Call for papers

Nature plays a prominent role in Le Corbusier’s work. It is present both as an essential reference point in the modern architect’s project since Esprit Nouveau and the first emblematic achievements of modern garden cities, residences and villas in the Paris region, and in the post-Second World War reconstruction and the Firminy-Vert and Chandigarh projects and the construction of houses and villas, churches and convents.
Corbusier’s historiography has most often treated nature as a pretext, and the resulting misunderstanding has had serious consequences. It denies the architect any ability to conceive of modernity as both a respectful ode to nature and a source of inspiration and design for architectural projects. It allows the Athens Charter to be reduced to the systemic mechanisation of a purely Taylorised, functional city, and to restore and assimilate the epic of the Grandeur Conforme housing units to the above-ground construction of large housing estates built in the open countryside against the surrounding nature.

This eliminates any deep connection or attachment to nature, whether Virgilian or Ciceronian in its attachment and ecosystem. Considerations regarding Le Corbusier’s construction and thinking on landscape and its role in urban and architectural projects are often neglected.

The 23rd Rencontres de la Fondation aims to re-examine in depth the complex, evolving and structuring relationships that Le Corbusier maintains with nature. The aim is to restore both the historical foundations of this thinking and its analytical translations, by questioning nature as an ecosystemic framework, as a spatial project and as a vector for social and cultural renewal at a time of contemporary climate change.

Communications may take a twofold approach:

• historical, focusing on the origins, developments and intellectual contexts of Le Corbusier’s thinking on nature

• analytical, focusing on representations, devices, forms and projects in which nature acts as an active principle of design.

The call for proposals is structured around three main areas:

1. Nature as the ecosystemic basis of modern art, from his youth in the Jura and his formative travels to vertical garden cities and architectural typologies that integrate living organisms;

2. New urban landscapes or nature at the service of humankind, where nature becomes a central element of hygiene, well-being and spatial anthropology in the modern city;

3. Re-enchanting the world through nature, via reconstruction projects, objects with poetic appeal, the architecture of retreat (cabanon) and the major urban developments of Firminy-Vert and Chandigarh.

The conference will be held on 26 and 27 November 2026.

Proposals for papers (3,000 to 5,000 characters, in French or English) must be submitted by April 15th 2026 at the latest.