LE CORBUSIER SKETCHBOOKS - VOL. 3, 1954-1957
Françoise de Franclieu (notes)
Françoise de Franclieu (notes): LE CORBUSIER SKETCHBOOKS - VOL. 3, 1954-1957. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press and the Architectural History Foundation in collaboration with the Foundation Le Corbusier, 1982. First edition. A very good or better hardcover book in a very good dustjacket: front panel of DJ has a large tear with a small tape repair. Bottom edges of boards display the inevitable shelf wear for a six-pound plus volume. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. 10.55 x 10 hardcover book with 520 pages with 1,096 illustrations, including 220 in color. Edited by Fondation Le Corbusier, and printed in Switzerland at Imprimeries Réunies, Lausanne, and bound by Mayer & Soutter, Lausanne. A truly amazing production.
The publication of Volumes 3 and 4 of the Le Corbusier Sketchbooks brings to completion a major undertaking by the Architectural History Foundation. After more than a decade of searching, the Fondation Le Corbusier found a suitable partner in publication to aid in the practical difficulties of producing the last and most elusive of Le Corbusier's unpublished works. André Wogenscky, President of the Fondation Le Corbusier, has stated that the sketchbooks vividly reproduced in these four volumes "are the most private of Le Corbusier's work, the most spontaneous, perhaps the most significant, encompassing all the others - the work of an entire lifetime."
From 1954-1957, Le Corbusier further developed the curving sculptural forms he had already used boldly for the pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp and for the new city of Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab. Various sketchbooks record the finishing touches of Ronchamp and continuing work in the building of Chandigarh.
Later sketchbooks show Le Corbusier increasingly integrating painting and sculpture with architecture, and introducing a strong symbolic element into his public buildings - such as the Open Hand at Chandigarh.
Sketchbooks in Volume 3 also reveal the architect's experiments with environmental control, the use of rustic materials and strong colors in a villa in India and two villas in Paris that are notably different from the more geometric and mechanistic work of Le Corbusier's earlier years.
"The publication of Le Corbusier's sketchbooks is, perhaps, the most important documentation to date of anything to do with the Modern Movement." - Philip Johnson
"A unique record of the mental processes of the most influential architect of the twentieth century." - Vincent Scully
"Overwhelming-both as an outstanding scholarly achievement and as a visually and intellectually stimulating compendium of thoughts and notations of Le Corbusier." - Richard Meier
"In the sketchbooks, Le Corbusier's drawings run the gamut from the coldly analytical to the warmly romantic.... [They] not only provide clues as to what he was about as an architect and as a painter, they also reveal and comment on a more gentle, receptive side of his personality - a side that he generally sought to hide under the guise of Le Corbusier, the architect." - David Gebhard, The New York Times Magazine
out of stock