The term Mannerism cannot yet be said to have become a necessary part of the vocabulary of every educated man or woman, but it should not be assumed that its uses are limited to those of a plaything for art historians. But how precisely did the term arise, and what does it mean? Basically this art was cold, perverse, intricate and intellectualized; more superficially it was consciously imitative of the manner of Michelangelo - and hence the term Mannerism.
In applying it to the architecture of the Modern Movement Colin Rowe breaks completely new ground - and turns a number of stones which have been hiding other things than some people thought. The villa built by Le Corbusier at La Chaux-de-Fonds, his first considerable work to be realized, in spite of its great merits and obvious historical importance, finds no place in the collection of the Oeuvre Complete.
This building, in a sense, is out of key with his later works, and by its inclusion, the didactic emphasis of the collection might have been impaired; but the omission is all the more unfortunate, in that six years later, the design was still found sufficiently serious to be published as an exemplar of proportion and monumentality. The house is of nearly symmetrical form, and in spite of a general lightness deriving from its concrete frame, its conventional character is fairly emphatic.
The principal block is supported by flanking wings; and a central hall, rising through two storeys and crossed by a subsidiary axis, establishes for the plan a simple, balanced, and basically cruciform scheme. Externally the appearance of these same characteristics of restrained movement and rational elegance seems to invite appreciation in Neo-Classical terms. Thus the elliptical windows are part of the stock furniture of French academic architecture; and while the lack of ornament with the simplified cornices suggests the influence of Garnier, and the expression of the concrete frame in the flanking walls indicates an obvious debt to Auguste Perret, the building as a whole, compact, coherent and precise, is an organization which the late eighteenth century could have relished, and a work towards which a Ledoux, if not a Gabriel, might have found himself sympathetic.
But the fourth and entrance elevation presents quite distinct problems of appreciation. Behind its wall, the presence of a staircase continued to the second floor has led to an increase in height, which somewhat detaches this part of the building from the rest; and this elevation affects a severe and obvious distinction from the mass behind, with which on superficial examination it seems, indeed scarcely to be related. Its succinct, angular qualities are foreign to the curvilinear arrangements of the block, and its inclusive, rectilinear, self-sufficient form seems to deny the type of pyramidal composition, which reveals itself from the garden.
