Abstract
Le Corbusier's theories and inventions in fields as diverse as architecture, urban planning, painting and sculpture have been the subject of a considerable number of historical and critical works, against a backdrop of increasingly meticulous biographical investigations, feeding into books and exhibitions. Since the years 1960 and the opening of the archives of the Foundation he created, a scientific continent seems to have emerged. A large number of master's and doctoral theses have been written on all aspects of his production - more than 700 according to one measured estimate, half in English and a quarter in French, the Iberian contribution being particularly significant.
These works are influenced by current events - politics, ideas, art and architecture - as well as by advances in historical science, aesthetics and literary theory. The relationship between his works and his personal experiences, and his appropriation of media such as photography and film, have inspired a number of new studies, which are the focus of the day's proceedings. The aesthetic and rhetorical strategies underpinning his latest projects are also addressed through analyses that place his formal invention at the center of reflection.
It is possible to define a typology of research issues applied to a body of work spanning more than sixty years of Le Corbusier's lifetime, extended by late construction campaigns from Zurich to Firminy, via Baghdad. The researchers correspond to different profiles : the corbulâtres (in the register of adulation) ; the corbumanes (in the register of obsession) ; the corbuclastes (in the register of hatred) ; the corbusceptiques (in the register of doubt) ; and above all the corbusologues, committed to the methodical construction of knowledge.
