About Le Mur Neutralisant & other strategies The role of Le Corbusier environmental control proposals in the evolution of the glass façade

This research work intends to reflect about some of the key approaches Le Corbusier undertook in the course of his professional career in relation to the use of glass in architecture, and how that perspective would promote the creation of a series of remarkable inventions from which I feel specially appealed by one named le Mur Neutralisant.

My interest for this prototype of double glass facade began some years ago, when I started to intensively read about the use of glass in architecture, finding mentions of this project systematically in most of the readings. Curiously, all those explanations about the invention seemed to me incomplete (at least for my curiosity): although the device was briefly described, in any case was present a clear drawing of its shape or its working principles. Usually, the successive mentions were accompanied by a sketch by Le Corbusier himself (as suggestive as criptic) that unavoidably made me think there was something else. It was not only cited in most of the publications without being really explained, but also in the consecutive references there were contradictory details among the different authors, who on the other hand insisted on establishing a certain type of connection with one of his other environmental control inventions: his screening system called brise-soleil.

This intriguing nuance would trigger my final resolution to find out my own understanding about the elusive device, and that opportunity came up in the summer of 2007, thanks to Fondation Le Corbusier. This research project, besides of being the occasion to finally understand the ultimate pretensions of the proposal itself, has become a critical example to understand the enormous signification of the historical context in the emergence of technological opportunities, and as in many cases, it has revealed how the perception of an event must be better interpreted from its environment than from itself.

The objective of this study will be the development of a complete document compiling and analyzing the daylighting studies that Le Corbusier accomplished along his career, mainly focused on his double glass façade and the concept of the Mur Neutralisant. This text intends to reflect on the global scope from which such a proposal emerges as well as the particular context offered by Le Corbusier’s professional trajectory in his relation to glass.To do so, this document will present the compilation of all his ideas as an important reflection on the relationship between inside and outside, how they can be framed in the contemporary evolution of the glass façade, the influence of those early studies and the technical assessment of their efficiency.

In the figure of Le Corbusier, glass and light would reach the maximum interests of modernity, as a pioneer in the early conceptions of a sense of transparency in architecture that little by little would mutate towards a subtler manipulation of the qualitative aspects of the illuminated space.