For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials."The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the "mass-production spirit," and much else. A principal prophet of the "modern" movement in architecture, and a near-legendary figure of the "International School," he designed some of the twentieth century's most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cité Universitaire, Paris; Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: "American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." "Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary." "A cathedral is not very beautiful . . ." and "Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life."Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians―but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions, and innovative theories of one of this century's master builders.

Towards a New Architecture

Reference

Le Corbusier

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Holt; Rinehart; Winston

The City of Tomorrow

In this 1929 classic, the great architect Le Corbusier turned from the design of houses to the planning of cities, surveying urban problems and venturing bold new solutions. The book shocked and thrilled a world already deep in the throes of the modern age.Today it is revered as a work that, quite literally, helped to shape our world. Le Corbusier articulates concepts and ideas he would put to work in his city planning schemes for Algiers, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Geneva, Stockholm, and Antwerp, as well as schemes for a variety of structures from a museum in Tokyo to the United Nations buildings. The influence it exerted on a new generation of architects is now legendary.The City of To-morrow and Its Planning characterizes European cities as a chaos of poor design, inadequate housing, and inefficient transportation that grew out of the unplanned jumble of medieval cities. Developing his thesis that a great modern city can only function on a basis of strict order, Le Corbusier presents two imposing schemes for urban reconstruction — the "Voisin" scheme for the center of Paris, and his more developed plans for the "City of Three Million Inhabitants," which envisioned, among other things, 60-story skyscrapers, set well apart, to house commercial activities, and residential housing grouped in great blocks of "villas."For those who live in cities as well as anyone interested in their planning, here is a probing survey of the problems of modern urban life and a master architect's stimulating vision of how they might be solved, enlivened by the innovative spirit and passionate creativity that distinguished all of Le Corbusier's work.

Arts & Photography

Architecture

M.I.T. Press

This title available from Harvard University Press

The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mech

Shares the influential architect's account of a 1911 trip through central and eastern Europe and includes sketches he made along the way

The Journey to the East

Mit Pr

The publication of Volumes 3 and 4 of the Le Corbusier Sketchbooks brings to completion a major undertaking by the Architectural History Foundation. After more than a decade of searching, the Fondation Le Corbusier found a suitable partner in publication to aid in the practical difficulties of producing the last and most elusive of Le Corbusier's unpublished works. André Wogenscky, President of the Fondation Le Corbusier, has stated that the sketchbooks vividly reproduced in these four volumes "are the most private of Le Corbusier's work, the most spontaneous, perhaps the most significant, encompassing all the others - the work of an entire lifetime."  Volume 1, 1914-1948 and Volume 2, 1950-1954 were published in 1981. All the volumes are included in the Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press series.  Volume 3 1954-1957  During these years, Le Corbusier further developed the curving sculptural forms he had already used boldly for the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp and for the new city of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab. Various sketchbooks record the finishing touches of Ronchamp and continuing work in the building of Chandigarh.  Later sketchbooks show Le Corbusier increasingly integrating painting and sculpture with architecture, and introducing a strong symbolic element into his public buildings - such as the Open Hand at Chandigarh.  Sketchbooks in Volume 3 also reveal the architect's experiments with environmental control, the use of rustic materials and strong colors in a villa in India and two villas in Paris that are notably different from the more geometric and mechanistic work of Le Corbusier's earlier years.

Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Vol. 3, 1954-1957 (Architectural History Foundation Book)

The publication of Volumes 3 and 4 of the Le Corbusier Sketchbooks brings to completion a major undertaking by the Architectural History Foundation. After more than a decade of searching, the Fondation Le Corbusier found a suitable partner in publication to aid in the practical difficulties of producing the last and most elusive of Le Corbusier's unpublished works. André Wogenscky, President of the Fondation Le Corbusier, has stated that the sketchbooks vividly reproduced in these four volumes "are the most private of Le Corbusier's work, the most spontaneous, perhaps the most significant, encompassing all the others - the work of an entire lifetime."Volume 1, 1914-1948 and Volume 2, 1950-1954 were published in 1981. All the volumes are included in the Architectural History Foundation/MIT Press series. Volume 4 1957-1964 This final volume contains the personal reflections, criticisms of other's work, and self-criticisms of Le Corbusier's maturity. He reassesses many of his works and projects with brutal honesty and his evaluation of Dutch functionalism and American architecture are equally forthright.For all this, however, his creative energies appear undiminished. Drawings reveal the inception of the Philips Pavilion at Brussels, showing an unusual engineering device for the walls; a new art form, the "Electronic Poem," suggested by Le Corbusier for the interior of the pavilion; and the first sketches for his only building in the United States, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.Volume 4 closes with sketches of Roquebrune, on the Mediterranean, where Le Corbusier lost his life a year after making them.

Le Corbusier Sketchbooks, Vol. 4, 1957-1964 (Architectural History Foundation Book)

The Decorative Art of Today (English and French Edition)

Examines the styles of interior, industrial, and architectural design, discusses the importance of function in design, and argues that design must respond to the needs of machine-age production methods

MIT Press]

This first English translation of Precisions reproduces the original book published in French in 1930, with an introduction added by the author in 1960. It is a spontaneous and exuberant series of 10 lectures Le Corbusier gave in Buenos Aires during the fall of 1929. As he spoke Le Corbusier improvised drawings on large sheets of paper with crayons. While similar drawings appear in other works, here all the lectures and images appear in their original context as Le Corbusier assembled them. Precisions reflects a new maturity in Le Corbusier's thinking and an extreme confidence in the development of his ideas. The drawings and lectures are unique in their eloquent and concise summary of his philosophy of architecture and urban design, stating the principles that informed his work from the 1920s on. They contain some of his most compelling aphorisms, both verbal and visual, covering technique as the basis of architecture, the human scale in design, furniture, the private house, apartments and office buildings, the city, the League of Nations competition, teaching architecture, and a splendid analysis of the transformation of his own work in houses from La RocheJeanneret to the Villa Savoye.

Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning With an American Prologue, a Brazilian Corollary Followed by the Temperature of pari

"This book may very well prove to be a seminal study for more than the history of architecture, but in that area it is definitely new, fresh, and delightful." -- Tom Peters, author of Building the Nineteenth Century 
This revelatory study of Le Corbusier's oeuvre is the most unexpected and vital Le Corbusier scholarship to appear in years. Adolf Max Vogt looks to the early, formative years of the architect's life as a key to understanding his mature practice and to solving such fundamental riddles as, "Where did his design vocabulary come from?" and "How was his aesthetic sense formed?" Like an archaeologist of the avant-garde, Vogt uncovers those aspects of the physical and educational environment that made an indelible impression on a receptive kindergarten boy in a remote Swiss village--and had a profound impact on the future architect's imagination and development. 
Vogt's investigation of LC's early life and education not only reveals important, previously unacknowledged influences on specific projects such as the Villa Roche and the Villa Savoye, but also offers explanations as to why LC throughout his career preferred to lift buildings above the ground, to give them the appearance of "floating." This tendency had decisive consequences for buildings associated with the modern movement (whose identity as a monolithic stylistic norm Vogt questions) and continues to influence architecture today. By uncovering crucial dimensions of LCs early life and resurrecting primary documents and source materials overlooked by other scholars, this book changes the face of LC studies.

Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism

Biographies & Memoirs

Vogt, Adolf Max

Arts & Literature