Le Corbusier's Practical Aesthetic of the City: The Treatise 'la Construction Des Villes' of 1910/11

ISBN-13: 9781472445643 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 528 str.

Christoph Schnoor

Opis

Le Corbusier wrote his first book-length treatise, La Construction des villes, in the early years of the C20th. This remarkable work, dealing with questions of aesthetic urbanism, shows Le Corbusier's intellectual influences in the field of urbanism, and it is an important document of contemporary urbanistic discourse around this period. In it, the architect emphasized the concept of space in the city as a prerequisite for aesthetic urbanism - which is highly remarkable since he later completely abandoned this notion. Discontent that the script was not sufficiently avant-garde, Le Corbusier abandoned it. Only in the late 1970s, American historian H. Allen Brooks discovered approximately 250 pages of the forgotten manuscript in Switzerland. However, he left it to Swiss architect Marc Emery to publish the first - incomplete - edition in 1992. While carrying out research on La Construction des villes in the late 1990s, Christoph Schnoor discovered another 350 handwritten pages of this manuscript, consisting of extracts, chapters and bibliographic notes. This splendid find enabled the re-establishment of the manuscript as Le Corbusier had abandoned it - unfinished - in the spring of 1911. Set within an insightful analysis, describing its genesis and the ideas and ideologies which influenced Le Corbusier in writing it, this volume makes this important theoretical work available for the first time in English. It also offers an interpretation as to how much and in what ways this 'essai' may have influenced his later work. In doing so, this volume offers an unbiased extension of our knowledge of Le Corbusier and his work, as well as helping to establish and evaluate a serious new urbanism by offering lessons from the experiments made in the very early C20th.