Pavilion of the New Times

In March 1932 the architecture competition for the 1937 Paris International Exposition opened, with the home given pride of place. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret entered it with a scheme in the east of Paris, near the Vincennes park, which was not selected. In 1934 Le Corbusier offered to take part on behalf of the CIAM with a second scheme drawn from the Ville radieuse: collective facilities for 1,200 flats, meant to remain after the Exposition; it came to nothing, because every building of the Exposition had to be temporary. In 1935 he was offered a site at the Porte d'Italie, where he wanted to set up a museum of the modern age; for lack of subsidies, he lost the site and gave up the scheme.

In 1936 Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret devised a fourth and last scheme, on a plot between the Porte Maillot and the boulevard de l'Amiral Bruix, in the 16th arrondissement. As the plot was small, they gave up the idea of a full-scale building and put up an ephemeral structure instead. Fifteen subjects were covered in stands, each placed under an artist's responsibility, with photomontages, models and dioramas; Le Corbusier kept the one on the "plan of Paris" for himself. The pavilion was inaugurated on 17 July 1937.

When the Exposition closed, it was to be dismantled and carried by a trailer wagon to various towns of France, as a "travelling exhibition of popular education for the countryside". The trailer-wagon idea was dropped, although the pavilion's structure allowed it to travel if need be. It was taken down in November 1937 and never reused.

Le Corbusier wanted a travelling exhibition space, and that dictated the pavilion's form. The steel frame consisted of sixteen lattice pylons, tilted at 10 degrees, which faced each other every five metres and were tied together by steel cables. The whole envelope was a yellow Austrian tent canvas. Its plan, almost square, covered 1,085 m².

Visitors entered through a 31 m² door mounted on a central pivot. The door bore the inscription “Musée ambulant d'Éducation Populaire. Aménagement des villes et des campagnes (architecture et urbanisme)” (travelling museum of popular education; planning of towns and countryside), in tune with the ideas of the newly elected Front populaire. The stands ran along a route conceived as an architectural promenade, with level floors alternating with ramps. They presented, among other things, the charter of town planning, the analyses of the “functional city”, the four functions (dwelling, recreation, work and transport) of town planning, the misery of Paris, a leisure centre, the plan of Paris, a bookshop, agrarian reform and the history of the CIAM's proposals for the 1937 Exposition. The walls were covered with large collages on these subjects.