Title: The Modernist Architecture of the Sublime: The Case of W. B. Yeats

and Le Corbusier.

Abstract

In this paper I will be looking at both W. B. Yeats and Le Corbusier in

their association of the architectural with subliminal experience. It may

sound a little daring to bring in together such diametrically antithetic

figures in a comparative study such as this. But the challenge is

rewarding. Yeats and Le Corbusier, with all their diffentness, are joined

together, if not strikingly resonate each other, when it comes to defining

the sublime in architectural spaces--what Yeats calls the "monuments of

unaging intellect". Both authors celebrate Byzantium as a perfect

articulation of an architectural sublime. The idea is of course culled from

Schopenhauer. The intersectional similarity between Yeats and Le Corbusier

derives from the fact the each of them had expanded beyond his own

disciplinary boundaries. Le Corbusier wrote with the "enthusiasm" of the

poet, inasmuch as Yeats culled his images from the imagination of an

architect. His much-celebrated architectural archetypes are the "Tower" and

the "Dome". These are not only places of writing but are also writings of

places, places which are strongly imbued with an ideological signification.

Le Corbusier's celebration of the "rectilinear" and "order" is also as much

ideological. Though Le Corbusier overvalues modernity and articulates some

kind of an obsession with rationalising and mathematizing space, he does not

as yet repudiate the poetics of architecture. Likewise, although Yeats

repudiates modernity and its "mechanical philosophy" he nevertheless adopts

some of its obsessive quests, that is to say, the subjection of knowledge to

geometry and mathematics, especially in his interpretation history. Nowhere

are these antithetic authors more closely joined together than in the

poetics of architecture. Here the textual becomes architectural and the

architectural is transformed into textual.