Il teatro spontaneo di Le Corbusier. L’uomo come architettura effimera della città

Abstract In 1948 in Paris were published the conference proceedings Architecture et dramaturgie, in which an enthusiastic Le Corbusier explains how the city can become an improvised scene of a spontaneous theater, modifying itself in street furniture and in the management of the free space with ephemeral and reversible architecture. He tells how the idea rushed during his second trip to Brazil in 1936, looking at the way in which the three components of the Brazilian people - the African, the Indigenous and the Portuguese - were able to transform street performances into real theatrical pieces where anyone can express himself using the city as stage. For this type of impromptu actions the city needs to acquire special equipment - desks, benches, stages - that could be easily arranged an then dismantled and stored, but can be also used forgotten spaces or incomplete construction sites, giving them a new life when workers and carpenters are out. In Brazil, for the Swiss architect, anyone can improvise himself as a poet, an actor, a comedian and, therefore, he must be given a chance to change suddenly the city to express the instant need to change himself, but this practice can involve also European cities, where people need to play life in a different way to avoid sadness. The text of the conference is in French, unpublished in Italy and never published after 1948; it was found by the writer during a research in the archives of the Intituto Lina Bo and P.M. Bardi in São Paulo and is an unexpected and fun distraction of Le Corbusier on the issues of public space, the theater, the ephemeral architecture and a "tropical anthropology" that drives him, with a jump, well away from the “order paths”.

“Io non ho alcuna autorità in materia di teatro. L’avventura della mia vita è questa: quando avrei voluto dire qualcosa me l’hanno impedito; ma adesso, che ho i capelli bianchi, mi invitano a parlare su tutto, anche su argomenti che conosco poco o nulla, come in questo caso del teatro.”i Con queste parole Le Corbusier saluta la platea intervenuta al convegno Rapports du lieu théâtral avec la dramaturgie présente et à venir, organizzato dal Centre d’Etudes Philosophiques et Tecniques du Théâtre, tenutosi alla Sorbonne di Parigi nel dicembre del 1948, i cui lavori furono raccolti nel testo Architecture et dramaturgie. Parole il cui cinismo si ripeterà spesso durante l’intervento, tinto anche da toni polemici, divertiti e ironici. In esso, al quale non sono allegate immagini, l’architetto svizzero non descrive progetti, ma idee; non suggerisce forme, ma azioni; non illustra soluzioni ma racconta desideri e riflessioni.