UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Department of Architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State will host “LC150+,” a traveling exhibition celebrating the architectural legacy of Charles-Édouard Jeanneret — professionally known as Le Corbusier — from April 28 to May 16 in the Rouse Gallery, Stuckeman Family Building. The exhibition is organized by renowned architect Rene Tan, co-founder and director of the award-winning Singapore-based firm RT+Q Architects.
Le Corbusier is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of what’s now known as modern architecture. He dedicated his career, which spanned five decades, to designing buildings that provided better living conditions for residents of heavily populated cities in Europe, Japan and India, as well as North and South America.
Organized by architecture faculty members Benay Gürsoy, Orsolya Gáspár and Mehrdad Hadighi, “LC150+” showcases more than 150 detailed architectural models of Le Corbusier’s work, which have been reconstructed and built to scale by RT+Q’s interns.
The firm holds over 350 models in total, making it the world’s largest private collection of Le Corbusier’s designs. The exhibition is endorsed by the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris.
“We thought interns should be exposed early to the works of a master architect before other distractions set in,” said Tan. “The models keep getting better as the interns become savvier and more sophisticated in their observations and model-building abilities. We are also creating more sectional models that reveal interiors – what’s typically ‘unseen’ in Le Corbusier’s design and compositional strategies.”
Having traveled to venues around the world, Penn State is the exhibition’s 42nd stop. It will travel to Dallas, Texas, following its debut in Happy Valley. The exhibition will open at 6 p.m. on April 28 at the Rouse Gallery, followed by a talk by Tan.
Marcus Shaffer, associate professor of architecture, will also present a lecture at noon on April 30 in the gallery, titled "The Machines of Cosmic Spectacle: Le Corbusier's Unrealized Roof Mechanisms for L'Assemblee at Chandigarh and the Church of Saint-Pierre de Firminy-Vert," as a compliment to the exhibition.
Hadighi, Stuckeman Professor in Advanced Studies, will also present a lecture related to the exhibition at noon on May 2 in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space that focuses on Le Corbusier’s Ahmedabad Millowners’ Association Building, which is the topic of his most recently published book, “Le Corbusier's Ahmedabad Millowners' Association Building: Between the Beautiful and the Sublime” (Birkhäuser, 2025).
According to Hadighi, because the association building was one of Le Corbusier’s later works, it sheds light on many of his earlier proclamations that were documented in the late architect’s collection of essays titled “Vers une Architecture,” which translates to “Toward an Architecture,” in 1923.
Hadighi will present a didactic study of Le Corbusier's spatial, formal and aesthetic inclinations, and said he hopes the audience can see how Le Corbusier’s ideas evolved throughout his career and how they are reflected in the different buildings he designed.
“Theory and practice are one in architecture,” said Hadighi. “We cannot have good architecture that does not have a theoretical backbone, and a clear theoretical proposal is not good architecture unless it responds to the material and technical demands of buildings.”
The exhibition, which will open at 6 p.m. on April 28, and related talks are free and open to the public.