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The exhibition “Gebautes Licht” at the Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich shows the unique connection between Lucien Hervé’s photographs and Le Corbusier’s architecture.

Lucien Hervé, Universität St. Gallen, Schweiz, (Architekt: Walter M. Förderer), 1964, ©Lucien Hervé
Lucien Hervé, Le Havre, Frankreich (Architekt: Auguste Perret), 1956, © Lucien Hervé
Lucien Hervé, Le Corbusier und sein Modulor in der Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, Frankreich, 1952, © J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles / Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris

His black and white photographs never depict buildings in a sober and purely objective manner. Lucien Hervé always immersed them in magical contrasts of light and dark, emphasising the geometry of the structures and creating sculptural compositions that sometimes border on abstraction. For Le Corbusier, the image of his own work was of great importance, and so photography was at the centre of his interest as the medium par excellence for the dissemination of his ideas. Lucien Hervé met the architect for the first time at the end of 1949. The photographer’s reduced visual language opened up a new dimension for Le Corbusier in the media dissemination of his architecture – and he made him his house photographer. Perhaps it was because they both drew their inspiration from vernacular architecture, antiquity and nature. “You have,” Le Corbusier said to Hervé, “the soul of an architect”. 

Under the title “Lucien Hervé: Built Light”, the Pavillon Le Corbusier in Zurich is showing a selection of works by the French photographer of Hungarian origin from 3 May to 24 November. The focus is on the work of Le Corbusier, which was created between 1949 and 1965. According to the information provided, both well-known and previously unpublished photographs from the work of Lucien Hervé will be presented. At the same time, the exhibition creates a dialogue between the photographs of Le Corbusier’s buildings and those of other architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, W. M. Förderer, Jean Prouvé, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Nouvel and many others. Typical for Hervé is also the juxtaposition of architecture from different eras or cultures, which leads to a “journey through time” in three series of pictures. . The exhibited photographs are accompanied by quotes by Le Corbusier from Hervé’s book “Le Corbusier. The Artist and the Writer”, original documents such as letters between Le Corbusier and Lucien Hervé, documentary photographs and other publications. The publication “Lucien Hervé: Gebautes Licht”, edited by Imola Gebauer and Simon Marius Zehnder, is available in the museum shops and in the eShop of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. 


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