Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier, is one of the best-known architects in history. He is not the most loved (he has his detractors and they are not few), but he is one of the most influential. His works are iconic and his solutions to the construction challenges posed to him are brilliant.
The construction from the ground up of a capital for the Indian Punjab after the partition of India and Pakistan is textbook. But for a long time he said no to the project.
It was two British colleagues, the couple formed by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who convinced him and helped him build Chandigarh decades before, for example, Oscar Niemeyer planned and built Brasilia. The Fry couple have a good resume to convince Le Corbusier, because they had already carried out a similar project in Ghana.
In the years of decolonization, from the forties to the sixties, the new governments wanted to project their own image, also in that of their new buildings. And so, with the help of native professionals and from the old metropolises, trained in classicism, but with new (and above all brilliant) ideas, they had understood that the climate dictated the construction.
Something that in 2024 is the watchword of a world in which the climate brings us surprises every day. Le Corbusier, Drew, Fry, Kenneth Scott, Aditya Prakash, John Owuso Addo and Nikso Ciko built what is known today (rather little) as Tropical Modernism.
The Victoria Museum in London
The beauty and recognition of all these buildings, such as the Nkrumah University, in Ghana, have earned a place in the annals not only for their political intention, but above all because they were built not thinking about structures that functioned in northern Europe, but not in Africa or India.
For tropical modernism, the local climate is the judge who passes sentence and incorporates new ventilation systems, cooling of the houses, use of the sun and shadows, use of water and strong increases in temperature... without having to resort to air conditioning. That big dilemma from last summer. Does that sound familiar to you?
These are all the challenges that professionals in southern European countries have to confront today, where winter is no longer what it used to be. Lessons and solutions from the past that are also free or almost free. See the sample of the V
Since it opened a few months ago, the Andorra gallery house has done nothing but raise the bar. After Maier, Meyerowitz, Leiter
The Fashion Museum of the Belgian fashion capital is one of the most daring in Europe with its displays that break barriers and ways of showing textile art, so difficult to exhibit and preserve. These days presents a retrospective of the famous photographer Willy Vanderperre
The Barcelona photographic foundation presents some of the masterpieces from its collection, specialized in Spanish photographers, with professionals from the last decades (in the image, a work by Xavier Ribas)
A great reference for London photography, these days it presents the winners of the Deutsche Börse with works such as that of the veteran Austrian photographer Valie Export
The Sanremo festival was the festival for music, glamor and scandals. Turín dedicates its sparkles to him in the exhibition “It never ages. San Remo in white (1951-1976)”. In the photo Adriano Celentano, with his back to the audience, something that scandalized the public, singing '24,000 baci'. Eternal song... which came second. Years later, at the beginning of 1970, the wonderful and almost forgotten singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco would not make it to the final and would commit suicide by shooting himself.
