Henry Plummer

University of Illinois professor Henry Plummer has carved a niche for himself in the world of architectural publishing, putting together beautiful books about the role of light in historical and contemporary architecture. Recently he has focused on Scandinavian architecture and the sacred buildings by Le Corbusier, but my first exposure to Plummer's photos was in the special edition of the Japanese magazine A+U that appropriately focuses on light in Japanese architecture. The cover, a photo of a church by Tadao Ando, makes it clear that Plummer is interested in new buildings, but for every new one in the book there is an old building, be it a shrine, temple, residence or landscape. Chapters are arranged by the effects of light, be it color (moonlit gray, autumn gold, vermillion red), its ethereal presence (cloudy translucence, woven air), or how architects design with light in mind (incantation, streams of sun). The author's adjective-heavy text tries to match up to the effects of light, but they are best captured through his skilled lens. A+U, which takes great care in the printing of their books, is an obvious choice for putting out this book, not solely because of geographical circumstances.… (meer)

In 2013, The Museum of Modern Art examined the career of Le Corbusier in a comprehensive exhibition and a hefty companion book featuring numerous scholarly and critical essays charting the Swiss-French architect’s six-decade career. Yet like other great modern architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn), even the most exhaustive account of Le Corbusier’s output cannot derail new explorations of his buildings and new books being released on the visionary architect every season.

An antithesis of MoMA’s unwieldy show and book can be found in Henry Plummer’s photographic and personal account of three religious structures in France designed by Le Corbusier: the chapel at Ronchamp, the monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, and the parish church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy-Vert. Light, as the title makes clear, is the subject of the book. Le Corbusier famously declared that “Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of volumes assembled in space,” and nowhere is that more moving than in these three concrete buildings designed after 1950, one of them (Firminy-Vert) completed posthumously.

While this statement is interpreted usually as an argument for the bright white surfaces of Le Corbusier’s “heroic” period in the 1920s and early ’30s, the idea resonates in these three buildings primarily because they are so dark—shadow is just as important as light. That these are places of prayer and introspection, and not houses or schools, is hardly accidental, even though Le Corbusier was, as Plummer puts it in this introductory essay, “an outspoken agnostic.”

Buildings like Villa Savoye whitewash their brick and concrete construction to create platonic abstractions, but the three béton brut structures that are the subject of this book are stripped of superficialities and bear the process of making. Further, light takes on an almost tangible quality to heighten one’s perception in the otherwise empty spaces. Plummer’s photos—taken over a period of 20 years—capture the way light turns these plastic creations (unprecedented in form and detached from religious precedents) into meaningful sacred spaces. Plummer manages to convey the way Le Corbusier puts us in touch with the light that comes from beyond—out of reach but all too real.

(The above review was written for Designers & Books and was originally published on their website.)… (meer)