DES CANONS, DES MUNITIONS?
MERCI! DES LOGIS... S.V.P.
Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier [pseudonym of Charles Edouard Jeanneret]: DES CANONS, DES MUNITIONS? MERCI! DES LOGIS... S.V.P. Boulogne: Editions de L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, 1938. [Monographie du "Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux" a l'Exposition Internationale "Art et Technique" de Paris, 1937. (Collection de l'Equipement de la Civilisation Machiniste.) ] First (only) edition. Text in French. Linen backed printed and pictorial boards. Almost inevitable modest wear to edge of the boards, with bumping to forecorners, light scattered rubbing and dust soiling to the white portions of the boards, early ink ownership inscription, but a very good copy. Out-of-print. Book design and Classic color photomontage by Le Corbusier.

The famous pictorial board cover, printed in red, yellow blue and green with a photomontage of cannons, aircraft, bombs and an aerial ccity overview , is one of the classic graphic images of the interwar period [Brady, Darlene: Le Corbusier: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1985), no. 9; Sharp p. 70; Andel, Jaroslav: Avant-Garde Page Design 1900-1950 (New York, 2002), p. 244, illus. 327].

11.5 x 9.25 hardcover Oblong quarto with 148 pages illustrated with plates, drawings and photographs. First edition of this profusely illustrated monograph based on Le Corbusier's involvement with the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux at the International Exhibition of Art et Technique in 1937. In publishing this plea for the application of the same technologies that were utilized for the fabrication of munitions and armaments of war to the realization of an enlightened architectural urbanism, Le Corbusier was nonetheless struck by the increased relevance of the title applied to his text. The title-page bears the parenthetical note: "De titre date de janvier 1937; il n'est nullement une allusion a l'actualite brulante des rearmamnets de 1938."

DES CANONS... is the finest example of Le Corbusier's largely unnoticed skills as a graphic artist and book designer. His use of type and images in his books were truly revolutionary for twentieth-century design. Corbu described his approach as, "This new conception of a book, using the explicit, revelatory argument of the illustrations, [which] enables the author to avoid feeble descriptions: facts leap to the reader's eye through the power of imagery."

Le Corbusier distanced himself from Modernist typography, while truly embracing the spirit of Bauhaus functionalism. In common with the German avant-garde, he took not only images but also graphic methods from the popular press, breaking continuous text with small illustrations of damn near everything: pell-mell, photographs of animals, buildings, everyday objects, clippings from newspapers and sales catalogues, cartoons, old-master paintings, scientific diagrams and more.

This handsome volume served as Le Corbusier's polemical guide to the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux, which he built for the Paris Exhibition of 1937, and included many outstanding photographs and illustrations of the Pavilion and its exhibits. The Pavilion's importance lay in its tentlike construction which anticipated the tension structures of the postwar period. The book is a presentation of the aims of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and many of Le Corbusier's own planning schemes as a more constructive social alternative to rearmament.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) adopted his famous pseudonym after publishing his ideas in the review L'Esprit Nouveau in 1920. The few buildings he was able to design during the 1920s, when he also spent much of his time painting and writing, brought him to the forefront of modern architecture, though it wasn't until after World War II that his epoch-making buildings were constructed, such as the Unite d'Habitation in Marseilles and the Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp.

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