Framing modernity: gender, vision, and colonial ideology in Le Corbusier’s visual rhetoric

This study examines Le Corbusier’s drawings from the colonial period through the lenses of gender, visual culture, and colonial ideology. It approaches early twentieth-century modernism not merely as an aesthetic transformation but as an ideological arena where gaze, body, and power were renegotiated. Unlike studies that focus on Le Corbusier’s architectural projects or theoretical writings, this research fills a gap by analysing how his drawings construct gendered and colonial meanings. Grounded in feminist and postcolonial critique, the study employs iconographic and iconological methods to examine drawings produced between 1920 and 1940. The analysis reveals that Le Corbusier instrumentalised the female body as a measure of order and purity within the modernist spatial vision. The fusion of woman and nature in his Algerian, North African and Latin American sketches transforms conquered landscapes into feminised forms, linking modern abstraction with colonial power. Ultimately, Le Corbusier’s drawings expose how modern architecture’s formal aesthetics were intertwined with visual regimes of domination. By revealing these entanglements, the study contributes to rethinking modernism’s visual culture through feminist and postcolonial perspectives.