On a balmy afternoon last month, French artist Pierre Huyghe stood in front of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts with the building’s designer, the Swiss-born architect Le Corbusier. Double parked along Quincy Street sat a limousine and out of a nearby truck spilled props and other movie-making equipment. A militia of gaffers, grips, special effects technicians and camera operators matted down Harvard’s primly manicured grass as they scurried around, barking into walkie-talkies and cell-phones. It was a scene more fitting for the back lot of a Hollywood studio than it was amidst the respectable brick and ivy of the Harvard campus.

When architectural luminary Le Corbusier first visited Cambridge 45 years ago this fall, he came to begin work on a home for the practice and instruction of the visual arts at Harvard. With his characteristic black glasses sitting upon his beaked nose, Corbusier’s arrival marked not only the birth of a significant piece of the modernist architectural canon, but also a significant—and to this point, unparalleled—moment in Harvard’s historically tenuous relationship with contemporary art and architecture.

On this particular Sunday afternoon, however, Le Corbusier had not returned with visionary ideas for the Harvard campus. Instead, he required some attention from Huyghe. If there were any incongruity to be found in the situation it was not due to the architect’s diminutive size—reincarnated some 35 years after his death as a foot-tall marionette, his strings slightly tangled. Instead, it came from Huyghe’s own parallel role as an artist brought to Cambridge in a similar attempt to redefine the University’s relationship to contemporary art.

This past year the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts hit middle age. In response to what may be an impending identity crisis, the University has thrown the concrete building a series of birthday celebrations. Following on a recent historical exhibition about the building is this “puppet opera,” which weaves together narratives of the building’s commission with Huyghe’s own experience working with a university patron given to bureaucratic excesses.

Harvard University Art Museum curator Linda Norton and graduate student Scott Rothkopf have commissioned Huyghe to respond to Harvard’s most beloved, if not emblematic work of architecture. Their charge: to consider the con temporary and future impact of this eclectic Modernist monument.

It’s a prescient challenge for Huyghe, a rising star in the art world. He arrives at Harvard following the receipt of a prestigious Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum in 2002 and representation of France at the Venice Biennale the year before. While his previous films and multi-media installations have touched on the legacy of Corbusier-inspired Modernism—and, most often, upon its idealistic failure—Huyghe, who is in his early 40s, was, like most of the students who inhabit the Carpenter Center, born only after the building’s completion. In response, his film at once reconstructs the story of the building’s conception while layering on his own experiences of working on this most unusual commission.

At the centerpiece of the project is a historically-inspired “meta-opera” filmed in situ within an “architectural extension” that has taken shape between the Carpenter Center’s pilotis. A 20-minute film version of that production—complete with Hollywood-style special effects—will be screened in the auditorium during the opening night. It will then continue its run in the upstairs Sert Gallery until April 17 of next year. A multifaceted and unusual project, Huyghe’s film is the result of a similarly complex and atypical interfaculty collaboration involving the Harvard University Art Museums, Graduate School of Design, and the Visual and Environmental Studies department (VES).

FORTY YEARS ON THE RUTE TOURISTIQUE

When the University’s 1957-8 Committee on the Practice of the Visual Arts recommended to President Nathan Pusey that Harvard launch a formal program in the arts, then-Dean of the Graduate School of Design, Josép Lluis Sert (also reincarnated as puppet) recommended Le Corbusier for the job. The building, built to house the nascent VES department, was to become a laboratory for creativity and a catalyst for the understanding of art at Harvard. The Carpenter Center as synthèse des arts was a utopian challenge for Corbusier, whose recent and no less idealistic project of designing a home for the fledging United Nations had fallen prey to the horns of bureaucracy.

When Corbusier arrived at Harvard to discuss his commission in the fall of 1959, America dealt yet another disappointment: the Carpenter Center, tiny at only 57,000 square feet, would be located not in Harvard Yard, but on a postage stamp-sized lot across the street.

Unable to put his building in the Yard, Corbusier tried to bring the Yard into his building. The striking ramp that bifurcates the building both laterally and vertically—“un rute touristique,” as Corbusier named it—would make clear to visitors the importance of the practice of art within the Harvard community.

This sidewalk, which lifts off the street and wraps through the building, was to become a link for students between the historic Georgian Yard and a planned expansion beyond Prescott Street, in the direction of downtown Boston. In the years since, however, Harvard has expanded in other directions, geographically and academically, in part marginalizing the building’s dual purpose of providing pedestrian connection and bringing the visual arts to the center of the Harvard experience.

Ultimately, the very process of designing the Carpenter Center—and the client-architect relationship from which it developed—may have had a more important impact on Harvard’s visual arts program than the completed structure itself. Indeed, a historical monograph published by the University to commemorate the building’s completion—Le Corbusier at Work, edited by Professor Emeritus and first director of the Carpenter Center, Eduard F. Sekler—places importance not to the building’s original forms, but on the process of the Center’s conception. It is from this document that Huyghe has cleverly derived the storyboard for his own project. As his film further solidifies the Carpenter Center’s dual role as a protagonist for art as well as a place for its making, the building provides a hinge upon which Huyghe can collapse 40 years of Harvard’s tenuous history with the visual arts.

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In the Carpenter Center’s basement theater hangs a tapestry designed by Le Corbusier for the building. A little red bird sits at the bottom, its head perpetually tilted towards the theater screen. The bird is one of what Huyghe calls the “missing pieces of the original design.” Along with the ramp connecting the old and new ends of campus, a system of bells embedded in the building that would mark the movement of students between classes and through an enamel door of Corbusier’s design, was the architect’s desire for natural landscaping “brought by the birds.”