WHEN THE CATHEDRALS WERE WHITE
A Journey to The Country of Timid People

Le Corbusier

5.75 x 8.25 book with 217 pages and text illustrations by Le Corbusier. Translated by Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. "This urbane and witty book about America by the famous French architect and painter Le Corbusier will provide most Americans with their first real chance to discover one of the really original minds of our time."

From the book: "At a time when the exigencies of housing shortages have made people particularly conscious of the spaces in which we live, the author tries to teach that housing is not merely a question of the haphazard building of buildings as the whim of the builder or the demand of the dweller decides; that city-dwelling must become a planned way of life, if city-dwellers are not to suffer a daily continuing diminution of life. This way of life the author and his fell architects and thinkers of the Ascoral school, call urbanism. He has examined the American city through its prototype, New York, and also the people who make that city what it is. And his revised plan for a vertical New York, the city where the skyscrapers are now too short, will be provocative and revealing even for those who do not agree with it. "

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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