Petr Šmídek : Le Corbusier before Le Corbusier

On Wednesday, February 21, 2018, at 5:00 PM, an introductory lecture of a thirteen-part spring cycle on the work of one of the most significant architectural figures of the past century will take place in room B510. The idea arose after viewing the lecture “Le Corbusier after Le Corbusier,” presented by Professor Leon Krier on March 30, 2015, at Yale University. A simple survey revealed that the same institution published the book “Le Corbusier before le Corbusier” thirteen years earlier, where the duo of professors Stanislaus von Moos and Arthur Rüegg dealt with the formative period of Charles Edouard Jeanneret between 1907-22, during which the transformation into Le Corbusier occurred. The most valuable source, however, is Canadian professor Allen H. Brooks and his more than twenty-year-old book “Le Corbusier's formative years, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds.” Brooks was, among other things, the main editor of a thirty-two-volume work exhaustively mapping Le C's work, including that which Le C himself did not mention in his publications, as it did not fit into his later modernist manifestos.

Petr Šmídek (*1977 Brno) studied architecture at the Czech Technical University in Brno (2003) and the School of Architecture at the Fine Arts Academy in Prague (2005). As a PhD candidate, he worked at the University of Ljubljana from 2007-08. He gained professional education during his studies in technical fields in Dresden and acquired practical experience at an architectural office in Seattle. Since 2001, he has been responsible for the foreign column of the online portal archiweb.cz. From 2008-15, he taught at the Faculty of Art and Architecture at TU in Liberec. Since 2015, he has been working at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in Brno.