A great inventor of shapes

Estates in Europe look intimidating in a way that heightens their allure: they often seem transformed from giant filing cabinets into proud monuments celebrating man's pyrrhic victory against nature.

In her 2007 book Estates: An Intimate History – an impassioned, often vitriolic study of the rise and fall of social housing that made me very appreciative of the peaceful, friendly and well-maintained council estate that I live on – Lynsey Hanley discusses Le Corbusier's almost hypnotic influence on the architects and town planners of the mid-twentieth century. She tells the story of a retired architect for Liverpool Council who remembers looking up to Jeanneret 'as a kind of idol' whose vision of a new way of living would change society for the better. Hanley herself describes the seductive power of his architectural studies: "The pictures were exquisite ... every right angle suggestive of a brave and powerful future."

Her thoughts echo those of Robert Hughes in his infamous Shock of the New, who describes Le Corbusier as a failed sociological architect but a great inventor of shapes:

Corbusier was a great aesthete ... his designs provoke such strong sensations, contain such overmastering rhythms and display such a muscularity of drawing.

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As I wait for my 8mm rushes to be transferred to video, I've been imagining a prop through which I could digitally project and re-shoot the film – a glass and mirrored tetrahedron, each side hinged so the pyramid can be folded in and out; a shape that echoes the geometry of the Snowdon Aviary, that reflects and refracts its structure into new configurations, and that further blurs the distinction between its interior and exterior spaces...

Designs for a glass tetrahedron