Remember how Archimedes explained the lever? He said, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the earth” Well, Airplanes gave us a new place to stand in the early 20th century and we moved the earth. The view was glorious. It could not be ignored. It had to be ingested. It had to be expressed.
I think of Swiss/French architect, Le Corbusier. The view from above awakened in him a obsessive passion. "L'avion accuse ... !" he wrote. "The airplane indicts ... the city." That was in 1935, and the wild iconoclastic Le Corbusier had just put out a picture book on airplanes. Le Corbusier had already started an avant-garde magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau -- The New Spirit. He took on architecture, science, technology -- even music. Composer Darius Milhaud was a collaborator. They waged war on every part of the establishment. Education and cities were favorite targets. "The 20th century wasn't built for men," cried Le Corbusier, "it was built for money." The old orders of architecture are hopelessly inhumane. They've forgotten function and human need.
And the airplane was Le Corbusier’s perfect metaphor to explain his belief that the world was built ill. Here was a wholly new form -- pure function. It derived its beauty from function. "The airplane," he said, "embodies the purest expression of the human scale and a miraculous exploitation of material."
The pictures in his book are beautiful. Such wild machines once filled our skies. Graceful gliders, lumbering transports, exotic racing planes, amphibians, airplanes with three engines -- or with eight. "No door is closed." he said. "Everything is relative. . . . If a new factor makes its appearance, the relation alters. . . . In aviation everything is scrapped in a year." And to get from here to there, an airplane simply flies in a straight line.
For Le Corbusier, machinery and craftsmanship are the one truth in a world full of lies. Machines are truly humane, but we don't know machines. He wrote, "The world lacks harmonisers to make palpable the humane beauty of modern times."
Those ideas become a bit scary in hindsight. They lay much too close to fascist thinking, then laying its hold on Europe. But look at the photos in his book. There's a terrible beauty in his airplanes. Each is different. They're all transient. Each struggles with the rigors of carrying us into an unwelcoming sky.
So we catch a glint of his meaning. The airplanes of 1935 -- buoyant and fluid -- did indeed indict the static cities below them. Le Corbusier showed us what he meant by harmonizing their beauty and making it palpable to us. Yet his view carried with it the same excesses that drove a younger Lindbergh.
Of course we had to dampen those intensities; but I hope we can keep some of our airplane youth. Just recently, I flew across western America, my face pressed against the Perspex window, camera in hand. I was trying to rediscover what we’d once seen when the airplane was young. And I did. It’s still there if we only look.
Even from my aluminum capsule, I saw many things. Here was a small town nested into the foothills of snow-capped mountains. I saw the shifting texture of clouds, the hues of the sky at 36,000 feet. A canyon slicing through the dry land below split in two as water sought its way to the sea.
The dark blue upbent wingtip stood out against the shifting hues of the sky itself, here at the edge of the atmosphere. And far off, miles way, I saw the parallel contrails of another jet,
scoring its willful way across the deep blue. Did they look at me as I at them? Or have we all become invisible to one another. I hope not. I hope that we have not forgotten about flight, as we fly together. I hope we have not entirely lost the wonder of this world we once knew -- this world we once wrote about.
Sources:
Le Corbusier, Aircraft. New York: (Universe Books, 1988 -- reprint of a 1935 English edition.)
F. Choay, Le Corbusier. (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960).
B. H. Baker, Le Corbusier: An Analysis of Form. (Hong Kong: Van Nostrand Reinhold (U.K.) Co. Ltd., 1984.)