THE CITY OF TOMORROW AND ITS PLANNING
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier: THE CITY OF TOMORROW AND ITS PLANNING. London: The Architectural Press, 1947. Third printing thus. Gray cloth over flexible boards titled in green. Printed dust jacket. 310 pp. 82 black and white photographs and 133 text illustrations. Endpapers offsetted and mildly foxed. Textblock edges dusty and tips uniformly pushed. Dust jacket lightly edgeworn and soiled with minor chipping. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket.
5.75 x 8.5 hardcover book with 302 pages and 82 b/w photographs and 133 text illustrations. Translated from the 8th French Edition of URBANISME with an introduction by Frederick Etchells. In this volume, Corbu proposes that the modern city is a vast and complicated machine that can only be made to function smoothly on the basis of strict order and efficiency which, at the same time, must lead to fine and noble architecture. Includes proposals for Voisin plan for the center of Paris, and for the City of Three Million Inhabitants.
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.