello, Atrani and Amalfi; undertaking an ample range of watercolours and drawings. Although all these were collected in 1991 in a catalogue by Jan Hochstim, it was not possible to identify the areas and concrete locations in which these notes were taken. In 1996 on the occasion of an exhibition on the travel drawings of Kahn, which took place in Chicago and New York, he offered exact information on the locations in which ten of these works were completed. In the present article seven more notes are identified and provide more precise information on the previous ten. In addition to this information, Kahn’s intentions in carrying out this work is analysed as is his graphic style and the concrete influences of techniques and representation methods made popular during the second half of the twenties in the United States and the posible repercussions of these travel drawings which he developed in the mature stage of his life.

Kahn began designing social housing projects and urban housing developments for immigrants and workers in Philadelphia in the 1930s. During his lifetime he worked on some sixty projects, including houses, terraced homes, housing additions, refurbishing and apartment buildings, although the great majority made it no further than the paper they were designed on. In fact, if we limit ourselves to detached homes, beginning with Oser House, which he built during the Second World War, and ending with Korman House, finished in 1973, Kahn only built 10 of these projects.

A young Le Corbusier visited the Monastery of Ema, near Florence, for the first time in 1907, returning again in 1911. He always associated these visits of his youth with later projects for modern collective housing, for example those which are represented by the Immeubles Villas, a model which, in the spirit of the monastery, combined individual seclusion with nature and communal services.

For seventeen years, between 1917 and 1934, Le Corbusier lived with his wife Ivonne Gallis in a little rented apartment on the second floor of 20 rue Jacob, in Paris’ St. Germain-des-Près, on the Rive Gauche. Before that, for one year approximately, he had lived in the attic below the mansard of the same building. An environment, both of them, quite distant to that supposed for one of the instigators of change in domestic architecture and the modern dwelling. The building is quite unique, it posses a few secrets and is probable better known for being the residence of another one of its inhabitants, the Natalie Clifford Barney, and host her legendary literary receptions on Friday evenings, which gathered together a more than important part of the intelectual circles of Paris for over sixty years. Le Corbusier was never invited.

“The other day, already at dawn, we have walked for a long time through the streets of La Plata”. Amancio Williams first and then Simón Ungar received with the Curutchet house a statement in the shape of a preliminary sketch and built afterwards new textual warps with the received plot as if they were links in a chain of senses, assuming the inter textual condition of their interpretation, in other words, the construction of reality by crossbreeding different texts.

In the last issue of journal G: Zeitschrfit für elementaren Gestaltung (G: Material for elementary creation) the key proponents of architectural modernism in 1920s Germany published an image with the following caption: “two different perspectives/one single object”. Objects –buildings, works of art– were not only seen in one single way; getting different perspectives for a single object was then possible because, due to the technological advancements of modernism, new perceptive possibilities have emerged. Objects could no longer acquire meaning by themselves; they had to be experienced.