On 6 October, 2025, at 14:00, the Ethnographic Museum in Mogilev (8 Pervomaiskaya Street) hosted the opening of the exhibition Le Corbusier: The Mogilev Echo.
Dedicated to the great architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965), better known under his creative pseudonym Le Corbusier, the exhibition was organized as part of the Festival of Architecture marking the 90th anniversary of the Union of Architects of Belarus. The project was initiated and supported by the Embassy of Franceand the Embassy of Switzerland in the Republic of Belarus.
The show continues the earlier exhibition Le Corbusier: The Minsk Echo, which was presented at the Museum of the History of Minsk in July 2025.
Le Corbusier’s vast legacy – scattered across the world – and his celebrated Five Points of Architecture were presented as a kind of modern architectural testament. A series of photographic panels introduced the architect’s key projects realized in his two homelands: Switzerland, where he was born and took his first professional steps, and France, where he founded his own architectural practice. The photographs of his works were provided by the Le Corbusier Foundation.
Although the legendary architect never visited Mogilev, the resonance of his ideas can still be felt in the city’s modern urban fabric. In the Soviet Union, Le Corbusier’s projects – and even his portrait – adorned the walls of young architects in the 1960s as a challenge, as an unattainable ideal of modern housing, as a symbol of a new age and a renewed society.
By exploring and decoding the iconic architectural concepts of Le Corbusier – the philosopher-architect, the futurist-architect – visitors could rediscover the large-scale housing developments of Mogilev’s neighborhoods built between the 1920s and 1990s, as well as other architectural landmarks that shaped the city’s image and, ultimately, the environment in which we live and which shapes us in return.
The curatorial team built the exhibition around associative parallels between the masterpieces of the twentieth-century modernist Le Corbusier and the works of Belarusian architects who defined the architectural identity of Mogilev throughout the past century and into the present day. The city’s architecture was captured in photographs spanning decades by Mogilev and Minsk-based photographers.