THE VILLAS OF LE CORBUSIER 1920 -1930

Tim Benton

8.75 x 11 softcover book with 224 pages and 300 illustrations and photographs (50 in color and 250 in b/w). An unsurpassed monograph focusing on Le Corbusier's early residential work. Originally published in French in 1984. Images including architectural drawings, buildings, letters, and candid photos throughout. Includes project chronologies, synoptic table of villa projects, table of craftsmen and builders, table of fees, catalogue of drawings, and an index.

Between 1920 and 1930, Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret built a series of villas and detached houses - many in Paris and its environs - which played an important part in enhancing their professional reputations. Through these projects they developed and refined a sophisticated vocabulary of compositional solutions which stimulated and fostered international architecture for over half a century. The study, magisterially conducted by the British historian Tim Benton, reviews numerous projects for houses, villas and apartments, which include not just the celebrated Villa La Roche in Paris and Villa Savoye at Poissy, but also Villa Berque and the Ozenfant Studio in Paris, Church House at Ville-d'Avray and Cook House in Boulogne.

The villas of the 1920s in and around Paris, including such modern classics as the Villa La Roche-Jeanneret in the Auteuil district of Paris, the Villa Stein-de Monzie in Garches, and the Villa Savoye in Poissy, constituted a radically new orientation for architecture that have made them central points of reference for all subsequent generations of architects right up to the present. This volume reveals the design processes behind these icons of modernism, from the first idea to the occupation of the homes, and sheds light on the steps and contexts of daily work. It measures the concept of modern architecture against the built reality, and enables us to rediscover the architect Le Corbusier behind the myth.

Benton's remarkable series of case histories shatters the conventional image of Le Corbusier as an ivory-tower idealist and theorizer. Eccentrics, artists, collectors and the genteel poor were among the clients for whom Le Corbusier built luxury houses during the 1920s. These projects were beset by cost overruns, delays and disastrous technical failures that necessitated urgent and expensive repairs. Frequently, the interplay of economics, site and client relationships led to a sudden shift in a villa's design. Le Corbusier's high-handed approach to many of his clients strained close friendships to the breaking point, sometimes beyond. Building these houses around his own notions of privacy and freedom, the architect filled austere interiors with high points of commanda library or an apex looking out on nature. The results, to some homeowners, were cold or confusing.

Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) adopted his famous pseudonym after publishing his ideas in the review L¹Esprit 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 wasn¹t until after World War II that his epoch-making buildings were constructed, such as the Unité d¹Habitation in Marseilles and the Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp.

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