LE CORBUSIER ET PESSAC 1914 - 1928
Brian Brace Taylor
[Le Corbusier] Brian Brace Taylor: LE CORBUSIER ET PESSAC 1914 - 1928. Paris: Spadem via Fondation Le Corbusier en collaboration avec Harvard University, 1972. 2 Volume Set [Volume I : Texte; Volume II : Documentation graphique et photographique (graphic and photographic documentation]. First editions. Text in French. Oblong quartos. Thick printed stapled wrappers. Vol. 1: 64 pp. Vol. 2: 66 pp. 4 color and 100 black and white plates. Uniform light wear overall. A very good or better set. [2] 8.25 x 6.25 books with 130 pages total and 4 color and 100 black and white plates. Fully illustrated with Corbusier's architectural drawings, sketches, facades, and photographs, all documents reproduced from the personal archives of Le Corbusier. In the mid-1920's - at Pessac near Bordeaux - Le Corbusier built his first large-scale project, the Quartiers Modernes Fruges which consisted of some 70 housing units. Acting simultaneously as architect and town planner, and taking account of the prevailing social and economic factors, he wished to provide people with low-cost, predetermined, homogeneous cubist structures-"machines to live in" or empty containers that their presence alone would activate and fulfill.
One of the most imaginative and influential architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) devoted a lifetime to building and planning, from private houses and churches to apartment blocks and entire cities. Although they aroused a storm of opposition ats the time, his most famous buildings have largely determined the course of modern architecture in the past few decades. Two of them, the now legendary Villa Savoye and the pilgramage church of Ronchamp, have been declared historic monuments by the French government. They and many other works, in many countries, are shaping the architectural future. Le Corbusier's ideas, his books, his vision of the Radiant City, continues to be as much discussed today as when he first put them into circulation.
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.
A sample spread from this volume can be viewed here.
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