The only book on Purism (founded by Le Corbusier), & a key contribution to the study of classic 20th century modernism in painting & architecture. -- Tie-in with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition.
Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.
Pioneering manifesto by founder of "International School." Technical and aesthetic theories, views of industry, economics, relation of form to function, "mass-production split," and much more. Profusely illustrated.
This book is an account of a significant aspect of Le Corbusier's work - the relationships between form and colour. The book relates the way in which he arrived at a personal architectonic polychromy in the early 1920s and how his theories relating to Purism developed.
**Selected in the top eight short-list for the Thought and Criticism category of the FAD Awards 2019** Le Corbusier is well-known for his architectural accomplishments, which have been extensively discussed in literature. Towards a Public Space instead offers a unique analysis of Le Corbusier’s contributions to urban planning. The public spaces in Le Corbusier’s plans are usually considered to break with the past and to have nothing whatsoever in common with the public spaces created before modernism. This view is fostered by both the innovative character of his proposals and by the proliferation in his manifestos of watchwords that mask any evocation of the past, like l’esprit nouveau ("new spirit") and l’architecture de demain ("architecture of tomorrow"). However, if we manage to rid ourselves of certain preconceived ideas, which underpin a somewhat less-than-objective idea of modernity, we find that Le Corbusier's public spaces not only didn't break with the historical past in any abrupt way but actually testified to the continuity of human creation over time. Aimed at academics and students in architecture, architectural history and urban planning, this book fills a gap in the systematic analysis of Le Corbusier’s city scale plans and, specifically, Corbusian public spaces following the Second World War.
The book investigates the theme of Modernism (1920-1960 and its epigones) as an integral part of tangible and intangible cultural heritage which contains the result of a whole range of disciplines whose aim is to identify, document and preserve the memory of the past and the value of the future. Including several chapters, it contains research results relating to cultural heritage, more specifically Modernism, and current digital technologies. This makes it possible to record and evaluate the changes that both undergo: the first one, from a material point of view, the second one from the research point of view, which integrates the traditional approach with an innovative one. The purpose of the publication is to show the most recent studies on the modernist lexicon 100 years after its birth, moving through different fields of cultural heritage: from different forms of art to architecture, from design to engineering, from literature to history, representation and restoration. The book appeals to scholars and professionals who are involved in the process of understanding, reading and comprehension the transformation that the places have undergone within the period under examination. It will certainly foster the international exchange of knowledge that characterized Modernism
This is the first English translation of Le Corbusier's densely illustrated polemic against the crafts tradition and superfluous ornament in interior decoration.