LA VILLE RADIEUSE
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier [pseudonym of Charles Edouard Jeanneret]: LA VILLE RADIEUSE. Boulogne: Editions de L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, 1935. First edition [Collection de l'Equipement de la Civilisation Machiniste]. Text in French. Oblong Quarto. Laminated decorated cardboards with linen backstrip (perished). Vintage cloth tape hinge reinforcements. Boards creased with edges chipped and worn, bumping to forecorners, light scattered rubbing and dust soiling. Rear board split with tape-repair. Book design and typography by Le Corbusier. A good copy of this fragile volume.
11.5 x 9.25 hardcover book with 345 pages illustrated with plates, drawings and photographs, a few in color. First edition of one of the most important works in which Le Corbusier most fully developed his principles of planning. In this ideal city he advocates 'centralized planning, which would cover not merely city building but every aspect of life'. He envisaged a totally geometric town where all life would be regulated, and the inhabitants 'live in giant collective apartments called 'Unités' (one was in fact build in Marseilles in 1946). Among some 13 cities for which Le Corbusier devised plans are Algiers, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Rome and Barcelona.
In addition to being an artist and architect, Corbu was also a city planner. "Modern town planning comes to birth with a new architecture," he wrote in a book titled simply URBANISME. "By this immense step in evolution, so brutal and so overwhelming, we burn our bridges and break with the past." And boy, did he mean it! His vision of the city included no congested streets and sidewalks, no more bustling public squares, no more untidy neighborhoods. Instead, people would live in hygienic, regimented high-rise towers, set far apart in a parklike landscape. This rational city would be separated into discrete zones for working, living and leisure. Above all, everything should be done on a big scale ‹ big buildings, big open spaces, big urban highways. And he wrote all this down in a book ‹ a big book called LA VILLE RADIEUSE, the Radiant City.
LA VILLE RADIEUSE is a fine 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.
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.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
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