Corbusier Montparnasse Multiplex

2025

A Brut Nouveau? Le Corbusier’s Phantom Cinema

A cinephile to his core, Le Corbusier made many films, pursued directors and stars, and realized two cinemas, the Cinéma “La Scala” (1916–19) and the Neelam Theatre (1954–56), the latter a node in the masterplan for Chandigarh. A third cinema design, long overlooked, was a proposal for a three-tiered multiplex in Montparnasse that concluded in 1931.¹

The Cinéma à Montparnasse has many virtues of Le Corbusier’s most winning era: clarity of organization, a diagram-as-building of bracing audacity, and great proportions. Set on a diamond-shaped corner lot in a building shell that was either existing, designed by others, or undeveloped, the 20m × 20m complex has a subterranean cabaret and two film “salles” above. The raked seating of the three theaters alternates direction on the diagonal, so that both upper cinemas expand in section, while tapering in plan toward their screens. Though it could easily be taken for one, it is not a continuous surface project avant la lettre. The oblique surfaces are in fact conical fragments cropped from the concentric seating of an amphitheater, rather than purloined from circulation paths or transit structures, as they would later be by OMA and others.

In those concluding years of the Jazz Age, Sergei Eisenstein and Le Corbusier vied to reorient modernism away from, or simply beyond, the pre–World War I vanguard practices indebted to painting — cubism, futurism, etc. — the director with his 1927 theory of montage, the architect promulgating his promenade architecturale (a term he employed as early as 1923, though in print only after 1929). As Jean-Louis Cohen and Anthony Vidler explore, but without reference to Montparnasse,² Le Corbusier met Eisenstein on a trip to Moscow in the late 1920s, and the two formed a warm, if competitive, alliance. In its radial “jump-cut” floors and odd mash-up of entry-level needs, the Cinéma à Montparnasse memorializes their détente and sets a distant, protean stage for Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts and many “montage architectures” to come.

If the anguished impasto of art brut painting pitted medium against representation, Brutalist architecture is equally tragic: an incommensurable and escalating arms race, waged almost entirely in reinforced concrete, between structure and function. In many projects, massive post-and-beam frames amplify the former; in others, projected volumes of legible utility, especially those of collective assembly, favor the latter (in extremis, the cantilevered wedges of auditorium seating in James Stirling’s 1963 Leicester Engineering Building, echoing those in Melnikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club of 1928). Corbusier’s Montparnasse triplex offered another paradigm — and thus another point of origin for latter-day Brutalisms — in which the nascent geometries of cinematic delivery and reception meld in a new synthesis, or simultaneity, of program and support.

1. The Fondation Le Corbusier website now references two lesser-known cinema design proposals, the Cinéma à Montparnasse and a related project, The Embassy, now lost: https://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/en/work-architecture/projects-cinema-atmontparnasse-paris-france-1931/.
2. See both Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928-1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Anthony Vidler, “The Eisenstein Effect: Architecture and Narrative Montage in Sergei Eisenstein and Le Corbusier” in The Moving Eye: Film, Television, Architecture, Visual Art, and the Modern, ed. Edward Dimendberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 57–75. This research, and Corbusian studies in general, has been overshadowed by the huge losses of Vidler and Cohen in 2023, compounded by that of Le Corbusier’s last apprentice, José Oubrerie, as well as Kurt Forster, early in 2024. I corresponded with Vidler and Forster on the Cinéma à Montparnasse and both were surprised and excited to hear of it. Sadly, if Cohen or Oubrerie knew of the project, it is unrecorded.

Le Corbusier, Cinéma à Montparnasse, Paris, 1931. © F.L.C. / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY 2025.

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Chinese & Overseas Architecture vol. 128