Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture (1923–)

“For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier, 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 mean of raw materials.’

The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine L’Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the “mass production spirit,” and much else. A principal prophet of the “modern” movement in architecture, and a new-legendary figure at the “International School,” he designed some of the twentieth century’s most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cite Universitaire, Paris; Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.

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.’

Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians – but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions and innovative theories of one of this century’s master builders.” (from the back cover)

Note: This 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. (from Wikipedia)

Originally published in French under the title Vers une architecture, Paris, 1923.

This edition, first published in 1986, is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the work originally published by John Rodker, London, in 1931, as translated from the thirteenth French edition and given an English introduction by Frederick Etchells
Publisher Dover Publications, New York
ISBN 0486250237, 9780486250236
320 pages

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Franz Schulze: Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (1985/1989) [Italian]

Schulze’s acclaimed biography is the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Schulze traces Mies’s European career in its progression to avant-garde modernism—where his work was materially rich but of modest scale—to his second maturity and world renown in the United States, where he invented a new architectural language of “objective” structural expression. Among the authors’ most exciting new discoveries is the massive transcript of the early-1950s Farnsworth House court case, which discloses for the first time the facts about Mies’s epic battle with his client Edith Farnsworth. The book reveals new information about his relationships with women, including the nature and breakup of his marriage to the wealthy Ada Bruhn, his close professional and personal ties to the gifted designer Lilly Reich, and new details from a series of illuminating interviews with his American companion, Lora Marx. This edition also gives voice to dozens of architects who knew and worked with (and sometimes against) Mies—many of them from the unique oral history collection of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture.

This comprehensive biography tells the compelling story of how Mies and his students and followers created some of the most significant buildings of the twentieth century.

Originally published by University Of Chicago Press, in association with the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the Museum of Modern Art, 1985
Translated to Italian by Mara De Benedetti, published as Mies van der Rohe by Editorial Jaca Book spa, Milan, April 1989, ISBN 8816600888, 344 pages.

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Robert H. Kargon, Arthur P. Molella: Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (2008)

Industrialization created cities of Dickensian squalor that were crowded, smoky, dirty, and disease-ridden. By the beginning of the twentieth century, urban visionaries were looking for ways to improve living and working conditions in industrial cities. In Invented Edens, Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella trace the arc of one form of urban design, which they term the techno-city: a planned city developed in conjunction with large industrial or technological enterprises, blending the technological and the pastoral, the mill town and the garden city. Techno-cities of the twentieth century range from factory towns in Mussolini’s Italy to the Disney creation of Celebration, Florida. Kargon and Molella show that the techno-city represents an experiment in integrating modern technology into the world of ideal life. Techno-cities mirror society’s understanding of current technologies and, at the same time, seek to regain the lost virtues of the edenic pre-industrial village.

The idea of the techno-city transcended ideologies, crossed national borders, and spanned the entire twentieth century. Kargon and Molella map the concept through a series of exemplars. These include Norris, Tennessee, home to the Tennessee Valley Authority; Torviscosa, Italy, built by Italy’s Fascist government to accommodate synthetic textile manufacturing (and featured in an early short by Michelangelo Antonioni); Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, planned by a team from MIT and Harvard; and, finally, Disney’s Celebration—perhaps the ultimate techno-city, a fantasy city reflecting an era in which virtual experiences are rapidly replacing actual ones.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation series
ISBN 0262113201, 9780262113205
208 pages

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