AIRCRAFT
Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier [Charles-Edouard Jeanneret]: AIRCRAFT. New York: Universe Books, 1988. Original edition [originally published by The Studio, Ltd, 1935]. Quarto. Paper covered boards decorated in blue. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 124 pp. Illustrations and black and white photographs. Elaborate typography and graphic design throughout by Le Corbusier. Jacket lightly rubbed, otherwise a pristine copy: fine in a nearly fine dust jacket.
7.5 x 10 book with 124 pages of photographs selected by Le Corbusier showing the evolution of aviation aesthetics. The New Vision series was conceived and published by the Studio in London, and included “World Beneath The Microscope” by W. Watson-Baker and “Locomotive” by Raymond Loewy.
‘Aircraft” is a fine example of Le Corbusier's largely unnoticed skills as a graphic artist and book designer: he meticulously planned and realized over 40 books in his lifetime. 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.
“Published in 1935, Aircraft celebrates flight and casts the aeroplane as the pinnacle of modern technological achievement. The Wright Brothers had made their first flight only 32 years earlier. Combining photographs with short, dramatic captions, Aircraft was compiled and written by the seminal French modernist architect, Le Corbusier.
“Aircraft was produced by The Studio as part of their New Vision series, which introduced the reader to modern, pioneering technologies and ideas. Although The Studio commissioned Le Corbusier to focus on the industrial design of aircraft, the architect chose to widen his subject to aviation as a cultural and social phenomenon.
“The result is a book that captures the enthusiasm and ideas surrounding the aerial age. Le Corbusier opens the book by emphasising the ‘ecstatic feeling’ that flight produces in him. It is ‘symbol of the New Age’, promising adventure, progress and wild possibility. He idealises the aesthetics of the machines, too, which possess ‘Clearness of function’ (a core principle that underpinned Le Corbusier’s utopian architectural schemes).
“Ultimately, Le Corbusier’s interests as an architect and urban planner are at the centre of this work. He explores how flight offers us a new perspective – the ‘bird’s eye view’ – on the environments that we inhabit. Specifically, he is interested in the implications for urban environments: ‘the airplane eye … now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be. And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming. The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse.’
“Le Corbusier’s captions are typically bold and uncompromising. The text that accompanies image 9, for example, reads: ‘THE BIRD’S EYE VIEW … MAN WILL MAKE USE OF IT TO CONCEIVE NEW AIMS. CITIES WILL ARISE OUT OF THEIR ASHES.’ Although motivated by utopian ideals surrounding social injustice and urban planning, Le Corbusier’s vision calls for an authoritarian level of destruction that has been seen by some critics to resonate with fascist thinking.” [The British Library]
From the Authors preface: “The Studio has informed me of its intention to publish a book on Aviation, the desire of the publishers being to inform the general public, questions of technique apart, as to what stimulus there may be in it for contemporary society, divided at the moment between a desire to retrace its steps and to embark on the conquest of a new civilization.
“I accepted the task and so that there should be no ambiguity I headed the opening pages with this modest sub-title: “Frontispiece to Pictures of the Epic of the Air.” Being neither technician nor historian of this amazing adventure, I could only apply myself to it by reason of that ecstasy which I feel when I think about it.
“This ecstatic feeling dates from the first Aviation Exhibition at Paris after the War, at which time I was helping to run the Esprit Nouveau, a review which strove to remove the veil which still largely obscured the new era of machine civilization. We gave out labours this confident heading: “A great period has just begun.”
“During the publication of L'Esprit Nouveau, I used with a timely impatience the phrase “Eyes which do not see ! . . .”and in three articles I cited as evidence, steamships, automobiles, and airplanes.
“The point then was that our eyes did not see . . . Did not see the budding of a new feeling for plastic beauty in a world full of strength and confidence.
“But to-day it is a question of the airplane eye, of the mind with which the Bird's Eye View has endowed us; of that eye which now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be.
“And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming. The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse.
“Being indissolubly connected in all the fibres of my being with the essential human affairs which architecture regulates ; having waged for a long time, without fear of hatred or ambush, a loyal crusade of material liberation by the all-powerful influence of architecture, it is as an architect and town-planner-and therefore as a man essentially occupied with the welfare of his species-that I let myself be carried off on the wings of an airplane, make use of the bird's-eye view, of the view from the air, to which end I directed the pilot to steer over cities. And, justly stirred, advised moreover by my friend the poet Pierre Guéguen, to whom I showed the draft of this book, I have added my own title “The airplane indicts.”
“Thus the stirring work of the men in the air will in no sense be tinged by my technical ignorance. I seek only to crown their prodigious effort by a salute addressed to the heads of countries and cities, an appeal to them to weigh up the misery they have allowed to establish itself.
“And inciting them-finally to take the steps which will provide an attainable amount-materially realizable-of happiness: of “essential delights.” The dwelling of modern times, a dwelling in harmony with the state of modern conscience, to which a hundred years of sensational developments have brought us. — Paris, May, 1935.”
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.