Shade Shadow & The Chiasmus of Le Corbusier​

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Christine Kelley

Virginia Tech, USA

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In the eleventh book of Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus must sail to Hades in his attempt to return  home from the Trojan War. In the land of the Cimmerians, Odysseus performs the sacrificial ritual  instructed by Circe, and thus initiates the gathering of the shades. Anticlea appears, and Odysseus  weeps at the sight of his mother’s shade. Longing for home and anguished to learn her fate, he asks:  What fate of pitiless death overcame you?  

                             of disease?

                                            by the darts of Artemis? 

                                                              Of Laertes? 

                                                                              Of Telemachus? 

                                                                                           Possession of his estate? 

                                                                                                            Of Penelope? 

Anticlea responds: 

                                                                                                            Penelope remains in the halls 

                                                                                           No one has taken thy kingship, 

                                                                              Telemachus is master of thine estate, 

                                                              Thy father dwells in the fields, 

                                            I died not by the gentle darts of Artemis, 

                             Nor by disease 

                But of grief for thee [1] 

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Homer makes use of chiasmus to form the dialogue in which Anticlea’s reply is the shadow of her son’s  melancholic inquiry. Anticlea’s seven responses are given in the reverse order of her son’s seven  questions. Chiasmus, the inverted parallel, is a tactic favored by Homer and provides a mnemonic  device that empowers the life of the epic narrative. The inverse parallel is of two things similar but not  the same and the two passages are joined at a fixed point that is a crossing. 

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Between 1947 and 1953, Le Corbusier created The Poeme of The Right Angle for the art patron and  publisher, Tériade. The only architect to contribute to the series, “Grands-Livres,” Le Corbusier designs 19 paintings with original text as an artist book; a book that transforms to an architectural installation.  In Le Corbusier’s Sketchbooks 2 1950-1954, he makes notes on the early development of “The Poème” and references the sequence, alterations, cadence and diversity of Homer’s Odyssey.[2] The chiastic  framework in Homer’s work is a classical literary device; one that Le Corbusier employs to align things past and present, similar yet diUerent. “The Poeme’s” paintings are a precis of Le Corbusier’s work, and  the verse is his ideological view. The Poeme of The Right Angle represents the architect’s wholistic view of art, architecture and a personal doctrine. Le Corbusier portrays his Grande-Livre as a chiastic  structure in both image and theory that proposes the intertwining and resolution of oppositional forces. 

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Concurrent with “The Poème,” Le Corbusier is engaged to design a chapel as part of the mouvement  d’art sacre.[3] Ravaged by war, the Marian chapel Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is redesigned by the  modernist architect, Le Corbusier. Chiastic forms as architectural elements reinforce the sites history, and the narrative is emphasized in the atmospheric quality the architect creates. In the chapel, Le  Corbusier exhibits the melancholic paradox of shade and light as an allusion to things remembered and  imagined. Le Corbusier’s chiasmus at the Chapel Notre Dame du Haut is both the sentient and the  sensed in the quest to unite dark and light, hill and sky, earth and heaven.

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[1] Homer, Odyssey Books 1-12, Henderson, J., ed. and A.T. Murray, trans., Dimock, G.E., rev. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard  University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.

[2] Le Corbusier, Le Corbusier Sketchbooks Volume 2, 1955-1954, SK465, Fondation Le Corbusier, Thames and Hudson,  Paris, France, 1981.  

[3] Fr. Marie-Alain Couturier, (1897-1954) a French Catholic priest, Dominican friar and chief editor of L’Art Sacre. Fr.  Couturier was essential to secure Le Corbusier’s commission at the Chapel Notre Dame du Haute. Couturier pursued living art in contemporary church buildings in France following the second world war with numerous contemporary  artists, notably Matisse, Leger, Braque and Chagall.