Le Corbusier, the Noble Savage: Toward an Archaeology of Modernism [Paperback]

Friedr /. Vieweg (Author), Gwv Fachverlage -. Gmbh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2000

This revelatory study is the most unexpected and vital piece of Le Corbusier scholarship to appear in years. Adolf Max Vogt looks to the early, formative years of the architect's life as a key to understanding his mature practice, taking aim at such fundamental riddles as "Where did his design vocabulary come from?" and "How was his aesthetic sense formed?"Vogt's investigation of LC's early life and education not only reveals important, previously unacknowledged influences on specific projects such as the League of Nations headquarters and the Villa Savoye, but also suggests why LC throughout his career preferred to lift buildings above the ground, to give them the appearance of "floating." By uncovering crucial dimensions of LC's early life and resurrecting primary documents and source materials overlooked by other scholars, this book changes the face of LC studies.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, aka Le Corbusier, is a towering figure of modern architecture. He was also notoriously self-invented?from his self-aggrandizing nom d'architecte to his flagrant dissembling in his copious writings and sketchbooks about the origins of his ideas. Vogt, in this closely argued but readable book, takes as his task the reconstruction of the local and particular origins of the forms that Le Corbusier universalized. The nexus of his argument is the discoveries, beginning around 1850, of the remains of a prehistoric lake-dwelling culture in the Swiss Jura region, where Jeanneret grew up. Vogt shows how this historical awareness, awakened in Jeanneret as a child by its inclusion in the curriculum of the day, led to Le Corbusier's famous piloti, the reinforced-concrete columns he used to make his buildings seem to float above the ground. The author skillfully employs his subject's own argumentative technique of seamlessly blending word and picture?without resorting to the architect's trademark combination of soaring rhetoric and flimflam. Although Vogt's analysis of Le Corbusier's drawings and buildings (in particular, the unbuilt project for the League of Nations on Lake Geneva) is convincing and even moving, readers are left to ask themselves whether the architect, in suppressing public knowledge of his influences, doesn't demonstrate more wisdom toward them than Vogt has been in uncovering them. The author's "attempt to undercut the cult of genius" confronts the truth of Le Corbusier's genius itself: the artist's forceful reimagination of his antecedents?however obscure, provincial and contingent by themselves?makes the forms that result seem necessary, correct and inevitable. 265 illustrations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Scholarly and witty." Richard Weston, Building Design

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 381 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (February 28, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262720337
• ISBN-13: 978-0262720335
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #497,713 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)