Le Corbusier Le Grand (First Edition)

COHEN, Jean-Louis & BENTON, Tim (eds.; Phaidon Editors). Le Corbusier Le Grand. London: Phaidon Press, 2008. 2 vols.

Elephant Folio (32 × 42 cm). Vol. I: Pictorial colour-illustrated boards, 72 pp. Vol. II: Brown paper boards stamped in black (Documents volume, with English translations), 767 pp. 788 pp total. Illustrated slipcase. Approximately 2,000 images and documents throughout, many previously unpublished — major built works, urban plans, paintings, publications, furniture, sketches, archival photographs, and personal correspondence. First edition.

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (1887–1965) — who renamed himself Le Corbusier in 1920, choosing the pseudonym from a branch of his mother's family — was the most consequential architect and urban theorist of the twentieth century: the man whose proposals for the complete demolition and rebuilding of central Paris, whose housing blocks in Marseille and Chandigarh, whose chapel at Ronchamp, whose formulations about the five points of a new architecture, whose theoretical writings — Vers une architecture (1923), Urbanisme (1925), La Ville radieuse (1933) — shaped the built environment of every city in the developed world for half a century, whether the architects who shaped it had read him or not. His influence extended to people who disagreed with him profoundly, because his ideas were clear and forceful enough to require disagreement. He remains the most debated figure in the history of modern architecture.

A book grand in size is the appropriate vehicle for a life of this scale. Phaidon's Le Corbusier Le Grand is a spectacular visual biography of the life and work of one of modernism's most influential architects, urban planners, and theorists. The first volume — the visual biography — moves chronologically through Le Corbusier's life and work from his Swiss childhood and early training under Auguste Perret in Paris to the late masterworks of the 1950s and 1960s, deploying approximately 2,000 images from archives that include the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris and collections worldwide. Rare photographs and letters shed new light on Le Corbusier's relationships with Josephine Baker, Eileen Gray, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Prouvé, and many others — an aspect of his biography that the architecture monograph tradition has largely left unexplored, and that this volume addresses with considerable documentary thoroughness. The second volume presents the source documents — correspondence, manuscripts, theoretical texts — with English translations, giving the set a scholarly apparatus that complements the visual argument of the first.

The introductory essay is by Jean-Louis Cohen, France's most authoritative architectural historian and critic — a scholar whose own monographic work on Le Corbusier, on modern architecture in France, and on the relationship between architecture and political power makes him the ideal voice for this enterprise. The chapter introductions are by Tim Benton, Professor Emeritus at the Open University and one of the leading Le Corbusier scholars in the English-speaking world, whose archival research into Le Corbusier's early career and his theoretical writings has defined the field for three decades.

Fine. Both volumes present as new. Slipcase shows some mild shelf markings.

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Catalogue Number: HH000623