Primitivism emerged as an art movement in the early 20th century that drew inspiration from non-Western and prehistoric artistic forms. Artists like Paul Gauguin incorporated motifs from places like Tahiti in their paintings and ceramics. Primitivism was also applied to artists working in a naive or folk style. During this time, primitivism was elevated to an art movement that valued simplicity and what was deemed natural. Le Corbusier incorporated primitivist elements into his architecture through the use of basic construction techniques like vaults, emphasizing the craftsman's hand, and employing raw, unfinished materials. His Maison Jaoul from 1952-1954 featured vaulted brick ceilings, rough concrete

2. Primitivism is a Western art movement that borrows visual
forms from non-Western or prehistoric peoples, such as
Paul Gauguin's inclusion of Tahitian motifs in paintings
and ceramics. Borrowings from primitive art has been
important to the development of modern art.
WHAT IS PRIMITIVISM
The term "primitivism" is often applied to other
professional painters working in the style of naïve or
folk art like Henri Rousseau, Mikhail Larionov, Paul
Klee and others.

3. PHILOSOPHY
 Whether and to what extent we should simplify our lives and get "back to basics" is a
debate that has been going on since the invention of writing.
 In antiquity the superiority of the simple life was expressed in the Myth of the Golden
Age, depicted in the genre of European poetry and visual art known as the Pastoral.
 The debate about the merits and demerits of a simple, versus a complex life, gained new
urgency with the European encounter with hitherto unknown peoples after the
exploration of the Americas and Pacific Islands by Columbus and others.

4. • Gauguin's search for the primitive was manifestly a desire
for more sexual freedom than was available in 19th-
century Europe, and this is reflected in such paintings
as The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch (1892), Parau na te
Varua ino (1892), Anna the Javanerin (1893), Te Tamari No
Atua (1896), and Cruel Tales (1902), among others.
• Gauguin's view of Tahiti as an earthly Arcadia of free love,
gentle climate, and naked nymphs is quite similar, if not
identical, to that of the classical pastoral of academic art,
which has shaped Western perceptions of rural life for
millennia.
• One of his Tahitian paintings is even called "Tahitian
Pastoral" and another "Where Do We Come From".
• In this way Gauguin extended the academic pastoral
tradition of Beaux Arts schools which had hitherto been
based solely on idealized European figures copied from
Ancient Greek sculpture to include non-European modelsv
Paul gauguin

5. PRIMITIVISM AND ARCHITECTURE : PRIMITIVE HUT
• The Primitive Hut is a concept that explores the origins of
architecture and its practice.
• The concept explores the anthropological relationship between man
and the natural environment as the fundamental basis for the
creation of architecture.
• The idea of The Primitive Hut contends that the ideal architectural
form embodies what is natural and intrinsic.

6. ORIGINS OF THE PRIMITIVE HUT
• The Essay on Architecture was first published by Marc-Antoine Laugier in 1753.
• It was written in the age of enlightenment, during a time characterised by rationalist thinking through science
and reason.
• Architecture in France during this period was defined predominantly by the Baroque style with its excessive
ornamentation and religious iconography.
• Rather than being concerned with the search for meaning and the over analysis of the representational
elements of architecture, Laugier's essay proposed that the idea of noble and formal architecture was found
in what was necessary for architecture, not in its ornamentation but in its true underlying fundamentals.
Laugier argued for the simplicity of architecture, that architecture must return to its origins, the simple rustic
hut.
• The Essay on Architecture provides a story of man in his 'primitive' state to explain how the creation of the
"primitive man's" house is created instinctively based on mans need to shelter himself from nature.
• Laugier believed that the model of the primitive man's hut provided the ideal principles for architecture or
any structure.

7. • It was from this perspective that Laugier formed his general principles of architecture where
he outlined the standard form of architecture and what he believed was fundamental to all
architecture.
• To Laugier, the general principles of architecture were found in what was natural, intrinsic and
part of natural processes.
• The Primitive Hut made an important contribution to the theory of architecture.
• It marked the beginning of a significant analysis and debate within architectural theory,
particularly between rationalist and utilitarian schools of thought.
• While previously the field of architecture concerned the search for the ideal building form
through truth in building, the primitive hut questioned the universal in architecture.

8. LAURIE BAKER :
• Laurence Wilfred "Laurie" Baker (2 March 1917 – 1 April 2007) was a
British-born Indian architect, renowned for his initiatives in cost-
effective energy-efficient architecture and designs that maximized
space, ventilation and light and maintained an uncluttered yet striking
aesthetic sensibility.
• Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and his own experiences in the remote
Himalayas, he promoted the revival of regional building practices and
use of local materials; and combined this with a design philosophy that
emphasized a responsible and prudent use of resources and energy.
• He was a pioneer of sustainable architecture as well as organic
architecture, incorporating in his designs even in the late 1960s,
concepts such as rain-water harvesting, minimizing usage of energy-
inefficient building materials, minimizing damage to the building site
and seamlessly merging with the surroundings.
• Due to his social and humanitarian efforts to bring architecture and
design to the common man, his honest use of materials, his belief in
simplicity in design and in life, and his stauch Quaker belief in non-
violence, he has been called the "Gandhi of architecture."

9. ARCHITECTURAL STYLE
• Throughout his practice, Baker became well known for designing and building low cost, high
quality homes, with a great portion of his work suited to or built for lower-middle to lower class
clients.
• His buildings tend to emphasize prolific - at times virtuosic- masonry construction, instilling
privacy and evoking history with brick jali walls, a perforated brick screen which utilises natural
air movement to cool the home's interior and create intricate patterns of light and shadow.
• Another significant Baker feature is irregular, pyramid-like structures on roofs, with one side
left open and tilting into the wind. Curved walls enter Baker's architectural vocabulary as a
means to enclose more volume at lower material cost than straight walls. Baker's
architectural method is one of improvisation, in which initial drawings have only an idealistic
link to the final construction, with most of th accommodations and design choices being
made on-site by the architect himself

10. Some elements of Baker’s Construction Technique:
• Rat-trap Bond
• Jali Wall
• Filler Slab
• Frameless Doors and Windows
• Rubble Masonry
• Arches
• Lintel
• Bamboo Construction MUD CONSTRUCTION JALI WORK ARCHES
• Flooring
• Mud Construction
• Built in Furniture

11. LAURIE BAKER CENTER
The 3.34 acre (1.35 hectares) campus is an undulating piece of land dense with trees and
other flora and fauna. The campus at present has five buildings that represent the last set
of buildings personally designed and built by Laurie Baker for one of his friends who
wanted to start a community centre for differently able children and adults who will also
interact with other persons in the society. This initiative could not continue and hence a
proposal was made to secure the land and buildings for establishing the LBC with financial
assistance from the Government of Kerala.
The LBC Campus is located in the Nooliyode Village in Vilappilsala Panchayat, 12 kms away
from the centre of Thiruvananthapuram city. It is 12 kms away from the Trivandrum Central
Railway Station and 18 kms from the Trivandrum International Airport

12. The campus has nine buildings including:
(1) an office,
(2) a kitchen with a dining hall,
(3) a dormitory to house 16 persons with a lecture hall,
(4) a guest house to house seven persons,
(5) a tower that houses a rain water harvesting tank and a view tower where
discussion sessions can be held.

13. GUEST HOUSE

14. OFFICE

15. ADMIN OFFICE

16. DORMITORTY

17. CANTEEN

18. • The campus exemplifies the practice of sustainable architecture. Built on a granite
quarry, the deep excavations provide contours to the site. Laurie Baker, true to his
principle of building with minimum intervention to the site shapes the buildings along
these quarry lines. The load bearing buildings have no footings and are built on a random
rubble masonry foundation.
• What was once a barren land, is now abundant with trees. The 1200 odd saplings have
grown into a forest rich with flora and fauna within a span of 15 years.
• As it is his style of working, none of the buildings have any drawings. The Junior
Architect admitted to the trouble he had documenting these buildings with varied
curvatures and heights as the dimensions were nowhere near to a whole number.

19. At the time of the the Avante Gardes of the
twentieth century the primitive was elevated
to the status of a movement known
primitivism.
Dictionary meaning :
Primitive
1.preserving the character of an early
stage in the evolutionary or historical
development of something.
2. very basic or unsophisticated in
terms of comfort, convenience, or
efficiency.
Primitivism
a belief in the value of what is simple
and unsophisticated, expressed as a
philosophy of life or through art or
literature
Roughness, primitivism and regionalism first emerged in Roman
architectural theory more than 2,000 years ago. The
universality and smooth, stretched whiteness of Purism and
the placelessness of the International Style suppressed these
aspects.
Nonetheless, they reappeared with Brutalism, Post-Modernism
and most recently, Critical Regionalism.

20. The Four Elements of Architecture is a book by
the German architect Gottfried Semper. Published in 1851
hearth – metallurgy, ceramics
roof – carpentry
enclosure – textile , weaving
mound – earthwork
Carlos de Beistegui's apartment in Paris.
Maison Weekend

21. Le Corbusier concluded that “there is nothing left of original
things.” He concisely declared that modernization should not
be erected on the premodern -cultured foundation since they
were even more vulnerable than to build up our own
Maison Dom-ino (1913)
Villa Savoye (1929)

22. Unite d’habitation of Marseille,1952
Capital complex , 1952

23. Maison Loucheur, 1929
•local rubble-stone wall with his
industrialized fabricated
productions,
• the exposed steel-frame
construction and the light-weight
components.
Providing only 44 square meters (490 square feet) to
accommodate two adults and four children
Maison Errazuriz, 1930
a residence Le Corbusier
Grave Circle A ,16th-century BC .

24. Maison Errazuriz

25. •open-floor plan
•archaic and modern materials, such as a thick turf
roof,
• rough brick stacks,
• a neolithic stone circle in the garden,
•plain wooden interior partitions, along with a
modernist concrete structure and glass bricks
Maison de Weekend, 1935

26. Maison Errazuriz
Maison de Weekend, 1935
Bricks date back to 7000 BC, which makes
them one of the oldest known building
materials.
Expose brick masonry.

27. Stonemasonry is one of the earliest trades in the history of
civilisation, around 10,000 BC,
Grave Circle A is a 16th-century BC royal cemetery situated to
the south of the Lion Gate, the main entrance of the Bronze
Age citadel of Mycenae in southern Greece.

28. The Colosseum, Rome,
70-80 AD
Maisons Jaoul,1954
Maison de weekend, 1935
Catenary
arch

29. Heb Sed Court at the Step Pyramid
The Maisons Jaoul emerge as both a
fundamental reconsideration of domestic
living and a radical reassessment of Le
Corbusier's longstanding commitment to
primitivism.

30. The roof terrace of the Casa Grande hotel
in Santiago de Cuba, 1515
Villa Savoye, 1920

31. Straight ramps used to construct an Egyptian pyramid. As the
pyramid gets higher, the ramp is made longer, to maintain a
manageable slope of the inclined plane.
Oeuvre Complet de 1929-1934
Living Library
Villa Savoye (1929)

32. The Pyramid of Djoser (or Djeser and Zoser), or step
pyramid 27th century BC
Mezzo-American step pyramid,2011
Cranfield School by Foster,1946Corbusier’s Maison Monol (1920).

33. Aalto Finnish Pavilion for the NYC expo (1939)
exhibition interior
Foster’s Wallbrook (2010)
Headquaters building
Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain (1954)
Millennium Dome , 1999 Exhibition space

34. “as an architect you design for the present, with an awareness
of the past, for a future that is unknown”.
The Glass Pavilion (1914)
The Gherkin ( 2004 )

35. Roman ‘X’ framed chair of AD 250
Barcelona chair,1929
Mies cantilever chair of 1926 has its seed in the Victorian metal
rocking chair of 1850

36. 1952-1954: Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, Paris

37. Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, Paris
Location and site plan
Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, Paris

38. About
•André Jaoul and built for his son Michel, the first design of the
houses was made in 1937.
• In 1951 a new approach was presented but was between
1954 to 1956 when they were built, making it one of the most
important buildings of the postwar period by Le
Corbusier which in turn breaks the entire series of white villas
designed in 1920.
•Since 1966, Maisons Jaoul have been protected by the French
government as historic monuments
Description
•the section of the corridors is a golden rectangle and square,
respectively, the matrix of the houses.
•The facades of the house “A” facing the street and hide the
house “B”, with its different orientation. The two houses, about
250 square meters each were designed so that the two families
could live comfortably in the three plants each.
•The buildings are carefully placed in the ground,
forming right angles to each other, with strategic
setbacks from all property lines,
•except on the south side where one of the
houses adjacent to the wall of an adjacent
building. T
•he result of this placement is a sequence of open
spaces more and more private.
•The location chosen for the trees as well as for
the windows of the house offering privacy
between the two houses and adjacent buildings
hidden

39. 1952-1954: Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly, Paris

40. House B
Ground floor: hall, toilet, kitchen with dining area, living room,
library
First floor: four bedrooms, one bathroom, three toilets, a
balcony
Second floor: living room studio, one bedroom, a toilet
surrounded by terraces
A House
Ground floor: hall, toilet, kitchen with dining
area, living room, library
First floor: hall, toilet, two bedrooms,
bathroom, two toilets, chapel, balcony
Second floor: two bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
surrounded by terraces

41. Materials
built of brick, concrete, stone, glass and natural wood.
The external finish gives the concrete view of the red brick structure and rustic
materials mixed with unpainted wood and glass. Inside are metal beams in the
concrete facade.
In the interior finishes of the same materials are juxtaposed with walls painted
in bright colors, vaulted ceilings and brick floors unpolished.
A house both govern the same measures of space, with
dimensions of Modulor, two longitudinal passageways different
widths, 3.66 and 2.26 meters set by bearing walls of brick and
covered with Catalan vaults
From the street, a narrow road leads to a common courtyard
where the access to housing. The living area is 252 square
meters in each of the houses and terraces occupy 63 and 70
square meters

44. Primitivism in Maison Jaoul
1. In this case he used vaults as one of the most basic spanning
techniques combined with the idea of the handcraft and the honour of
the craftsman.
This can be seen in the rough and uneven brickwork that was
additionally rendered by rubbing brick against brick to add to an even
rougher texture.
2. ‘beton brut’ or raw concrete and the impressions left from the
formwork pattern based on the Modulor.The use of these ideologies
was to contribute to a humble and modest atmosphere that returned
the spirit to its origins.
3. Le Corbusier wanted to incorporate the ancient idea of using the
human body as a system of measurement, which is why he used
aspects of the imperial system’s feet and inches.
The more the artist’s hand is apparent in the entire work, the
more moving, the more human, the more eloquent it will
be. Avoid all mechanical and impersonal means. The most
meticulous typography and calligraphy are less alluring than
a few hand-written, unpremeditated words scrawled by a
devoted hand.