L'ARCHITECTURE D'AUJOURD'HUI
April 1948
Le Corbusier Numéro Hors Série de L'architecture D'aujourd'hui
Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret]
Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret], Andre Bloc [General Director]: L'ARCHITECTURE D'AUJOURD'HUI [Le Corbusier Numéro Hors Série de L'architecture D'aujourd'hui]. Paris: L'architecture D'aujourd'hui, Avril 1948. Text in French. Plain chipboard wrappers. Printed perfect-bound dust jacket. [lxiv] 116 pp. Elaborately designed text and advertisments. Special issue devoted to—and designed by—Le Corbusier. An Ex-University Library copy with inkstamp to front panel, dewey decimal number inked to spine heel, and an Institutional perforation to contents page. Trivial wear overall aside from the noted ex-libris markings, so a very good copy.
9.25 x 12.25 magazine with 116 pages of editorial content written and designed by Le Corbusier sandwiched between 64 pages of period advertising and monthly news features.
Contents include:
- Le Corbusier Numéro Hors Série de L'architecture D'aujourd'hui116 page special section written and designed by le Corbusier.
- Includes the original Corbusier essay originally titled Synthése de Arts [Synthesis of the Arts] but publlished as Unité [Unity]. It was a direct extension of the task begun with New Worlds of Space, proposing a new, more sophisticated version of “synthetic” layouts. Here art, architecture, and town planning were skillfully merged thanks to montage and superimposition effects made possible by new printing techniques. Thus a skyscraper planned for Algiers seems literally incorporated into a painting, while drawings of spiraling, shell-like animal bones form a pattern that partially screens a photograph of the Stein Villa in Garches. Elsewhere, transparent color shapes—flat areas of yellow, blue and green—are superimposed on columns of text and images (not unlike paintings by Fernand Léger). Seeking to demonstrate the close links between the diverse fields of architecture, painting, sculpture, and town planning, Le Corbusier came to handle the printed page itself as an artistic medium; the unity of his oeuvre found its best argument through a concept that was highly creative.
- Also contains work by Jean Prouve, Rene Herbst, Raymond Subes, Henri Laurens, André Bloc, Berto Lardera, Jacques Lipchitz, and others.
L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui is the oldest French architecture magazine. It was created during the economic crisis, in November 1930, by the architect, sculptor, painter and publisher André Bloc (1896 to 1966).
From its very first issue, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui promoted the avant-garde and different movements and personalities of the architectural thinking behind "modernity", among whom Le Corbusier, who contributed to several issues. L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui also offers a cross disciplinary vision of period architecture mixing featured subjects, architectural creation, interviews with architects, urbanism and technical resources. At this time, it was the only French architecture magazine known all over the world, thanks to its uncompromisingly international character.
This special issue of L'architecture D'aujourd'hui 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.