Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid [Hardcover]

Mardges Bacon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0262024799 | ISBN-13: 978-0262024792 | Publication Date: April 16, 2001

Le Corbusier's first trip to the United States in 1935 is generally considered a failure because it produced no commissions. The experience nevertheless had a profound effect on him, both personally and professionally. Sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Le Corbusier promoted his ideas through a lecture tour, exhibition, and press conferences, as well as in meetings with industrialists, housing reformers, New Deal technocrats, and editors. His lectures were watershed events that advanced the cause of European modernism. Yet he returned to France empty-handed and published a bittersweet account, Quand les cath餲ales 鴡ient blanches: voyage au pays des timides (When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People), which faulted America for lacking the courage to adopt his ideas.In this first major study of Le Corbusier's American tour, Mardges Bacon reconstructs his encounter with America in all its fascinating detail. Through extensive archival research and interviews, she presents a critical history of the tour as well as a nuanced and intimate portrait of the architect. Drawing on the methods of microhistory, she also considers how small ordinary events affect larger biographical, architectural, and cultural developments.Bacon notes that Le Corbusier's dialogue with America was drafted within a spirited European discourse on am鲩canisme. She contends that the trip validated his concept of a "second machine age" that would unite standardized industrial methods with a new humanism. Le Corbusier's subsequent work, she suggests, reflected an "Americanization," evidenced by the introduction of tension structures and the textured skyscraper conceived as an integrated system with functions articulated. She also defines Le Corbusier's role in the debate over New York City high-rise public housing.Appearing here in print for the first time are color reproductions of the pastel drawings that illustrated Le Corbusier's American lectures.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

And for a blow-by-blow of two months in the life of the master, there is now Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid, which chronicles PŠre Corbu's fruitless 1935 trawl for commissions. Northeastern University professor of art and architecture Mardges Bacon painstakingly (with more than 195 mostly b&w illustrations) but compellingly follows Corb on the trip that would result in his memoir When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid People, from which she cribs her title. Arriving in New York, Le Corbusier made stops at MoMA, Columbia, Yale and Vassar, moving through to Michigan and beyond, lecturing and inciting architectural controversy at every point yet leading, Bacon argues, to a subsequent "Americanization" of his work.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The "timid" in the title are those Americans who, in the master's view, lacked the strength to adopt his principles and concepts for expression in the United States. Based on Le Corbusier's first trip to this country in 1935, Bacon's meticulous and substantive scholarship provides a detailed account of the architect's lecture tour, exhibitions, and press conferences and fashions him into an architectural de Tocqueville. Beyond a glimpse of Le Corbusier's often incisive reading of American urban forms and social conditions, Bacon (art and architecture, Northeastern Univ.) clarifies how he came to influence not merely the first generation of American modernists but also, even without specific reference, the self-designated white architects of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Peter Eisenmann, Michael Graves, who saw white as a defining aesthetic choice) and even an entire architectural curriculum. Bacon examines unrealized projects, illustrated with either the architect's sketch or a beautiful, high-quality period photograph. The only flaw is the absence of a bibliography; with 75 pages of highly informative notes, some of the abbreviated citations are difficult to trace, resulting in the need to consult the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals for some important sources. Many readers lacking a scholarly interest in Le Corbusier but still concerned with American modernism will find the epilog, "The Consequences of Transatlantic Exchange," to be highly instructive. For larger architecture collections. Paul Glassman, New York Sch. of Interior Design Lib.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262024799
• ISBN-13: 978-0262024792
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 9.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,091,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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