DutchEve on Beauty

Like a modern romantic ruin Le Corbusier’s ‘Tour d’ombres’ (or Tower of Shadows) in Chandigarh is a concrete pavilion in the Capitol area of his modern city, sited between the Palace of Justice and the Parliament building. A symbolic structure, it demonstrates Le Corbusier’s theories of sun control and was inspired by 18th century Indian astronomical observatories:

“A very open hall, very high and shadowy(…) the sun can be controlled at all four cardinal points of an edifice and even manipulated in a hot country to reduce temperatures”

Rooms with a View 

“This exhibition focuses on a subject treasured by the Romantics: the view through an open window. German, French, Danish, and Russian artists first took up the theme in the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Juxtaposing near and far, the window is a metaphor for unfulfilled longing. Painters distilled this feeling in pictures of hushed, spare rooms with contemplative figures; studios with artists at work; and open windows as the sole motif. As the exhibition reveals, these pictures may shift markedly in tone, yet they share a distinct absence of the anecdote and narrative that characterized earlier genre painting.”

1. Peter Ilsted

2. Carl Holsøe

3. Léon Cogniet

4. Wilhelm Bendz

5. Alfred Broge

6. Caspar David Friedrich

7. Georg Friedrich Kersting

8. Jacobus Vrel

9. Johann Erdmann Hummel