Christine Kelley
Pure Finish
The Balcony at Villa La Roche,2023
​
Acrylic on canvas
24” x 24”
“I think, then, that the beauty of the eye consists first in its clearness…”
Edmund Burke – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and the Beautiful, 1871.
In Edmund Burke’s philosophical investigation of the sublime and the beautiful, he describes one quality of visual clarity as a kind of ‘smoothness’ that is essential to beauty. Smoothness - as witnessed in the natural finish of a smooth stream or the sloping contours of the landscape. This kind of natural occurrence allows a visual clarity that, curiously, is in keeping with the invariable complex laws of geometric order.
In 1918, Charles-Edouard Jeanerette [Le Corbusier] and Amedee Ozenfant became partners in the pursuit of a Purist ideology that in certain respects resonates with Burke’s theories of the sublime and the beautiful. The Purist tableaux maintains that the simplicity of form is closer to nature in being both intelligible and based in geometry.
The Villa La Roche (1923 – 1925) was designed for the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, a patron of the Purist painters. Villa La Roche, known as one of Le Corbusier’s Purists’ houses, embodies the theories behind the Purist movement in the form of a gallery and a residence. The reciprocity of the canvas and the architecture is evidenced in the clearness and clarity of the building’s form. The evenness, softness and continuity of color that is beautiful and produces an emotion that Burke identifies as ‘astonishment’.
At Villa La Roche the ‘Purist finish’ shows itself in the smoothness, clarity, continuity, and color of the building to channel an emotion the Purists identified as a ‘conception’. Conception being one of the seven fundamentals of Purist painting. The smooth and clear finish illustrates a Purist ideology for a modern world.
Christine Kelley is a third year PhD student at Virginia Tech’s Washington Alexandria Architecture Center. Her research explores ideas surrounding chiasmus and the analogical presence of shadow and light specifically related to Le Corbusier’s mid-twentieth century ecclesiastic buildings.
Prior to her PhD studies, Ms. Kelley received her B. Arch and M. Arch from Virginia Tech and the University of Texas at Austin respectively. She has practiced as a licensed architect in Boston, Massachusetts, and New York City for more than twenty years.