UNE PETITE MAISON
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier [ Charles-Edouard Jeanneret]: UNE PETITE MAISON. Zürich: Editions Girsberger, 1954. First edition. Text in French, with 8-page English appendix. 16mo. Perfect bound plain card wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 96 pp. 60 photographs, sketches and colored designs. Elaborate graphic design throughout by Le Corbusier. An unread copy, pristine with Editions Girsberger bill of sale laid in. Rare thus.
4.75 x 6.5 softcover book in dust jacket with 96 pages [including an 8-page English appendix] with 15 color illustrations, 9 black and white illustrations, and 36 black and white photos. “This book tells the story of the little house Le Corbusier built in 1923 near Vevey on Lake Geneva for his mother. The texts and layout are by Le Corbusier.”
UNE PETITE MAISON 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 Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles and the Church of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp.
One of the most imaginative and influential architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier 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.