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Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
Jose Oubrerie, the last living protégé of Le Corbusier, one of Modern architecture’s major figures, lectured at the Texas A&M College of Architecture March 28 as part of the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s Dr. F.E. Giesecke Lecture Series, honoring the founder of the university's architecture program.
A video of Oubrerie's lecture can be viewed on the College of Architecture's vimeo website.
Jose Oubrerie is a professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University He worked in Le Corbusier’s office 1957–1965, collaborating with his mentor, one of the 20th century’s most important architects, in the last years of his life. Oubrerie was the chief designer of Saint-Pierre de Firminy Church in Fiorminy, France.
“He worked on many of the later works of the office, most notably the design for Firminy church,” said George Ranalli, dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York. “After Corbusier’s death, he went into practice and produced many excellent projects, especially the Miller House in Kentucky and the completion of the Firminy church. His work is extraordinary.”
As a young man, wrote Jan Otakar Fischer in the May 12, 2005 issue of the New York Times, Oubrerie helped develop the Firminy church design from the very first sketches.
After LeCorbusier’s death in 1965, construction on the building continued at a slow pace until stopping in 1978 when funds ran out.
“Oubrerie, however, never lost his focus,” wrote Fischer. “In the 1990s he helped establish a foundation to win approval and raise funds for the completion of Saint-Pierre. By 2003 he had found enough support to restart the project with a handful of similarly dedicated local architects and builders.”
The completed structure, she wrote, is the keystone of a new strategy of civic boosterism for the former mining town.
Cincinnati Art Museum director Aaron Betsky, blogging for Architect, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects, calls Oubrerie’s Miller house in Lexington, Kentucky a Modern masterpiece.
“What makes the house extraordinary are the slips and slides away from the relation between space, structure, and circulation you would come to expect,” wrote Betsky. “The Miller House is an assembly of cracks, crooks, el-shaped elbows of space, extensions, and ledges. Rooms are not just part of an overall shape, they are separate entities.”
Oubrerie composed the house of different materials, continued Betsky, breaking it down into frames, planes, lines and moments where space suddenly opens up through a window or a fissure between one wall and the corridor next to it.
“It is a house not so much of vistas, as of peeks; of intricacy rather than intimacy; of intimation rather than expression,” wrote Betsky.
The Dr. F.E. Giesecke 1886 Lecture Series, which began in 2006, was established by Preston Geren, Giesecke’s grandson, and his wife Colleen '45 to bring outstanding, world-class speakers to the Texas A&M College of Architecture. The lectures give students and faculty opportunities to hear the latest ideas and accomplishments by leaders in the virtual and built-environment professions, industries, and disciplines.
To learn more about Giesecke, who founded the architecture program in 1905, visit www.arch.tamu.edu/content/inside/history.
- Posted: Mar. 22, 2011 -
Contact: Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.
Jose Oubrerie
