Towards a New Architecture

Product Information

Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: "American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." "Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary." "A cathedral is not very beautiful . . ." and "Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life."

There exists a mass of work concieved in the new spirit; it is to be met with particularly in industrial production. This is a recommended book and if read carefully should begin to show a picture of Corbusiers Architecture that escapes most easy critiques of modernism. This is a moment in time where modernism is being tried out across all political persausions. Both in communist and capitalist regimes alike its being tried on for size. Here Le Corb a serial failed entrereneur makes the case for Capitalism, Architetcure or Revolution, one or the other. Le Corb thinks his modernism can cure revolution.

For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles- douard Jeanneret, 1887?1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials." A Corbusier-ian maxim: Architecture has nothing to do with the various "styles". Styles "are to architecture what a feather is on a woman's head; it is sometimes pretty, though not always, and never anything more" urn:oclc:811361472 Republisher_date 20120511054513 Republisher_operator [email protected];[email protected] Scandate 20120505054342 Scanner scribe5.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition)

The family, the church, educational institutions, bankers, the real estate industry—no quarter of society escaped his wrath. Echoing Henry Provensal’s L’art de demain of 1904, Le Corbusier insisted that modern art was the ultimate expression of man’s new place in the world and would lead him out of the wilderness of naïve naturalism. (Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present [London, Zwemmer: 1996]. Kruft also points to Edward Schure’s Les grandes initiés [1906] and Erest Renan’s Life of Jesus as sources for Le Corbusier’s messianic zeal.) No longer bound by the farm, the manor house, and the eight-hour work day, modern man was free to express himself and pursue a life of enlightened leisure. Machines were the answer to his age-old problems of hard labor with little to show for it. Like Verlaine and Baudelaire, he pulled imagery from the profane to goad his readers into action. Like Saint Simon, he was selling utopia, but one that Jacques Tati’s film character, Mr. Hulot, would parody decades later. For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials." The English translation of the book has also been a source of controversy with regard to its change of style and very specific alterations to the text. The alterations have generated criticism and required correction, even as some of them began to define architectural language. A new translation was released in 2007 that is meant to be truer to Le Corbusier's intention. [3] L-C buildings featured [ edit ] I have added my rough notes on the book taken as I was reading as a help to understanding the book.Is this a foundational text that gives me a better framework for understanding 20th-century architecture? Yes. Did I strongly dislike it? Also yes. This new critique was able to reach new audiences, not only restricted by those directly related to our field, and the language naturally evolved into something more digestible for the layman.